the crustybastard

Governor Privilege Denying Dude.

2012-01-26T12:02:00.000-06:00

Rorschach test.

2012-01-24T08:09:00.000-06:00

By request.

Of course it's scissors.

Why? What did you see?

Jamie Kilstein tells his gay rights joke.

2012-01-20T00:30:00.000-06:00

Just saw this on The Green Room with Paul Provenza. As hilarious as it is NSFW.

Please to enjoy.

http://youtu.be/m2MYRukrdug

Screw as I say, not as I screw.

2012-01-19T18:23:00.000-06:00

I wish I knew who did this boss caricature.

"I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to."
- Newt Gingrich, in an interview with Gail Sheehy

A former staffer named Anne Manning seems to be the earliest claimant to an affair with the creepy and odious Newt Gingrich. She says he limited their encounters to her servicing him orally "so he could say he had not slept with me."

How gallant. Also, please note the "eatin' ain't cheatin'" foreshadowing.

A few years later, Newt Gingrich attempted to get his first wife, Jackie Battley, to agree to his terms for the divorce while she was in the hospital, semi-anesthetized, recovering from uterine cancer surgery. According to Newt's former campaign treasurer, Newt said of Jackie "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer."

Well, you're not exactly Brad Pitt yourself. Or president.

Jackie was Newt's high-school geometry teacher, who he began surreptitiously dating when he was a mere lad of 16.

Please note the horny schoolboy foreshadowing.

It should surprise you not at all to learn Newt ended up being a real hard case about the division of marital assets accumulated over 18 years, to the point the mother of his two daughters had to seek a court order to pay the utilities.

It seems likely that Marianne Ginther, 16 years younger than Jackie, was — shall we say — already "on deck," as she and Newt were married in 1981, a mere six months after his divorce from Jackie was final.

Please note that "how soon looks hasty?" and "trade in for younger model" foreshadowing.

Just you wait. Backatcha.

In 1983, Newt became Congress' moral crusader, making the Congressional Page sex scandal his cause célèbre, to the point of demanding Congress expel his colleagues Representatives Gerry Studds (D) and Daniel Crane (R).

Representative Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, took the floor of the House and told his colleagues that no teacher in any school system would be allowed to continue teaching if he or she had sexual relations with a student. ''The two Congressmen, like a teacher, must be fired,'' Mr. Gingrich said. (New York Times, 19 July 1983)

Or, y'know...married. They ended up censured. But again, note the cannibalistic foreshadowing.

In 1993, Newt started having an affair with Callista Bisek, a self-described "devout Catholic" and semiprofessional botox abuser. Callista was a Congressional staffer a mere 23 years his junior.

I will eat your soul.

In 1996, House Speaker Gingrich sponsored the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," because "marriage is between a man and a woman."

Foreshadowing, etc.

In 1998, Speaker Gingrich initiated impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton over blowjobs performed by White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When asked if there might have been some hypocrisy involved, Newt thought not. In a 2007 interview with the odious hate group Focus on the Family (which I refuse to link to, for obvious reasons), Newt explained:

I drew a line in my mind that said, "Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept...perjury in your highest officials."

Wow. Have you ever seen more ego and narcissism packed into such a small space?

Naturally, Newt — modestly styling himself a "leader of the government" — isn't judging (heaven forfend!), he's merely fulfilling his duty to be the noble arm of justice. It wasn't the moral failure of adultery (that we were both guilty of) — it was the crime of perjury (that only Clinton was guilty of)!

Except that, at the time, adultery was indeed a crime in the District of Columbia.

Moreover, Gingrich himself ended up racking up 84 charges of ethics violations as House Speaker, including an official reprimand for (wait for it) "making false statements," (perjury that isn't performed front of a judge) which effectively led to Newt slinking out of office under a cloud of shame and suspicion. Without the smallest trace of irony, Newt explained:

"I'm willing to lead, but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals." (New York Times, 8 November 1998)

Says the corrupt jackass whose actions cost fellow Republican Rep. Daniel Crane his seat, and whose idiotic bomb-throwing political style damn near lost the Republicans their majority in the House in one of the biggest upsets in recent political history.

The latest bombshell is that Newt once attempted to...shall we say "redefine marriage" by making it between 1 man and 2 women. Marianne said Newt insisted St. Callista was cool with the idea of "sharing" him.

Marianne declined Newt's offer to be so generous with himself, and sometime later became the second Mrs. Gingrich to get a shattering medical diagnosis — MS. Eight months later, on Mother's Day 1999, Newt dialed her up at her mom's house where she was visiting to ask for a divorce, which was finalized in April 2000.

Newt subsequently converted to Catholicism (the faith of his longtime paramour Callista), then requested and received annulments for both of his previous marriages from the Archdiocese of Atlanta, which allowed the two Godly traditionalists a white wedding inside the confines of Holy Mother Church, where their sacred vows could be properly solemnized.

A mere four months after Newt's second divorce was finalized.

But none of this matters, and here's why; because in Newt's twisted megalomaniacal psyche, his message is so unique, profound and important, nothing he can do can nullify that message. As he explained to Marianne, who asked him how he could rationalize making "family values" speeches during the day, then skulking off to fuck his mistress that night:

It doesn't matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter how I live.

When it comes to a job where your judgment can affect the world, yeah...it kinda does.

Getting lapped by third-world countries.

2012-01-18T16:15:00.000-06:00

Cuba has announced that this year it will consider allowing gay couples civil union recognition.

Yes, "we're thinking about giving you homos second-class legal status," is totally fucking lame, until you consider the bastion of freedom and equality — the United States — isn't even close to considering the possibility of thinking about maybe conferring even second-class legal status to gays.

At a federal level, our country is still busying ourselves with deciding whether we should belt-and-suspenders amend our Constitution in addition to the Act of Congress that ensures gay people cannot claim any of the constellation of rights, benefits, privileges and obligations of marriage.

The Republican party makes political purity determinations based on how much a candidate is willing to punish gay Americans for their identity, and even our relatively hip, young mixed-race Democratic president believes gays aren't entitled to equal rights because Jesus — but he's "evolving," which evidently means "I'm still kinda a homophobe, but I'm politically savvy enough to hedge my bets, and am definitely content to lead from behind on this issue, what do the polls say?"

So — just in our hemisphere — we now find ourselves waaaay behind Canada, and also behind Mexico (!), Aruba, Dutch Antillies, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil.

And now Cuba. We are now less socially progressive than Cuba, ferchrissakes!

What are we aiming for, here — Haiti?

The Devil's Advocate.

2011-12-16T11:18:00.001-06:00

I've been not wanting to write this for some time: Christopher Hitchens has died.

My favorite Hitch story concerned the time he was called to the Vatican on the matter of one Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Popularly known as "Mother Teresa," Hitchens had found her an insidious fraud and cunning religious extremist. Naturally, the Holy See was fast-tracking her for sainthood.

The process of beatification includes, effectively, a trial, in which the church argues for sainthood while the Devil — in the person of his advocate — argues against. Yes, the Devil's Advocate was an actual office in the church, if not much of a career. I say "was" because Pope John Paul II eliminated the office to streamline his sainting frenzy.

Though Hitchens never assumed the office of The Devil's Advocate, he quipped, "I drew the job of representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono."

That was Hitchens' great genius; challenging sacred, entrenched biases with passion and wit. This creation of a lasting expression of genius has ever been the atheist's immortality.

Q: Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one?

A: Faith. Closely followed — in view of the overall shortage of time — by patience.

- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

President Obama is a coward.

2011-11-20T16:19:00.000-06:00

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, or approve or disapprove of the OWS movement, you must concede that the police brutality has gotten utterly out-of-hand, and needs to be promptly and properly addressed at the highest levels.

I'll admit — the video of UC Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike and his colleagues casually firing chemical weapons at close range into the heads of defenseless, unresisting, huddled protestors, then turning and giving them a second dose with the indifference of a guy applying pesticide to his lawn — yeah, this shit shook me to my core.

I thought this might finally be OWS's Tiananmen Square — the trigger to rouse our aloof, standoffish president into justified and righteous action. These peaceful protestors being systematically brutalized by uniformed police officers were, after all, the same young people who were responsible for Barack Obama's landslide victory.

Surely the president will have something to say about this.

Now, I didn't expect an immediate response from the cautious White House, but I didn't expect no response.

What's on the White House website front page right now? Obama's new South Pacific "free trade" deal, which, if it's like all the other ones, is guaranteed to benefit big business as it off-shores more American jobs.

The vulgarity and tone-deafness of this is beyond astounding.

Hello gorgeous.

2011-11-18T08:27:00.000-06:00

This stunning portrait of a bonobo chimpanzee (our closest living relative) by Graham McGeorge is just one of 12 spectacular entries to National Geographic's current photo contest.

The other 11 photos are totally worth the click.

This may put Scalia right over the edge.

2011-11-14T10:51:00.001-06:00

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided to decide the fate of The Affordable Care Act, President Obama's health-insurance reform law, a/k/a "Obamacare."

As an ultraconservative Republican partisan, Justice Scalia no doubt loathes the commie nanny-state big-gubmint unfunded-mandate ACA, and is already trying to figure out how to nullify an Act of Congress without appearing overly hypocritical — given his history of insisting that unelected judges just have no business overriding the decisions of elected representatives who are simply expressing the will of the people.

But what's going to drive him into true torment is his so-called "originalism."

"Originalism" is Justice Scalia's remarkable belief he alone possess some unique insight into the hive-mind of the Republic's founders (as if they all agreed on everything), and only by applying his arcane knowledge can the Court accurately determine whether modern laws are congruent with the Founder's 18th Century worldview and America's place in it, which Scalia insists they intended to freeze in time with absolutely no express or implied accommodation for tomfoolery and shenanigans like social progress or evolving moral standards. I harbor precisely no doubt that had Scalia sat on the court 154 years ago, he would have cheerfully written the opinion in the Dred Scott case, concluding the Founders owned slaves, slavery was legal when the Constitution was signed, black people weren't citizens then, so shouldn't be now, case closed.

But here's the thing:

In July of 1798, Congress passed — and President John Adams signed — “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

Well, that's going to throw quite a wrench into Scalia's "originalism" unless he chooses to side with modern Tea Party whackadoos who insist John Adams was some kind of bolshevik.

But as Rick Ungar also points out:

it wasn’t only John Adams who supported the notion of government run health care. According to Georgetown University history professor and noted historian of America’s early days, Adam Rothman, Thomas Jefferson — the iconic hero of the Tea Party — also supported the legislation.

Sargent reprints the following email he received from Prof. Rothan on the subject —

"Alexander Hamilton supported the establishment of Marine Hospitals in a 1792 Report, and it was a Federalist congress that passed the law in 1798. But Jefferson (Hamilton’s strict constructionist nemesis) also supported federal marine hospitals, and along with his own Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, took steps to improve them during his presidency. So I guess you could say it had bipartisan support."

So I can't wait to see how Scalia resolves his "originalism" and "legislative deference" in the context of the ACA.

He'll have ample opportunity to exercise his usual dismissive sarcasm. SCOTUS has chosen to accommodate surprisingly lengthy oral arguments (allowing 5 1/2 hours, when they typically permit 1), promising a holding delivered in June.

As a sidebar, I was actually pleased to note that SCOTUS declined Liberty University's (a wretched hive of scum and villainy) petition to allow private entities (rather than state and federal attorneys general) to challenge the ACA. No doubt, the LU bigots were more interested in securing a ruling that would grant them special standing to challenge legislation that dispenses with, or fails to provide for, special rights for heterosexuals.

Gov. Perry crams extra herp in his derp.

2011-11-10T09:02:00.000-06:00

But OWS reforms are unfocused, right?

The world's worst tribute.

2011-11-09T23:39:00.000-06:00

So "The Family Circus" creator Bil Keane died.

Goodnight, champ.

2011-11-08T10:34:00.000-06:00

At 205 lbs., Joe Frazier was barely a "heavyweight," but he was big enough to lay Muhammad Ali — undefeated and in his prime — on the canvas with his devastating left hook.

Many boxing cognocenti insist Frazier's victory over Ali was simply the greatest match of all time. No doubt, "The Fight of the Century" actually lived up to its hype.

Ali may have been a bigger man, but Mr. Frazier was the bigger man.

When Ali was banned from boxing for refusing the draft and had no source of income for himself and his young family, Smokin' Joe Frazier, heavyweight champion of the world, quietly slipped Ali money. That didn't stop Ali years later from taunting Frazier as a "gorilla" and "Uncle Tom." When it wasn't racist, their trash-talking was actually pretty funny.

Frazier to Ali: How's your wife and my kids?
Ali to Frazier: You calling my kids ugly?

Young Joe was a petty criminal who moved to Philadelphia, got a job in a slaughterhouse and trained using sides of beef as heavy bags and running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The only thing Frazier did better than throwing punches was taking them, and like Hollywood's mythological Rocky, you could hit Joe Frazier with a truck, and he'd just redouble his efforts. In homage, Stallone gave Frazier a cameo in Rocky. Before the big fight, the announcer invites Frazier into the ring and he waves to the adoring Philly audience, shakes each fighter's hands and asks Apollo Creed, "you been ducking me?" Heh.

Frazier was just gritty as hell. Due to an untreated injury as a child, his left arm lacked the full range of motion. He won Olympic Gold in '64 fighting with a broken thumb. It took him only five years to become world champion, which he accomplished although visually impaired by cataracts. Frazier summarized his style, "kill the body, the head will die."

In another decade, Smokin' Joe could have easily retained his belts, but fortune cursed him (and blessed boxing fans) with two contemporaries every bit his equal. Ultimately, Frazier, Foreman and Ali became Boxing's Greatest Triumvirate, overshadowing even other luminaries like Ken Norton, Larry Holmes, Leon Spinks and Jerry Quarry, all of whom made the 1970s the heavyweight class' Golden Age.

With Joe Frazier's passing, the sweet science is a little less sweet.

That about sums it up.

2011-10-29T10:53:00.000-05:00

Tip of the crust to STFU, Conservatives

Wanna feel old?

2011-10-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

The iPod became 10 years old yesterday. If it was a kid, it would be in Fifth Grade.

I wanted one badly, but at the time I believed 5/10 MB would be too small for my musical purposes. I was right. In April '03, when the third-generation iPod sported a 30 MB version (with the much cooler "touch wheel" and glowing touch-sensitive buttons), I finally got one. When its battery finally began to die up a couple of years ago, I cracked it open and repaired it.

Because I am a dork.

I've had several other iPods since then, which are superior in just about every way except the controls. This iPod had the best, most responsive, most intuitive control set ever, but Apple decided to incorporate the four buttons into the click-wheel found on nearly all later iPods.

Anyway, I still love my old 3G. Still use it too.

The gauntlet has been thrown.

2011-10-21T14:38:00.000-05:00

Dear Herman,
If being gay is a choice, show us the proof. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that's done, Herman, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick, Herman. Name the time and the place and I'll bring my dick and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument.
Very sincerely yours,
Dan Savage

How do they do it?

2011-10-13T12:29:00.000-05:00

Had to replace the power outlet in the old VW, and happened to notice the part was labeled, "Made in Germany."

Wow. Even the small parts are German-made? But how can Germans produce a competitively priced car by manufacturing parts in their own country? I was assured by the geniuses of American industry that this is quite impossible.

It must be that German auto-workers are low-paid, low-skilled, and have few job benefits, right?

Well, the internets say German auto-workers have higher take-home salaries than unionized US auto-workers, because German employers don't deduct healthcare costs from paychecks, and German auto manufacturers also provide free day care to employees. Under German law, all employers are required to provide eight weeks of vacation to their employees, and their unemployment benefits are much more robust. There is no US law requiring employers to provide even eight minutes of vacation to their employees. German carmakers have also not yet engaged in massive job-slashing or mass layoffs.

So no, I guess that's not it either.

It's a mystery.

Obama's "jobs advisors" are jobs slashers.

2011-10-10T15:08:00.000-05:00

The LA Times reports that tomorrow President Obama will take his quarterly meeing with his President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

It's a braintrust composed of 27 members, chaired by Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric. Mr. Immelt has closed 29 factories and offshored 30% of GE's American jobs over the past 3 years. He's also the master of not paying his fair share.

Or any share at all. His company paid -10.5% income tax last year on $10.8 billion worldwide profits.

Jeff Immelt, CEO General Electric

Yes, negative taxes.

And it's not like chairing the President's Council has caused Immelt to reconsider his habits. Less than two months ago, Immelt re-headquartered GE Healthcare from Wisconsin to Bejing.

According to the LA Times report, several of the other council CEOs, despite heading profitable corporations, have nevertheless chosen to slash jobs or shutter unionized facilities here to open non-unionized facilities there.

But rest assured, the president's jobs advisors are not all tax-dodging plutocrats; balance is achieved by including 2 labor leaders, 1 economist and a biologist.

What kind of proposals has this braintrust so far presented to the president? They've endorsed cutting business regulation and increasing foreign investment in U.S. companies.

The hypocrisy becomes even more breathtaking when you learn Jobs Czar Immelt's off-shoring of GE Healthcare comes with a plan to invest $2 billion across China for "customer innovation centers," which is clearly laying the groundwork for further job creation there, at the expense of job-creation here.

The 'bastard's favorite economist, Robert Reich says, "Nobody should expect this group to come up with innovative ways of investing in the American workforce and generating not only more jobs but higher wages. That's just not what these big companies do."

Nobody should, but Barack Obama evidently does.

Top Republicans LIVE at Hatestock '11.

2011-10-07T13:52:00.002-05:00

If you're wondering what House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich are all doing this weekend — Surprise! They're all hanging out together at a conference hosted by two Certified Hate Groups.

"Bryan Fischer’s stunning record of public bigotry would make him a pariah in any sane political movement. But his long record of hate speech doesn’t seem to bother the supposed ‘mainstream’ GOP politicians like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry who are sharing the stage with him at an event sponsored by his employer. Candidates don’t have to agree with the views of everyone they appear with – but they should be wary of lending legitimacy to those who peddle hate and fear of their fellow Americans."
- President Michael Keegan, People For the American Way

Fischer is not some bomb-throwing-for-ratings radio personality with some low-level or marginal connection to the American Family Association. His title is AFA Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy. You may remember the AFA was also the sponsor of "The Response," Rick Perry's Christian-only HateFest and prayer rally held in Houston's Reliant Stadium this past August.

Here are some of Fischer's Greatest Hits:

Liberals and progressives hate God, faith, and Christianity; they hate the liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment; and they hate the Declaration of Independence
Christian prayers caused an airplane to crash, killing an abortion provider and his family
The First Amendment applies exclusively to Christians, and Mormons aren't Christian
The Constitution's No Religious Test Clause was a mistake
“Government’s purpose is to protect our lives from abortionists, murderers, and Muslims.”
Muslims are "a toxic cancer," "parasites" and mentally impaired due to inbreeding
Muslims "worship a demon,"and should be purged and barred from military service
Building mosques in America isn't a right, but a privilege that should be revoked
The irrational anti-Muslim ravings in the manifesto of the Norway campground mass-murderer were "accurate"
All immigrants should be required to convert to Christianity
Satan is the source of all criticism of Sarah Palin
Tilikum, a captive SeaWorld orca, should be executed as a murderer; bears, wolves and other predatory species that occasionally attack people should be hunted to extinction
President Obama has a "dark and thuggish" character, is "not authentically black," "nurtures a hatred for the United States and the white man," "is committed to destroying babies" and has stated "I've been a fascist since Day One"
Black welfare recipients “rut like rabbits”
Native Americans are “morally disqualified” from controlling their land, and their communities are “mired in poverty and alcoholism” because God cursed them for failure to promptly and fully convert to Christianity
God calls “each one of us be a Phinehas” (a Bible character who murdered a couple for having extramarital sex in private)
Being gay should return to being a criminal offense
Gay people should be disqualified from holding public office
Two men having sex "is a form of domestic terrorism"
DADT repeal was "treasonous" and "is a guaranteed path to a permanently and irreversibly emasculated military that could not defend us if their lives, let alone ours, depended on it"
“You want to know who’s now running the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy and the Marines and calling the shots where it counts? Fundamentalist Muslims and homosexual activists.”
The German Nazi Party was predominantly gay and their policies, including the Holocaust, reflect The Homosexual Agenda
"Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage, and brutal, and vicious enough to carryout his orders, but that homosexual soldiers basically had no limits...virtually all of the stormtroopers, the brownshirts, were male homosexuals."
American gays remain fundamentally aligned with Nazi policies; "they'll do the same thing to you that the Nazis did to their opponents in Nazi Germany"; are already planning to incarcerate Christian dissenters "in reeducation camps"; "it's the Spanish Inquisition all over again"
Gay activists perpetrate more hate crimes in America than any other group
All opposition to himself or the AFA is a hate crime because it's all derogatory speech, intimidation, and harassment

Again, this tsunami of paranoia, lunacy, ignorance, and bigotry was all purposefully issued for public consumption by Bryan Fischer in his capacity as the spokesman for the American Family Association, a hate group, co-sponsor of the Values Voters Summit, where actual Republican presidential contenders and top Congressional Republicans will be featured.

This is functionally indistinct from appearing at a Klan rally.

At what point will major media confront this astonishing story?

At what point will sensible Republicans be inclined to stop associating with hate groups, and reassert control of their party?

These are reasonable questions.

He was a titan.

2011-10-05T19:55:00.001-05:00

It's a prison party.

2011-10-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

Please to enjoy.

NYPD. A division of JP Morgan Chase.™

2011-10-02T13:57:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not kidding.*

And those Wall Street motherfuckers are getting a helluva return on investment. Today the NYPD arrested 700 peaceful Wall Street protesters after luring them into a trap.

The NY Times reports:

None of the protesters interviewed knew if the bridge march was planned or a spontaneous decision by the crowd. But all insisted that the police had made no mention that the roadway was off limits. Ms. Day and several others said that police officers had walked beside the crowd until the group reached about midway, then without warning began to corral the protesters behind orange nets.

“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who marched but was not arrested.

Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road...Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”

He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.”

“This was not a trap,” [Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department] said. “They were warned not to proceed.”

We have a grave problem in America when — on behalf of the corporations that regulate our government — police are dispatched to punish citizens for exercising their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of their grievances.

All of this has caused me to recall the words of Justice William O. Douglas where he prophesied the modern oligarch's insistence that even their worst excesses must be rewarded as successes because they are "too big to fail."

We have here the problem of bigness....The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices...[P]rice level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression...

[A]ll power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men.

His dissent was not argued from optimism or ignorance. Prior to his appointment to the court, Douglas was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

* Per their own press release, "JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center." [emphasis added]

Prejudice isn't evidence. It's the opposite.

2011-09-29T13:49:00.001-05:00

I've written before about why I think the "legislative repeal" of 10 U.S.C. §654 (The Homosexual Conduct Act, colloquially but incorrectly "DADT") is an abomination. To recap:

A federal court had already held §654 facially unconstitutional in Log Cabin Republicans v Gates and ordered a global injunction against its continued enforcement; and
That court found that laws discriminating against gays merit heightened scrutiny (a crucial and urgently needed legal precedent in the ongoing fight for legal equality); and
The "legislative repeal" was intended to render the important legal precedent of LCR v Gates moot (an outcome the Obama Administration has always desired and continues to argue on behalf of in the court of appeals); and
The "legislative repeal" allows and even requires the military to discriminate against gay and trans servicemembers while kafkaesquely excluding gay and trans servicemembers from being classified as one of the several minorities vulnerable to discrimination; and
The "legislative repeal" categorically bars all legal claims of discrimination under §654 or the repeal itself; so
The "legislative repeal" only says, "gays will no longer be discharged for mere homosexual identity but will otherwise continue to be subject to discrimination without recourse, and heterosexual identity and behavior will continue to be the qualifying factor in determining most employment benefits."

Even assuming the repeal was worthwhile and even if getting #6 implemented hadn't require dicking around for nearly a year, it still wouldn't have protected decorated Army National Guard Staff Sergeant Rebecca Grant. She was recently involuntarily discharged after serving more than decade with honors, including tours in Bosnia and Iraq.

A colleague who wanted to ruin Ssg. Grant's career learned Grant is trans and notified her superiors, aware Army regulations state that all trans persons are impaired by some psychological malfunction so profound they are presumptively unfit to serve. In short, a note dropped in a complaint box functioned as the equivalent of an actual legitimate psychological diagnosis of unfitness for duty DESPITE ACTUAL EVIDENCE Ssg. Grant more than competently performed her job for more than a decade. And this in the US Army, an organization that prides itself on being a meritocracy.

You don't need to be trans to realize this shit needs to end — not just in the U.S. military, but for every worker in the entire United States.

We're not a slave or feudal state — we're a nation founded on the idea that an individual's liberty and pursuit of happiness are their inalienable rights. Inalienable means cannot be taken from you, and cannot be given away.

Employment contracts (explicit and implicit) shouldn't allow an employer any rights beyond job supervision and protection of the employer's assets. If n is not illegal, doesn't interfere with one's ability to perform one's job, or doesn't compromise the employer's assets, employers should be barred from treating n as if it is professionally relevant and a reasonable and justifiable basis for nullifying the contract.

If employers intend to claim something is indeed professionally relevant, they should be expected to bear the burden of proof demonstrating their claim is factually true. Thus, if employers want to refuse to employ trans people, they would merely have to prove trans people can't do that job. Likewise, if employers want to refuse to employ people for smoking at home, they would merely have to show that smokers can't do that job. If employers want to refuse to employ people for being religious nuts, they would merely have to demonstrate how certain religious beliefs interfere with performance.

It's not complicated. Employers have an absolute right to dictate how employees do their job, but that does not extend any corollary right to arbitrarily circumscribe how much liberty they may enjoy or what sorts of happiness they may pursue off-site, off-the-clock, and on their own dime; or to punish people for exceeding those boundaries.

Alas, I suspect that frog has already been boiled by the corporations that regulate our government.

UPDATE: "Mission Accomplished" for Team Obama with regard to #3 above. Unforgivable.

Repuritans.

2011-09-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

Quite a spectacle at the Republican debate last night.

Stephen Hill, Iraq veteran, asked the Republican candidates about their policy intent with respect to gays serving in the military.

Members of the audience actually began booing Hill. No shit.

I believe these members would refer to themselves as "values voters."

Naturally, Rick Santorum (R- Frothy Mix) insisted he'd reinstitute the ban, inarticulately claiming that repeal of a law that discriminates exclusively against gays means, "we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege, in removing 'Don't Ask, Don’t Tell.' I think tries to inject social policy into the military."

Santorum's call to reimpose an unconstitutional law to discriminate against gays was met with thunderous applause and rhapsodic cheers. You can barely hear him finish.

Not one candidate rose to defend Steven Hill, thank him for his service, or condemn those who boo'd him. I believe these candidates would refer to themselves "compassionate conservatives."

Democrats against equality became known as "Dixiecrats." It's time that Republicans against equality get their own derisive portmanteau.

I suggest Repuritans.

Do you still love me, Dad?

2011-09-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

Persecution is wrong unless Obama does it.

2011-08-29T12:07:00.000-05:00

"Forty years ago at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, gay and lesbian Americans fought injustice from persecution and discrimination, bravely leading the charge in what has become the defining spark that began the gay rights movement around the world.

Four decades later, we as a people have come a long way and should be proud of what we have accomplished since that day in promoting equal rights for all Americans — yet there is much more to do. With a President and majority in Congress committed to equality for all, our country can take more steps toward achieving the Democratic Party’s commitment to fulfilling that promise by passing such laws as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, adopting a national HIV/AIDS strategy, enhancing the safety of our military and our national security by eliminating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and by repealing the Defense of Marriage Act.

With the courage and defiance of those individuals at Stonewall Inn still in our hearts and minds, the Democratic Party reaffirms its commitment to the march towards equality for all and second-class citizenship for none."
-President Barack Obama, June 2009

So today President Obama is having his U.S. attorneys bring a case against Lt. Dan Choi for having the temerity to protest the continued enforcement of an unconstitutional military gay ban in front of Mr. Obama's residence last November. (Bear in mind, the gay ban still in full legal effect today, 260 days after Obama signed the so-called "repeal.")

Evidently some protests by gay Americans against injustice, persecution and discrimination are brave, necessary and laudable. Just not the peaceful ones that happen at Barack Obama's front gate.

If that's not enough, the Obama Administration is also suing Lt. Choi civilly, insisting the government is "owed" money as a reimbursement because Lt. Choi failed to complete his military obligations after he was unfairly discharged pursuant a law held by a federal court to be facially unconstitutional.

Daniel Choi is the goddam Rosa Parks of the DADT repeal movement, and this dumbass president doesn't have the sense not to prosecute Choi on criminal charges in federal court for "failure to obey a police officer," while Choi was engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment speech on a public sidewalk.

Seriously, "Constitutional scholar?" At this point, I have no idea how Obama passed the fucking bar exam.

Medical marijuana has no medical use.

2011-07-16T18:32:00.000-05:00

Um, really?

2011-07-09T11:01:00.000-05:00

Gary Sisk & Sons Drilling Co. of Odessa uses their pickup to advertise their business.

That's a thrifty and sensible decision.

Less sensible is their decision to advertise their racism. Look closely, under the filth:

So yeah, this guy obviously knows how to dig a hole.

[A tip of the crust to Brian for the tip and picture]

Support your local merchants.

2011-07-09T10:09:00.000-05:00

This chick is badass, her shop is kickass and naturally she has the coolest commercial I've seen in ages.

Please to enjoy.

Donna's Dress Shop from Ryan Nicholson on Vimeo.

Saturday Night Lezak.

2011-05-22T01:48:00.001-05:00

Okay, yeah — I was actually sorta looking forward to the Saturday Night Live finale with Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.

The first half-hour of the show was indeed excellent. Then Gary "Dickhead" Lezak decided the metro area would rather watch him diddle his goddam computer and listen to him yammer on and on and on and on and on and on about local storms that aren't causing any actual damage for the entire remaining goddam hour of the show.

Hey Gary,

Nobody — really, nobody — needs you to come on-screen to impart such wisdom as "you might want to put you car in the garage in case it hails."

I believe No Shit magazine already scooped you there.

So Gary, please, pretty please, with sugar on top: stop going full-Horner and quit acting like a freaked-out toddler. A tornado touchdown 100 miles away more than an hour earlier doesn't require you to go to Defcon One. The End is Not Nigh and thunderstorms aren't news, they're just weather. When it's a little windy and rainy in our local broadcast area, run a crawl across the bottom of the screen and shut the fuck up, mmmkay?

Seriously, what is it about TV weather that attracts these relentlessly narcissistic twats and why won't station management control them?

From the Wall of Separation's rubble.

2011-05-21T19:06:00.000-05:00

In the United States, the First Amendment's Establishment Clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") was once respected by President and Founder Thomas Jefferson as "a wall of separation between church and state."

In 1947, Justice Hugo Black pronounced the classic legal definition of the Establishment Clause:

The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. - Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 [emphasis mine]

This definition, over the last couple of decades, been laid utterly to waste. By 1989, the Rehnquist Court chose to reduce the Wall of Separation to a speed bump, ceding only that:

...government may not promote or affiliate itself with any religious doctrine or organization, may not discriminate among persons on the basis of their religious beliefs and practices, may not delegate a governmental power to a religious institution, and may not involve itself too deeply in such an institution’s affairs. - County of Allegheny v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 [emphasis mine]

Two justices from that decision are on the current incarnation of the Rehnquist/Roberts Court: Scalia and Kennedy. Neither agreed with the Allegheny v ACLU holding, finding religious displays in courthouses and other buildings where the public transacts its business with government in no way offends the Establishment Clause. Indeed, Justices Scalia and Kennedy agree that clause does not, in fact, mean what it says. Rather, they insist the clause actually demands official respect for religion:

The requirement of neutrality...does not require a relentless extirpation of all contact between government and religion. Government policies of accommodation, acknowledgment, and support for religion are an accepted part of our political and cultural heritage, and the Establishment Clause permits government some latitude in recognizing the central role of religion in society. Any approach less sensitive to our heritage would border on latent hostility to religion...Id. [emphasis mine]

These two would be guided less by the words and spirit of the Establishment Clause than by religious America's faithful custom of ignoring it.

During the '90s religious conservatives took over the Republican Party and decided the Berlin Wall wasn't the only one deserving to be torn down. By early 2001, President Bush the Lesser had gone so far as to (ahem!) establish a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives requiring five federal cabinet agencies to provide religious establishments access to what was at the time $40 billion of taxpayer funds. In a 2004 speech in New Orleans, the president stated the goal of the program unambiguously; "we want to fund programs that save Americans, one soul at a time."

In 2004, an amendment to the faith-based initiative budget bill intended to ensure that religious establishments providing taxpayer-funded services on behalf of the government couldn't discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs and practices was proposed. It failed miserably.

Nor is our current president above using public money to purchase the indulgence of religious voters. Among President Obama's first official acts — announced at the 2009 "National Prayer Breakfast," no less — was a minor retooling and expansion of GWB's faith-based initiatives. President Obama subsequently granted Catholic Charities an unprecedented $100 million federal contract delegating to them the ability to act on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services during disaster emergencies.

This all means that, in the last decade, even the absurdly minimal "Speed Bump of Separation" has become a functional nullity. Under current law and policy, state and federal governments now freely promote religion, affiliate with religious establishments, and delegate governmental powers to religious institutions; all while allowing religious establishments the special right to discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs.

Have a problem with this? Well, the Rehnquist/Roberts Court has a message for you: "Tough shit."

In the curious case of Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, 551 U.S. 587 (2007), the court's five conservative Catholics agreed that these faith-based programs and spending were magically immune from taxpayer's Constitutional challenge because the president performed the contested acts but legal precedent involved cases contesting acts of Congress. The astonishingly ultraregressive logic is that the degree (or even existence) of a violation is determined by the status of the violator.

The president is dead, long live the king.

This decision also provides the eye-popping spectacle of the Judiciary encouraging the Legislature to further violate the Constitution by laundering money through the Executive, then slamming the courthouse door in the public's face. Singular work there, Justice Alito. You are indeed a conspicuous douchebag among several uniquely distinguished douchebags.

Our government's reflexive genuflection has merely encouraged increasingly aggressive and extremely bizarre state-sponsored religion-run-amok displays around the country, including this one I found particularly alarming.

I first learned of "Reverend" Bradlee Dean and his You Can Run But You Can't Hide ultraconservative self-styled "rock and roll" ministry during the Target/MN Forward/Tom Emmer controversy. Naturally, Dean has a radio show, where he commonly calls for jailing gay people, but in this episode, he actually endorsed the religiously justified murder of gays by claiming we're all rapacious serial sex-offenders.

Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians. They know homosexuality is an abomination. If America won’t enforce the laws, God will raise up a foreign enemy to do just that. The bottom line is this…[gays] play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator. On average, they molest 117 people before they’re found out. How many kids have been destroyed, how many adults have been destroyed because of crimes against nature?

Reverend Dean also endorses the manifestly false revisionist history, originated by Bryan Fischer, spokesbigot for the Christian hate group American Family Association, that — contrary to all evidence that exists outside these morons' fevered imagination — the Nazis didn’t really persecute gays, Hitler was gay, the SA was a gay organization and together they promoted some big fascist homosexual agenda that caused WWII.

In short, Bradlee Dean is as slanderous as he is murderous, and a degenerate liar of truly Biblical dimensions.

And yet it was his Christian bona fides that caused Representative Ernie Leidiger to invite Dean to pray open Friday's session of the Minnesota legislature, on the day Minnesota's marriage discrimination amendment was scheduled to be debated. In his remarks, Dean managed to leave the gays alone, but took the opportunity to call into question President Obama's Christianity.

The leadership hastily claimed a religious mulligan and called for another prayer. All parties involved hastily distanced themselves from Dean and his ideas.

Leidiger himself insisted that he doesn't share Dean's views and the invitation he extended was "an honest mistake." Of course. So does he still support Minnesota's marriage discrimination amendment? Of course! Rep. Leidiger says the amendment "has nothing to do with gays. It's all about a statement on what marriage is."

No, Ernie, it isn't and if you were honest you'd admit it.

These antigay statutes and amendments don't exist to define what the institution of marriage is, they exist to exclude one lawful minority from the institution.

But even assuming you are correct, if marriage discrimination statutes and amendments are indeed a statement, they are most certainly a religious statement, and you have proven it so. Indeed, these statements are an overt endorsement of Biblical law writ as public law, imposing by force of public law the majority's religious doctrine upon believers and unbelievers alike; a punishment the state levies upon gays for their sins, not their crimes.

There was a time the Establishment Clause might have prevented this, rather than encouraged it.

Harold of the Apocalypse.

2011-05-20T08:00:00.002-05:00

You're probably aware that the hilariously monikered Harold Camping, a self-styled "Bible scholar," has crunched the numbers and determined without a doubt that the Rapture will happen tomorrow.

Harold Camping, absolutely nailing

the "Porter Wagoner look"

Yes, it is true that Harold the herald once insisted that the Rapture would occur in 1994. "Mathematical error," he explained. No doubt. The math is indeed...um, byzantine.

Naturally, Camping believes God dictated the Bible¹, and in doing so, inserted layered meanings in words and numbers thereby stashing a secret numerology code within. Thus, the number 5 means "atonement," 10 means "completeness," 17 means "heaven."

Camping thinks these three words are God's secret code for the Rapture.

Evidently, one must multiply (why? who knows?) the word's numerical values [atonement (5) x completeness (10) x heaven (17)] = 850. Then — for reasons that are similarly unclear, but maybe just because all equations look more authoritative with the occasional superscript — square that sum, arriving at the number 722,500. This is the Rapture's magic number.

Camping decided that Jesus was crucified on April 1, 33² 1,978 years before April 1 of this year. So multiply 1,978 x 365.2425 (the mean number of days in a solar year) = 722,449.665 days, which is 50.335 days short of the magic number 722,500. Camping inexplicably rounds that number up, then counts 51 days forward from April 1 and TA-DA! he reckons this is "infallible proof" that the Rapture will happen Saturday, May 21, 2011.

"I just about fell off my chair when I realized that," Camping said.

Yes, I'm sure.

Personally, I think it's very thoughtful of Jesus to schedule his Second Coming to fall on the weekend so we'll all be at home.

When the Rapture inevitably occurs tomorrow, Camping says Jesus will arrive, judge us, then sweep up around 200 million of the righteous faithful to heaven with him, leaving behind the rest of us to the fate of corporal and spiritual annihilation when God obliterates us along with the entire universe on October 21 of this year.

Here's the thing: if you simply count the actual number of days that have elapsed from April 1, 33 up to and including April 1, 2010 (compensating for the Julian to Gregorian calendar conversion) it isn't 722,449.665 days.

It's 722,452 days — 48 (not 51) short of Camping's magic number 722,500.

That means Camping's Rapture happened last Wednesday.

Since Harold Camping continues to plague the Earth, that means he's either a fraud or Jesus won't have him. Either way, sensible people would do well to ignore Camping, although if they were sensible, they probably wouldn't be listening to this perfidious old fart in the first place.

If Camping was just some fringe cult guru leading a handful of wide-eyed and narrow-minded kooks, I wouldn't particularly give a damn. But this creep owns Family Radio Worldwide, an enormous network with 163 outlets around the country where he broadcasts this nonsense as fact, thereby capitalizing on his fraud by using our public airwaves to financially exploit simple, gullible people by scaring them shitless.

That pisses me off.

A fraud is a fraud is a fraud. Merely because the fraud has a religious component shouldn't place it outside the law. Criminal immunity not the sort of thing the First Amendment's Establishment Clause was intended to guarantee, but since America has become a quasi-theocracy, it has come to function in precisely that way.

Notes

1. Various books within the Bible are written in various literary styles and use the personal pronoun "I" to refer to their human authors while referring to God in the third-person, which scarcely indicates the heavenly dictation of a single entity. Moreover, the Bible is factually inconsistent, first contradicting itself on page 2, where the two Genesis accounts are internally contradictory. The Gospels are not only internally contradictory, they are inconsistent with each other to the point they cannot be resolved into a single consistent account of Jesus' life and death. For many specific examples of Biblical inconsistencies, go here.

2. The year of Jesus' execution is utterly uncertain and unascertainable because the Gospels are inconsistent. Even assuming Jesus was crucified on the Friday after Passover during Pilate's reign, the years 27, 30, 33 or 36 are all equally possible.

Crusty's culture corner.

2011-05-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

Please to enjoy.

Justice Ginsburg gets it.

2011-05-19T22:05:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, the other eight don't.

At trial, the examination of a criminal defendant's motive is crucial, because for the most part, motive makes the crime. So for example, if your intent is revenge, killing is murder. If your intent is self-defense, killing is permitted.

Ultimately, motive is an essential part of the criminal law equation: prohibited act + bad intent = crime. Every criminal defendant's motives are entirely situational — subjective — and properly examined by the trial process — "why did this defendant do this?"

However, Courts refuse to apply the same sort of examination of the motives of individual law enforcement officers involved in criminal cases. Deferentially, they allow agents of the state a mere objective examination. Thus, the question to the judge is never "why did this cop do this?" but "can I imagine other cops doing this?" It's extremely uncommon for a judge's imagination to fail.

But in cases where the questionable behavior of government agents exposes the questionable behavior of an individual, it's manifestly unjust that the motives of the government agent merits a less rigorous examination than the motives of the individual actor. Indeed, where the judiciary's task is to referee the contest of State v Citizen, the court's responsibility should be to hold the state to at least as high, if not a higher standard of behavior than it holds the individual.

To do otherwise invites the state to zealously trample the law in order to enforce it.

The Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

SCOTUS created an exception to the Fourth Amendment allowing law enforcement to search and seize without a warrant if "exigent circumstances" make obtaining the necessary warrant impossible. So, for instance, if police are in hot pursuit of an armed robber who escapes inside a private home, the police are not required to secure a warrant before entering the house to search for the armed robber.

The cops aren't violating the homeowner's Fourth Amendment rights because the search is reasonable — they watched a dangerous suspect go in there. If cops look in the basement and find human remains on meathooks, that evidence isn't going to be suppressed at the homeowner's murder trial even though the cops didn't have a probable cause or a particularized warrant to find the bodies.

Until now the Fourth Amendment demanded warrants whenever possible, and if cops don't bother to get a warrant, they cannot manufacture the exigent circumstance to avoid the warrant requirement.

That all changed this week.

In Kentucky v King, SCOTUS held that cops are now free to choose to skip the warrant and create their own exigent circumstances. As usual, the cop's motives for doing so are irrelevant. With this atrocious decision, the exigent circumstances exception finally swallowed the rule. The opportunity to obtain a warrant no longer imposes any obligation to do so. Justice Alito, for the majority, writes:

Faulting the police for failing to apply for a search warrant at the earliest possible timeafter obtaining probable cause imposes a duty that is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

Ah, but the legal question wasn't "how quickly must police seek a warrant?" The question presented was "may police, who could pause to gain the approval of a neutral magistrate, dispense with the need to get a warrant by themselves creating exigent circumstances?" Eight justices think so.

...even if an occupant chooses to open the door and speak with the officers, the occupant need not allow the officers to enter the premises and may refuse to answer any questions at any time. Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame for the warrantless exigent-circumstances search that may ensue.

It is true that, in this case Mr. King possessed marijuana. It is true that in this case Mr. King was indeed attempting to destroy evidence after the police started banging on his door and yelling. However, Alito uses these facts to dismantle the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement as if the requirement exists to aid criminals, rather than to protect the privacy of the American people by placing sensible restraints on police action.

Even accepting the facts of the case, the outcome wouldn't be different had law enforcement put a cop on Mr. King's door and obtained the warrant the Fourth Amendment requires. They still could have busted Mr. King for pot, with a warrant.

Despite granting law enforcement the power to ignore the warrant requirement, SCOTUS failed to grant them the superpower to infallibly discern between innocent noises and criminal ones. And now if a cop with bad intent manufactures an exigency to break into a house, we will not know because judges will not inquire as to the cop's motives.

It's objectively reasonable now.

Justice Ginsburg writes in a lonesome dissent:

The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant.

...The warrant requirement, Justice Jackson observed, ranks among the “fundamental distinctions between our form of government, where officers are under the law, and the police-state where they are the law.”

...There is every reason to conclude that securing a warrant was entirely feasible in this case, and no reason to contract the Fourth Amendment’s dominion.

I've said for a while this Rehnquist/Roberts Court is the second worst in American history. They seem determined to go for the #1 spot.

It's inconceivable!

2011-05-18T10:43:00.000-05:00

Please to enjoy:

Collateral Damage 2.

2011-05-17T20:08:00.000-05:00

In 2003, rock-ribbed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger moved into the California governor's mansion. Now term-limited out, Arnold — a practicing Roman Catholic — admits that this entire time he's been concealing his extramarital affair with a longtime employee, and the child who is the product of this philandering.

Ignoring the fact his own heterosexuality was hardly the key to marital success, Arnold felt certain other's homosexuality rendered them presumptively unworthy to marry at all. So Arnold vetoed marriage equality bills passed by the California legislature in 2005 and again in 2007, insisting that the issue should be decided by the courts or the voters.

He got his wish.

The next year brought the infamous Prop 8 referendum, intended to amend the California constitution to strip gays of their fundamental right to marry.

In a T2-style plot twist, the Governator suddenly sided with the good guys, and promised to fight Prop 8. He actually did very little, assuming the referendum couldn't pass, (conveniently ignoring California's embrace of homophobia had, in its not-so-distant past, even reached as far as the governor's mansion).

Of course Arnold was wrong — Prop 8 passed easily on the same ballot that put Barack Obama in the White House. It seems incongruous, but it really isn't. Naturally, the rampant and aggressive antigay bigotry within the Republican party has overshadowed the lower-key bigotry of Democrats, but their bigotry is quantifiable. Presaging California's vote, 3 out of 4 Missouri voters favored a marriage ban amendment on the same ballot where a majority also preferred to be represented in the US Senate by a dead Democrat rather than the odious — but at least biologically operational — Republican John Ashcroft.

Anyway, lawsuits challenging Prop 8 were filed in state and federal courts.

A majority of California's Supreme Court held in Strauss v. Horton that Prop 8 was cool by them because they felt California's referendum process grants voting majorities the power (a) to strip away gay people's fundamental rights, (b) to write gays out of the California constitution's equal protection clause, and (c) to force the state to discriminate on the basis of sexuality.

That astonishing conclusion came from the same court and even the same judge who, the previous year, wrote In re Marriage Cases:

[U]nder this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process...

[T]he right to marry is not properly viewed simply as a benefit or privilege that a government may establish or abolish as it sees fit, but rather that the right constitutes a basic civil or human right of all people." [emphasis mine]

In other words, neither the law nor the legislature may alienate gay people from their inalienable rights...but their neighbors can.

The federal suit claiming Prop 8's amendments violated gay people's rights as US citizens is styled Perry v. Schwarzenegger. To Arnold's credit, he chose not to defend from the outset. The court allowed some antigay religious organizations to intervene and do the deed. They were first schooled, then utterly demolished at trial by the plaintiff's counsel Ted Olson and David Boise. The court held for the plaintiffs, and the defendant-intervenors predictably appealed, which appeal is currently pending.

From inception Perry v. Schwarzenegger has been cultivated to be a Supreme Court landmark. What that functionally means is that if SCOTUS hears it, Kennedy decides it. It's mighty hard to feel optimistic about that, given Kennedy is a politically conservative Roman Catholic. Yes, Kennedy wrote Lawrence v Texas, but he also wrote BSA v Dale. As they note over at SCOTUSblog, on the big cases, Kennedy votes with the RATS. There's a real possibility we'll get a modern Dred Scott nightmare that will require generations to undo.

Anyway, it always struck me as unfortunate and unfair that after Arnold finally got on the right side of the issue, his name got stuck to the wrong side of this case. Learning that Arnold pushed us to the edge of this abyss while being a "family values" hypocrite, I felt that sympathy dry right up.

The harm he caused his family by disrespecting his marriage now just seems like a microcosm of the harm he caused gay families by disrespecting theirs.

Ana and the King.

2011-05-16T11:47:00.000-05:00

Ana notes the passage of a local celebrity, gentleman and bon vivant. I always looked forward to his visits, and will recall him fondly.

Hello neighbors,

Canelo will sail away tomorrow at 8 am. He has quickly developed a large tumor under his tongue, which in little time will choke him. The medical options -removal of his tongue and chemo- seem barbaric to me, specially knowing that he is about 15 years old. Should you want to say Good bye, you are welcome to stop by tonight.

He is comfortable and we are keeping him free of pain and relaxed.

He is the most amazing cat I have ever met. The king of the block, most friendly, most territorial, sun worshipper, untamable. Born free. He will die like a king, sweet and gentle. He will be buried in my front yard right under my front porch on his most favorite sunny spot.

He thanks all of you for offering shelter, food, water, petting, a place to sit and watch.

With much love,

Ana and Canelo

Gotta go. Something in my eye...

Take cover, Kansas City!

2011-05-13T13:24:00.000-05:00

The 'bastard's favorite bon vivant, Brian, dispatched an urgent alert that KCTV's Chief Scaremonger Katie "Madame Apocalypse" Horner may be out of a job.

That means our fair city may now be subjected to the clear and present danger of being able to watch entire television programs without being constantly apprised of the existence perfectly ordinary thunderstorms happening on the Iowa border.

From my basement underneath the safety of blankets and pillows, I tip my bicycle helmet in your honor, Katie.

When the dead baby in Brush Creek isn't really a chunk of wood, you'll have the last laugh.

A note of caution.

2011-05-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

Many of the regulars here are Mac users. I thought I'd call your attention to a bit of malware I've been seeing a lot. It's masquerading as a security programs called "MAC Defender" and "Mac Security."

They're trojans.

MAC Defender/Mac Security pretends to run a virus scan, which insists you're infected. If you download and install the application, it periodically opens up porn sites in an effort to further convince you that you're infected. Then it offers you the opportunity to "subscribe" to the antiviral package via credit card, using an unsecured website.

Here's an explanatory video from Intego, a reputable antivirus firm:

Always think hard before you supply that admin password to an installer.

Administration settles one DADT case.

2011-05-10T19:44:00.001-05:00

As a preliminary matter, the military's gay ban has not yet been repealed and continues to remain in full legal effect as of today, 139 days after Obama signed the so-called "DADT Repeal."

What's more, the Obama administration continues to pursue its appeal of its loss in Log Cabin Republicans v US, broadly holding that the military gay ban is unconstitutional on its face.

However, as part of a settlement, the administration finally dropped its appeal of Witt v Dep't of the Air Force, a narrower holding that the military gay ban is unconstitutional as applied to Major Margaret Witt, a highly decorated flight nurse who was discharged for nothing more than having an off-base relationship with a civilian adult.

Sadly, the settlement doesn't reinstate Major Witt, but at least it strikes the unlawful discharge from her military record and allows her to retire with all the benefits she earned — which is important because it's not uncommon for discharged servicemembers to be denied their full military benefits, a few even presented invoices demanding reimbursement to the government!

Congratulations and thank you to Major Witt and her counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Too scandalous for progressive Christians?

2011-05-09T19:53:00.001-05:00

The recently resurrected Queerty.com reports that Sojourners, a self-styled progressive Christian magazine, banned this Mother's Day ad:

The scandalous and unchristian message that Sojourners chose to distance themselves from?

"Welcome, everyone."

Wow. I got some reader mail.

2011-05-05T22:31:00.003-05:00

Aubrey, a longtime friend of the 'bastard, writes in regard to my post "Location, location, location":

What I have a problem swallowing is that it took us this long to find him. The timing is certainly opportune; support for American imperialism is fading and morale with continuing unnecessary foreign intervention is rapidly decreasing with the realization of the massive amounts of money we are throwing away on maintaining the military industrial complex at the expense of taking care of citizens at home. Afghanistan just saw one of the bloodiest months since our involvement.

And then there is the stupid birther distraction detracting from the real, important, and pressing issues of the day — like the unchecked monetary policy, the pillage of American prosperity by multinational corporate juggernauts and banks that profiteer off of taxpayer bailouts. Oh, and that huge debt ceiling issue. And the stupid war on drugs. And the complete and total disintigration and denial of civil rights, too many to enumerate here. And the killing of innocent Libyan citizens without Congressional authorization...news of the bombing of the Gaddhafi complex was all but buried by the OBL news.

Yep, OBL's "compound" isn't inconspicuous at all, worth at least a million bucks and sitting right there by a military academy. All the trillions we spend on military and we couldn't manage to find this guy sooner? Give me a break.

Aubrey, I cannot argue with your characterization of "the pressing issues of the day" — particularly with regard to the corporate takeover of the United States government. Congress and the president pretended to be pissed off about the Taxpayer's United decision but, like it was the goddam weather, nobody did anything about it. More recently, there was the even more astonishing holding — unsurprisingly, once again courtesy of the court's ultraconservative moral majority — that corporations may unilaterally strip customers of their right to join a class action lawsuit.

Likewise, the War on Drugs (Failing Spectacularly Since 1914™) is hardly more than a fig leaf for the police-statists' militarization of law-enforcement and their full-frontal assault on the Bill of Rights (limited rights and protections may not apply to you and may be rescinded without notice. See courts for details). The WoD also justifies policy meddling and waging wars in someone else's country, ever the favorite pastimes of the aristocracy.

The cost of all this is jawdropping. Some states spend more incarcerating drug users than they spend on secondary education. But when confronted with budget crisis after budget crisis, are these line items ever put on the table for some long-overdue reconsideration? Heaven forfend! Instead politicians prefer to fire teachers, close schools, cut programs serving the needy and vulnerable, and otherwise chip away at the fine and essential social safety infrastructure America spent generations constructing.

In the midst of an economic depression, the DEA still scored a 5.16% raise. The DEA's current budget is $2.415 billion, or $6.616 million daily. What do we get for the money? The DEA concedes that 98% of the plants destroyed under their domestic marijuana eradication program is uncultivated naturally occurring "ditchweed," and they also concede they can only catch 1% of all drugs that cross the border. The average cost per DEA arrest is nearly $10,000. But probably the most shocking statistic is that, despite being only 5% of the world's population, Americans are 25% of the world's incarcerated population, a statistic that is entirely a function of our insane drug prohibition policy.

And here's the fucking thing: in Western countries, draconian drug laws do not even sorta correlate to lower drug consumption — quite the opposite. Consider the most extreme example: in 2001 Portugal had among the highest levels of hard drug consumption in Europe. That year, they utterly decriminalized drug use. All drugs. Those busted for simple possession are sentenced to...therapy, which may be declined without penalty. Since 2001, Portugal's overally drug use is down, HIV infections are down and drug-treatment program enrollment has doubled. That's success by any measure.

However, there were two things about your letter that I didn't agree with.

#1: The timing of OBL's death is suspicious.

As a preliminary matter, in today's charged partisan political climate, any person could claim the timing of any momentous event seems suspicious. At the extreme end of the spectrum, religious fanatics will even insist natural disasters are timed to create reasonable inferences for the faithful — but of course correlation is not causation. Moreover, I don't disagree with your point that, for some, this incident could be manipulated to stoke the embers of war. However, it could as easily be framed as a justification for ending them.

That said, I think it's a mistake to assume this is the first time OBL was found purely on the basis that this is the first time he was caught. Indeed, one may easily imagine that the whereabouts of OBL (and other high-value AQ and Taliban targets) had been ascertained on dozens of prior occasions, but they escaped with help of treacherous parties within the allied military and intelligence community.

I can even make room for the possibility that the leaks came from within the US military. However, high-ranking US officials have pointed unequivocally at Pakistan on several occasions. For example, in '09 Secretary of State Clinton told the Pakistani press “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and could not get them if they really wanted to.” That's an astonishingly bold statement from our highest-ranking diplomat. That Presidents Bush and Obama both publicly and frankly stated their willingness to violate Pakistan's sovereignty to catch terrorists was also a pretty clear indictment of the Pakistani government's competency and/or willingness to do so.

There is also OBL's modus operandi to consider. After his transformation from ultraprivileged scion to militant jihadi, he became obsessed with his personal security and spent his vast inheritance ensuring it. He has never resided in a country whose government didn't personally provide him some special assurance of protection. When those guarantees evaporated, he entered a new agreement. To wit, when OBL embarrassed and annoyed the House of Saud to the point they banished him from his beloved "holy land," he moved to Sudan where he lived as the government's guest of honor, establishing businesses, building roads, hospitals and other amenities. When the Sudanese finally caved into pressure to show him the door, OBL relocated back to Afghanistan where he lived as the honored guest of his former comrades-at-arms who had morphed into the Taliban, the de facto regional government. OBL supported the Taliban with cash, soldiers, training, logistics and materiel. The Taliban rewarded OBL's devotion with its own, standing by him even when confronted with increasingly ominous U.S. ultimatums.

With the Taliban government deposed, OBL could have moved to the frontiers of Somalia or Chad or some other ungovernable shithole to spend the remainder of his life amongst locals so far removed from modernity they probably couldn't identify Osama's face even if they knew about the price on his head.

But this he did not do.

As usual, OBL relocated where his safety was assured. That's why his discovery in Pakistan has always made perfect sense. OBL made his jihadi bones fighting the Soviet occupation government in Afghanistan, which was also Pakistan's proxy war, a war Pakistan was intimately involved with at every level, particularly within the militant Islamic resistance movement. When Afghanistan formed its post-Soviet government, Pakistan continued to wage their proxy war against then new government, via the Taliban. Thus, OBL fought for years and sacrificed much not merely in the service of the Taliban, but also as Pakistan's ally. No doubt that some of his Pakistani war buddies felt just as bound to protect and defend OBL as the Afghani ones did.

I guessed wrong about where in Pakistan OBL was. I always expected he'd be found in Balochistan: it's wild so there's plausible deniability for Pakistan's government; it sits right on an unguarded border with Iran where he might slip across and dare the US to chase him and conduct an act of war on Iranian soil. So no, I really did not expect OBL to be found in the Pakistani version of Annapolis, and I remain truly astonished. (If Pakistan's president doesn't go straightaway to the PMA and put everybody's head in a vice until he squeezes out precisely who knew what then it's probably fair to assume he already knows).

All this is to say that with committed assistance, it's certainly possible for a fugitive to elude capture for a decade. Eric Robert Rudolph, likewise an ultrafundamentalist terrorist bomber on the FBI's Most Wanted, successfully evaded capture for longer than OBL did, and Rudolph even managed to do it within the US. How committed were Rudolph's allies? That sonofabitch's brother sent the FBI a video of himself sawing off his own hand.

So I'd say the timing and other circumstances of OBL's capture (except the location), far from being suspicious, are entirely explainable and even predictable.

#2: US military forces in Libya are deployed without proper authorization

Here I presume your objection "without Congressional authorization" is predicated on Congress' enumerated powers in Article I §8, "Congress shall have the power...to declare war."

However, that clause is merely an unambiguous statement of where the power is vested, not a description of the form or nature of the power itself. In other words, that statement doesn't require the president to secure Congress' permission before exercising his Constitutional power as CIC. Quite the contrary, the Constitution explicitly divides the war powers. Congress' hands are not tied; should they choose to prevent the CIC from using the military in some way they disapprove, they may defund, ratify a treaty, regulate and/or legislate.

The only unambiguous meaning that can be extracted from the clause is that neither the Executive nor the Judiciary possesses the competency to "declare war" — whatever that means, because it's certainly not self-evidently self-defining. It would have been a simple matter to write the clause to be more restrictive or in greater detail. You, Aubrey, could probably do precisely that while standing on your head.

However, it seems more likely that the framers intentionally left certain things in the Constitution ambiguous to accommodate exigencies and evolution — this being a particularly fine example. Fact is, this clause was initially conceived to grant Congress the power to "wage war," then subsequently revised to its current form after considerable debate.

Thus, it would seem that prudent politicians preferred to take a pass on being entirely responsible for the butcher's bill. I think that interpretation is supported by the fact that Congress reliably avoids exercising even its weaker power to issue declarations supporting the very wars it enthusiastically endorses financially.

Anyway, thanks for reading the crustybastard, and thanks for writing. Cheers!

A joke worth explaining to Republicans.

2011-05-02T10:08:00.003-05:00

"Donald Trump owns the Miss USA pageant, which is great for Republicans because it will streamline their search for a vice president."

- Seth Meyers, White House Correspondent's Dinner

"Sorry. Nope. Still don't get it. Try smaller words."

HONORABLE MENTION:

"Mr. President, look at your hair. If your hair gets any whiter, the Tea Party is going to endorse it."

Location, location, location.

2011-05-02T04:32:00.004-05:00

You're probably already heard that Osama bin Laden was enjoying the hospitality of Pakistan in a million-dollar mansion ~~within~~ on the outskirts of a large, affluent city.

Bin Laden was also living very close to Pakistan's version of West Point.

Seriously, I reckon he lived no more than ~~3.25~~ 1.6 miles — an easy walk — from Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul. I'm having a hard time assuming that's mere coincidence.

Here's a shot of the Osamahood I pulled off GoogleEarth. I'd like to attribute but can't. The photos are no more. Anyway, bin Laden's place is 200 yards off the left wing of the big structure in the middle of the picture, which is Government Post-Graduate College #1.

CORRECTION: Sheesh, I really should follow my gut. When I was reading the early reports, al-Jazeera had the residence somewhere along the PMA-Kakul Road. Then I started watching CNN, which put the residence further Southwest, off the main Abbotabad Highway. Because I always suspected the Pakistani military of being complicit in secreting bin Laden, the al-Jazeera report felt more accurate. Stupidly, I went with the more "reputable" CNN report instead. Mea culpa.

Think I'm being paranoid about bin Laden's proximity to a Pakistani military academy?

Okay, maybe.

But had Joseph Mengele been found in 1955 living in a high-security Bethesda mansion, ~~three miles~~ spitting distance from the National Naval Medical Center, reasonable eyebrows may have raised.

Just saying.

Revised GoogleEarth grabs:

Big red circle is the national military academy, small red circle is OBL's house
Focused to demonstrate the surrounding urban density.

This is what will be the bin Laden neighborhood in March 2001

Same area in 2011. There's been quite a buildup.

UPDATE:
CNN just released a Tim Lister story with some interesting details called Abbottabad—The military town where bin Laden hid in plain sight

Thanks, karma!

2011-04-26T09:23:00.000-05:00

The AP reports that the Rhode Island state legislature House Minority Leader, Robert Watson (R-East Greenwich), has been charged in Connecticut with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia and driving under the influence of alcohol.

During a February appearance at the Providence Chamber of Commerce, in describing issues confronted during the recent legislative session, Representative Watson bitched, "I suppose if you’re a gay man from Guatemala who gambles and smokes pot, you probably think that we’re onto some good ideas here."

The Guatemalan community noted that, at an official appearance, the sarcasm and racism in Watson's remarks were offensive and inappropriate. Watson doubled-down, adding another insult in his refusal to apologize in a comment during a radio interview, “I reject the suggestion that it's insulting."

Ding-dong!

Hi. I'm here from Karma.

Can you sign for this?

Pay special attention at :40.

2011-04-25T13:37:00.001-05:00

CCTV footage from the St. Louis airport tornado.

To enhance my dejargonization paradigm.

2011-04-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sadly, the people who need it most are the ones least likely to discover Unsuck It, the online corporate-babble-to-English translator.

Seriously, nonsense words like "incentivize*" make me stabby.

(* Also, I'm vaguely nauseated that abortion of a word actually exists in my computer's spellcheck. Yes, I discovered that fact because I initially misspelled it. Baldwin Rose, I know you're laughing about that, so bite me.)

Re: our imminent extermination by robots.

2011-04-20T13:41:00.000-05:00

Cyberdine System's Skynet became sentient and went online last night. The machines will commence their attack on humanity tomorrow.

So anybody up for drinks tonight?

I am saying this to shame you, NOM.

2011-04-19T19:48:00.000-05:00

Besides Leviticus, mainstream Christians love to clobber gays with a New Testament passage extracted from a dispatch that Paul of Tarsus (who never met Jesus) sent to the nascent Christian church of Corinth.

"...Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." 1 Corinthians 6:9-10

For the purpose of Christian civic activism, of the nine types of sinners listed, they fixate on but a single sin to the exclusion of all others.

Think about it: when was the last time you heard any Christian insist that marriage should be restricted to "one man and one woman who have never had sex outside of marriage," or "one man and one woman who are not alcoholics," or "one man and one woman who have never been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude" or "one man and one woman who are both near their ideal body weight and don't possess more money or stuff than they absolutely need"?

According to mainstream Christianity, only one sin absolutely disqualifies a person from marriage. Oddly enough, it isn't murder or domestic abuse or child molestation. Nope, if you're a person who likes to beat the shit out of your woman and rape your kids, as long as you're heterosexual, civil marriage is your God-given privilege, and good Christians will not interfere.

But if you're a homo, fuggedaboudit.

So the Christian marriage segregationists form political action committees such as the absurdly named National Organization for Marriage and drive around America persuading other Christians to impose their religious doctrines by law on everyone, and they lie about how civil marriage equality will magically grant gays some legal right to demand access to religious wedding ceremonies, and they insist that good Christians should redouble their efforts to keep those uppity sodomites under the godly boot of discrimination, etc.

At one NOM rally stop, a Christian minister displayed this sign.

Now, am I implying that NOM and their ilk inspire fanatical religious homophobes to murder? You're goddam right I am. This crazy shit is not benign and we ignore this at our peril.

Anyway, a funny thing happened on NOM's absurdly named "Summer for Marriage" bus tour. The guy who ran NOM's website and organized the bus tour, Louis Marinelli, actually met some gay Americans. Having talked to them at some length, Marinelli realized that what he'd been doing to them, and people like them, was...wrong.

And he decided to say so publicly.

NOM is now threatening to sue Mr. Marinelli, ostensibly for breaching a confidentiality agreement (without backing up their claim by detailing what privileged information he shared that wasn't publicly available).

Clearly, the embarrassment of Mr. Marinelli's defection is more than NOM can endure, and they intend to intimidate and harass him into silence which is just fucking rich, because the liars and hypocrites of NOM are the ones who whine that proponents of marriage equality really just want to wage "a massive campaign of intimidation and harassment designed to silence Christians."

Anyway, since NOM finds much compelling modern civic wisdom in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, perhaps they should give equal weight to the passage that immediately precedes the one I cited above.

It strikes me as very relevant to their current situation.

"When one of you has a dispute with another believer, how dare you file a lawsuit and ask a secular court to decide the matter instead of taking it to other believers!

Don’t you realize that someday we believers will judge the world? And since you are going to judge the world, can’t you decide even these little things among yourselves? Don’t you realize that we will judge angels? So you should surely be able to resolve ordinary disputes in this life. If you have legal disputes about such matters, why go to outside judges who are not respected by the church?

I am saying this to shame you. Isn’t there anyone in all the church who is wise enough to decide these issues? But instead, one believer sues another—right in front of unbelievers!

Even to have such lawsuits with one another is a defeat for you. Why not just accept the injustice and leave it at that? Why not let yourselves be cheated? Instead, you yourselves are the ones who do wrong and cheat even your fellow believers." 1 Corinthians 6:1-8

Damn, I love this show.

2011-04-14T22:51:00.001-05:00

Putting aside the crusty for a moment.

2011-04-06T22:31:00.001-05:00

Please to enjoy.

Defend DADT? No. Enforce DADT? Yes.

2011-02-25T23:21:00.000-06:00

Well...at least the assholes are consistent.

When the award-winning Crustybastard Action News Team last visited the mysterious case of Log Cabin Republicans v. United States, it was just after the federal district court held the military gay ban (10 USC §654) violated the Constitution in two different ways.

Subsequently, the Obama administration — which had argued the ban was perfectly rational and constitutionally sound — appealed the district court's decision, insisting that it bore some "duty" not only to defend every suit, but also to appeal every loss. As explained elsewhere here at The 'Bastard, the Department of Justice has no legal obligation to do so. As we saw just two days ago, when the administration decided to quit defending DOMA's §3, the DOJ effectively conceded lying about the existence of this duty to defend.

In making its appeal, the government argued that the court of appeals simply must issue a stay of the district court's decision, insisting the military would suffer “immediate harm” and “irreparable injury” if they couldn't keep discriminating against gays. The court of appeals just assumed the government's argument and granted the stay, keeping the unconstitutional ban in full legal effect.

It is worth noting that during the few days between the district court's decision and the appellate court's grant of the stay, 10 USC §654 was not in effect and chaos did not ensue. In fact, not a single incident was reported. Good order and discipline were maintained even in the absence of a discriminatory law! Imagine that.

Meanwhile, in the smoky back rooms of Congress, Obama's personally designated repeal point man Holy Joe Lieberman was predictably screwing gays by gutting the House repeal bill — a bill which contained antidiscrimination provisions — in favor of his own halfassed conditional repeal which contains no antidiscrimination provisions, and retains 10 USC §654 as controlling law unless and until all the conditions are met. Okay, and there's also a 60-day waiting period after that. The "waiting period" was the almost-dead Senator Robert Byrd's contribution to the so-called "repeal process"; allowing the old bigot's fetid, rotting corpse one final long pointless piss on some minority's civil rights. Such a fitting coda.

Anyway, the Lieberman Amendment was added to the Defense Authorization Act at the 11th hour and most of the Democrats congratulated themselves of their grand commitment to civil rights and the principles of equality, while most Republicans insisted we now almost certainly teeter on the cusp of pure anarchy, and surely deserve a divine smiting, because y'know...life is precious and God and the Bible or some such shit.

But remember — the gay ban still remains in full legal force because (a) the court of appeals granted the government's stay, and (b) the Lieberman Amendment conditions have not yet been met.

Which brings us to today.

For the second time this week, the Obama Administration, via the Department of Justice, has taken the position that can be fairly summarized as, "well, okay — this piece of antigay legislation that has been held unconstitutional probably really is unconstitutional — we'll give you that. But we still want to keep enforcing this unconstitutional law against gays."

Which causes my head to do this:

Because as any person who has taken one semester of Constitutional Law is well-aware, a law cannot be at once unconstitutional and enforceable.

Not even as applied exclusively to gays.

Well that's a new one.

2011-02-24T18:57:00.001-06:00

Gay people are pretty used to being scapegoats for all the world's ills. But this is a new one.

Darling of the Christian Right, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is currently blaming gay couples for...

...wait for it...

deadbeat dads.

Seriously. Huckabee says he opposes marriage equality because:

"There is a quantified impact of broken families...[a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year...that's the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties."

So...what's the logic here? That there is only so much responsibility in America and when gay people are allowed to be responsible for each other, it renders fathers incapable of being responsible for their children? And failure to pay child support is a phenomenon that first materialized in 2004, upon the advent of same-sex marriage?

What about states that enshrined marriage segregation into their statutes and constitutions? Shouldn't that have depressed divorce rates? Shouldn't single parenthood have become extinct? Shouldn't child support arrears have evaporated?

Yet none of that has been the case.

Indeed, the state with the lowest divorce rate is good ol' gay-marrying Massachusetts with 1.8 divorces per 1,000 people. Massachusetts isn't unique, either. Other states with marriage equality are Connecticut (3.1), District of Columbia (2.1), Iowa (2.5), New Hampshire (3.7), and Vermont (3.3).

However, of the five states with the highest divorce rate — Arkansas (5.6), Idaho (5.0), Nevada (6.6), West Virginia (5.0) — four amended their constitutions to segregate marriage, except Wyoming (5.2) which merely banned gays from marriage by statute.

Beyond his rank bigotry, Huckabee is exhibiting a fundamental inability to comprehend basic cause-and-effect. There's a point at which, as a civilized people, we shame these dipshits into silence, rather than encouraging them to run for goddam president.

Defend DOMA? No. Enforce DOMA? Yes.

2011-02-23T18:13:00.000-06:00

You've probably read the breathless headlines about Attorney General Holder's statement regarding Section 3 of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.

Yeah, well...it's being waaaaay oversold.

The DOJ is only saying it won't defend DOMA's Section 3* in the two new cases filed last November in the Second Circuit. The DOJ then invites any congressmembers "who wish to defend the statute [to] pursue that option" and the department also guarantees those individuals "a full and fair opportunity to participate in pending litigation."

This is a remarkable development — because I'm not at all certain that members of congress are a party with standing to defend the law. Attorney General Holder here seems to just assume this is the case without providing any support. Fact is, Congress delegated its right to defend federal laws to...Holder's department. Is Holder free to play Hot Potato like this? Not sure.

Holder buried his lede. The big news is:

The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples...is...unconstitutional.

Look, everybody! Our "constitutional scholar" president finally noticed that nouveau marriage segregation might be legally problematic. Ain't he just amazing?

So now that Obama and his DOJ have co-opted the very legal argument that kicked their asses in Massachusetts v. U.S. Health and Human Services, 698 F.Supp.2d 234 (D.Mass. 2010), there's really no case or controversy anymore. Thus, they've apparently also decided to abandon that appeal, and any other case where DOMA Section 3 is central to their argument.

However, just because Obama has finally come to believe that law is unconstitutional** doesn't mean he won't keep enforcing it.

"Section 3 of DOMA will continue to remain in effect unless Congress repeals it or there is a final judicial finding that strikes it down, and the President has informed me that the Executive Branch will continue to enforce the law. But while both the wisdom and the legality of Section 3 of DOMA will continue to be the subject of both extensive litigation and public debate, this Administration will no longer assert its constitutionality in court."

That raises two questions:

In Massachusetts v HHS (above), Federal District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro held DOMA Section 3 was unconstitutional. The judge stayed his ruling pending the administration's appeal — an appeal that Holder hints will be abandoned, rendering Tauro's decision final. Will President Obama respect the holding of that federal district court judge?

It's a reasonable question because when the Chief Judge of the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Obama administration — back in 2009 — to enroll the legal spouse of a court employee on the court's health insurance plan pursuant to the Federal Health Benefits Act, the administration ignored the court order, citing DOMA. So I'm very curious as to which judicial rulings President Obama feels compelled to respect.

Second question: if President Obama believes a law violates the Constitution, doesn't executing or enforcing that law violate his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution?

* DOMA §3: "In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife."
** 16 Am Jur 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256: "The General rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of it's enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. An unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Such a statute leaves the question that it purports to settle just as it would be had the statute not been enacted."

Wicked cool.

2011-02-08T14:39:00.000-06:00

This is one section of the Stockholm subway:

Other portions are equally badass. Well, maybe not equally, but I'm evil, so I'm pretty partial to this here hellmouth. Check out the rest when you have a moment.

Didn't the U.S. used to do similarly cool stuff at one time, or am I just being nostalgic for something that never was?

Have a fabulous holiday.

2010-12-23T09:46:00.000-06:00

Please to enjoy.

Fashion statement.

2010-12-16T11:56:00.000-06:00

I promised Beloved that I would prove that there was, in fact, such a thing as a penis gourd.

And yes, dear, they are indeed 'nesians. Melanesians, specifically. The penis gourd is sported (and I'm positive that's the appropriate verb) by the indigenous highlander tribes of the island of New Guinea.

Maintain eye contact, cheerfully pretend not to notice the other dude's giant penis gourd....

I suspect this is the midlife crisis model.

I plotzed.

2010-12-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving is the brilliant illustrated tale of a cross-country move of a couple and their dogs.

...as harrowing as the move was for us, it was nothing compared to the confusion and insecurity our two dogs had to endure. Our first dog is — to put it delicately — simple-minded. Our other dog is a neurotic German shepherd mix with agonizingly low self-esteem who has taken on the role of "helper dog" for our simple dog. Neither dog is well-equipped with coping mechanisms of any kind.

Please to enjoy.

On the most recent "DADT Study."

2010-12-02T11:29:00.003-06:00

I'm not a fan of this legislative "repeal" of the military's gay ban, because the new law is just discriminatory bullshit, repackaged.

Despite President Obama's pious speechifying that the military's gay ban is unjust, he meanwhile chooses to dispatch government lawyers to argue in court in favor of retaining the ban, and when they lose, he has them argue that “immediate harm” and “irreparable injury” to the military would ensue if they can't keep kicking out teh gheys. Despite the fact that the government lost their case in Log Cabin Republicans v United States utterly, the Ninth Circuit assumed the government's position anyway and granted their emergency stay (and this decision was essentially ratified by SCOTUS).

Meanwhile, for the eight days there was no gay ban in place while they haggled over the injunction, there were no problems with gays in the military. None. Now the "study" the administration commissioned regarding integration in the military has been released, and it (like all the other studies over the years) concludes that neither the gay ban nor closeted service is necessary for the armed services to continue to function effectively, as first reported in No Shit magazine.

Thus, the administration's own study proves its legal claims were completely false and baseless.

Had the Obama Administration chosen not to appeal their loss in LCR v US, or to insist on that emergency stay, they could have used this study to vindicate their decision not to appeal as empirically justifiable. That decision would have finally put the administration on the right side of this civil rights debate. They chose instead to stay their course of being tone-deaf bigots and hypocrites.

Besides eroding the administration's legal position, the study Obama demanded accomplished the following: it delayed the "repeal" vote until after the midterms when Democrats were sure to lose seats, and pushed the vote on the Defense Authorization Act of 2011 until essentially the last legislative minute, thereby creating a legitimate political justification for stripping the "repeal" amendment from the bill. One might be forgiven for assuming the administration's insistence on the study's December release was a poison pill by design.

If the amendment is stripped, the next move will be the Ninth Circuit's, around February or March of 2011. At that point, the Obama Administration is going to be forced to argue that the appeals court should ignore the evidence from the study and overrule the district court's finding that the gay ban is unconstitutional. Of course, given that this is a gay rights case, I make room for the real possibility that the court will happily ignore the evidence and perform all manner of legal and logical gymnastics to keep the discriminatory laws intact.

They usually do.

The Profit & Loss District.

2010-11-26T15:20:00.001-06:00

Saw this chart from localfirst.com over at Sully's blog. It quite nicely expresses why corporate welfare districts like Kansas City's Power & Light District are not merely bad economic policy, they're actually counterproductive in terms of building the local economy and enhancing the local taxbase.

As a preliminary matter, former mayor Kay Barnes and the nitwits in charge of Kansas City politics bought into Chicago-based C.H. Johnson Consulting Inc.'s fantastically rosy and spectacularly incorrect financial forecast, and with cartoon dollarsigns in their eyes and delusions of adequacy, decided to put the local taxpayers on the hook for $295 million to construct a mall-like "main street" designed to appeal to suburbanites and tourists. They also agreed to keep the taxpayers on the hook until 2033 to fill any revenue gap created by the consultant's over-sell and corporate underperformance.

It is difficult to overstate just how wrong C.H. Johnson was, so here's the numbers: for 2009, they projected sales of $240.7 million, but actual sales were $65.2 million. C.H. Johnson's epic failure has so far cost taxpayers an additional $16 million — and that's probably going to be the case every year for another generation.

Honestly, if you'd have just pulled a number from your ass you'd have probably gotten closer then these "experts."

But C.H. Johnson's incompetence absolutely pales in comparison to the gaggle of lackwits who comprise Kansas City Council. They actually — and no, I am not kidding — re-hired these same dumbshits and awarded them another $130,000 contract to study proposals for a new convention center hotel.

Yes, a new taxpayer-subsidized hotel, even though 38% of the city's existing hotel rooms sit vacant. A new taxpayer-subsidized hotel to directly compete against several existing taxpayer-subsidized hotels.

The city has already spent a half-million dollars over the past decade trying to polish this turd of an idea, and there's a fair chance that the city earnings tax is going to be eliminated in the very near future meaning residential property taxes will skyrocket while property values freefall, driving more folks to the suburbs and eroding the tax base to something frighteningly Detroit-esque.

But I digress.

Besides thrill-seeking suburbanites boldly braving the mean streets of Kansas City, the true beneficiary of the P&L district is the Maryland-based Cordish Corporation, a privately owned, multibillion-dollar retail and casino development and operations conglomerate. Cordish touts the P&L District as having "more than 50 unique and captivating shops, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues" in a 9-block "neighborhood."

By "unique" they mean "almost exclusively out-of-town corporate chains," including 801 Steak & Chop House (Des Moines), Bice Bistro (New York, abandoned P&L site), Chipotle Mexican Grill (Denver), Famous Dave's Legendary Pit Bar-B-Que (Minnesota, leaving P&L site), Flying Saucer Draught Emporium (Dallas/Ft. Worth), Fran's Restaurant (Toronto), The Fudgery (Georgia), GNC (Pittsburgh), Genghis Grill (Dallas), Gordon Biersch Brewing Company (Chattanooga), Hilton President (Virginia), Jos. A. Bank (Maryland), Kobe Japanese Steakhouse (Virginia), McFadden’s Sports Saloon (New York), Standard Parking (Chicago), Ted's Montana Grill (Atlanta, leaving P&L site), and T-Mobile (Germany). Although it's difficult to establish precisely, it seems that Cordish itself owns and operates several of the P&L District venues and chains, including Angel's Rock Bar, Fuego, Howl at the Moon Piano Bar, Lucky Strike Lanes, Maker's Mark Restaurant, Mosaic Lounge, Pizza Bar, PBR Big Sky, Raglan Road, Shark Bar, and Tengo Sed Cantina.

Yes, these marketing whizkids thought folks would drive into the urban core of Kansas City for...Atlanta steaks and Minnesota barbecue.

Way to have your finger on the local pulse, Cordish. Very impressive.

As a privately held company, Cordish is free to keep its finances and operations secret, and it certainly does. Although I don't have the financial breakdown of which company is making how much money, just by way of comparison, if you take the pie-chart figures above against the actual 2009 sales figures, you can see how dramatic the difference can be: if all tenants were non-local: 57% of $65.2 million = $37.164 million goes elsewhere, keeping $28.036 million in KC; however, if all tenants were local: 32% of $65.2 million = $20.864 million goes elsewhere, keeping $44.336 million in KC.

Ultimately, the city government is forcing taxpayers to subsidize a wealthy private out-of state company to operate for its own benefit and other mostly out-of-state companies, meaning 57% of those receipts go somewhere besides Kansas City.

We're not just hemorrhaging cash, we're paying somebody to keep stabbing us.

Travel advisory.

2010-11-19T10:13:00.002-06:00

The United Nations recently contemplated a resolution against extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.

Should be a no-brainer, right? Nope.

The resolution included executions "committed for any discriminatory reason, including sexual orientation." Naturally, an amendment was presented to remove those last three words from the resolution, which passed; 79 for, 70 against, 17 abstained. So, here's the list of UN member countries who, as a matter of public policy, have no problem with the arbitrary, state-sanctioned murder of people for the crime of being gay.

Africa: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Asia: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brunei, China, North Korea, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam

Central America/Caribbean: Bahamas, Belize, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & Grenadines

Europe: Russian Federation

Middle East: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

South America: Guyana

I know Jamaica is supposed to be the most homophobic place on Earth (a distinction that Uganda desperately wants, given how it's on the cusp of enacting a national gay extermination law) but the rest of the Central America/Caribbean group surprises me. Really, I had no idea. Evidently, the general rule is former French and Dutch colonies are gay-friendly, the Spanish ones aren't, and the former British colonies are outright hostile.

I had no idea they meant murderously hostile. Jesus.

Diagnosis: Excess gall.

2010-11-16T03:01:00.000-06:00

Glenn Thrush reports on Politico

A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan from the government takes a month to kick in.

Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange.

Yeah and while you wait 28 days, 40 million Americans are doing without healthcare for the foreseeable future, while financing your cadillac policy, you senseless, soulless sack of shit.

Go right ahead Dr. Congressman. Take your principled stand against "socialist" government healthcare. Purchase an unsubsidized policy for your family on the open market. Better yet, just do without. Consider it policy research.

Monsieur Guillotine, some days you are sorely missed.

Watch this. Seriously.

2010-11-13T16:45:00.000-06:00

Who's the maverick now? (UPDATED)

2010-11-12T12:50:00.001-06:00

"Our political and religious leaders tell LGBT youth that they have no future...that they can't serve our country openly...our government treats the LGBT community like they're second-class citizens — why shouldn't [schoolyard bullys]?"

— Cindy McCain

Not only are you absolutely right, Mrs. McCain, but you're evidently the last good decision your husband made.

Your marriage is your business, but you definitely deserve better representation in the Senate.

UPDATE: Evidently, Mrs. McCain wishes to clarify that she endorses her husband's homophobia, but not other people's.

I fully support the NOH8 campaign and all it stands for and am proud to be a part of it. But I stand by my husband's stance on DADT.
Cindy McCain
CindyhM1

I'd like to join the proofreader's union.

2010-11-07T19:38:00.000-06:00

I didn't have a phone on me, so you'll just have to take my word for it, but today I saw a bumper sticker that read:

Kansas City Federation of Teachers and School Related Personnel

It struck me funny because "school-related" is a compound modifier of the word "personnel," and thus should be hyphenated.

Perhaps the union doesn't include English teachers.

MSNBC asserts its droit de seigneur.

2010-11-06T14:06:00.000-05:00

When did our employers achieve the right to dictate what we do off-the-clock?

I understand that a company that depends on the public goodwill and trust of certain "face of the organization" employees might reasonably expect such employees to comport themselves lawfully and even within certain moral boundaries at all times. However, a contractual provision that purports to require any employee to obtain their employer's approval to exercise their First Amendment right to political expression could by extension evolve into a contractual provision that requires employees to obtain approval to vote in a certain way, or even to vote at all.

Contractual provisions are ultimately void and unenforceable if a judge refuses to allow the state to enforce them.* It's utterly irrelevant that every party knowingly and enthusiastically agreed with the specific terms at signing. Enforcing MSNBC's contract would compel the government to infringe on Mr. Olberman's First Amendment rights, and this it cannot do.

Honestly, I hope Olberman sues the living shit out of MSNBC.

I would.

(* In Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), SCOTUS held that a provision in real estate contract that purported to exclude any buyer "of the negro or mongolian race" was not in itself unconstitutional because it was a private agreement and there was no state action; however, it would be unconstitutional for the state to enforce such provisions because enforcement would be state action that violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. For all I know, a racially restrictive covenant may still cling to that deed, but it does so without legal effect.)

Wow. It works!

2010-11-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

Long ago, in a fit of pique, I posted a sign on the front of the ol' crapshack that reads:

NO SALESMEN, SOLICITORS OR PREACHING. THANKS.

I just watched a complement of Jehovah's Witnesses come up my stairs and turn back around. Awesome.

If only it worked that well on those goddam magazine peddlers.

On politicizing the judiciary.

2010-11-03T12:08:00.000-05:00

"Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

-Thomas Jefferson, 1819

If the people can vote for you, it's a political office.

It strikes me as self-evident that in the interest of promoting judicial neutrality, judges certainly shouldn't be politicians, and probably politicians shouldn't become judges.

It also strikes me as self-evident that no politician should attack any judge on the basis that a judge's decisions somehow failed to advance the politician's personal agenda. When it happens, it shouldn't be tolerated, much less encouraged.

However, yesterday Iowa's voters — for the first time in history — were persuaded to kick their state supreme court justices off the bench for having the temerity to find that all Iowans share an equal right to marry. In other words, three judges were targeted and expelled on the political basis of the outcome of one single case — not on the basis any were corrupt, intemperate, prejudiced, or legally incompetent.

This astonishing outcome was accomplished by an unholy confederacy of out-of-state Christian political organizations (Faith & Freedom Coalition, Campaign for Working Families, National Organization for Marriage, Family Research Council, American Family Association, and the Alliance Defense Fund) led by Iowa's own failed 'bagger gubernatorial primary candidate, motivational speaker, and professional homophobe Bob Vander Plaats.

The failure here ultimately resides in a voting public who evidently has no idea how a tripartite government is designed to function for the protection of the entire public, who has no idea what they need to do to ensure that a neutral judiciary continues to work effectively to protect all people generally, and who has no idea of what the Constitution actually says or what those words mean.

Further, Americans generally seem not to have learned history's lessons that wherever the state is encouraged to wield its power against one minority, that power will inevitably be used against another one, and another, and another, until the law eventually exists solely for the protection of a political elite. When this happens, at best the people end up furtively trying avoid the attention of sociopaths in jackboots, and at worst the people end up in the Dark Ages as the short-lived farm animals of some bishop or baron.

Ultimately, like California's Prop 8 vote, Iowa's vote should be seen as evidence of a failure of an education system that cannot, or will not, meaningfully teach history and civics, and the triumph of Christians promoting the belief that their particular dogma should be the whole of the law. Because strong belief easily defeats weak wit, we have reached the deplorable point where voters have come to believe that the loudest voice is somehow evidence that it's the most correct, rather than evidence it's probably only the most extreme.

The guiding principle of America has ever been striding toward more equality, not less. To destroy the independent judiciary to ensure that "you people shall never be our equal" is to cheerfully goose-step toward fascism.

This about sums it up.

2010-09-23T11:03:00.000-05:00

Pop quiz.

2010-09-23T00:32:00.002-05:00

Freebie Friday.

2010-09-17T10:21:00.000-05:00

For 24 hours only, Trent Reznor has made available a free 5-song sampler from his soundtrack to The Social Network at this site.

Please to enjoy.

Madness?

2010-09-15T09:17:00.002-05:00

Making the appeal unappealing.

2010-09-13T15:09:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, September 9, 2010, a federal judge presiding over Log Cabin Republicans v. U.S. & Gates held the military's gay ban violated the Constitution two distinct ways.

If the ruling stands, the federal law is unconstitutional, utterly void and without effect, unenforceable in any jurisdiction, and the ban on gay Americans serving in the U.S. military becomes an ugly part of American history.

Why President Obama had — on multiple occasions in addition to this case — dispatched squads of US attorneys to defend a law he'd often denounced and insisted he wanted repealed has never been clear. It's been "explained" vaguely as some "traditional" obligation to defend all U.S. laws. However, there is no actual legal obligation on the part of the executive to defend any particular law. Indeed, it would be a violation of his oath of office if he defended any law he believed to be unconstitutional. As a professor of Constitutional law, Obama certainly has personal knowledge of all of this.

Regardless of why Obama defended the law, his lawyers failed to carry their burden of proof, and he lost his case. Now, the only way this outrageously discriminatory dead law could be revived is if President Obama decides to appeal. Again, he bears no legal obligation to do so; any decision to appeal would be 100% discretionary.

If President Obama decides to use the power of his office to singlehandedly revive a dead, unconstitutional, discriminatory federal law via an unnecessary appeal, it is the same kind of gratuitous fascist homophobic bullshit we could get from any Republican or theocrat. It cannot be viewed in any other way.

Moreover, he is choosing to frag the LGBT community right before midterm elections.

Democrats, "you better think about the consequences of your actions."

Not to be shocked by animal attack.

2010-09-12T10:05:00.000-05:00

Beloved's friend sends along these instructions from a rice cooker purchased at Korean Market in Springfield. Please to enjoy.

The following must be observed to use the product safely and correctly to prevent accident and dangerous situations.

'Warning' and 'Caution' are different as follows. This means that the action it describes may result in death or severe injury. This means that the action it describes may result in injury or property damage.

This sign is for reminding something may cause problems under the certain situation. Please read and follow the instruction to avoid any harmful situation.

Please use it clearly; If it is used with any alien material being held there will be happened any case of boiled rice not being made well or boiled rice being burned. Please use it (them) always clearly by wiping out by sponge scrubber for the around the pan after soak in water, by sandpaper for the heater or sensor.

Please use it at a secured place; Please avoid using it at a insecure place easy to be fallen down, or near hot thing such as stove or gas stove or on carpet or cushion, etc.

Please pay careful attention against water; Please surely not wash out the body of this rice cooker by water which may be a cause of electric shock or firing.

Use a single socket with the rated current above 15A. Using several lines in one. Socket can cause overheating resulting in fire. Use the extension cord with the rated current above 15A.

Be caful both plug and power cord not to be shocked by animal attack or sharp metal materials. Damages by impact can cause an electric shock or fire.

Being hot! When cooking boiled rice there is coming out hot steam from the hole of the steam and please not come your face or hand near it.

Please pay careful attention against its deforming If you put anything such as dishcloth, etc. on the cover when cooking boiled rice or in the course of warming which may be a cause of deforming or decoloring the cover.

It is avoidable to use it for other use If you boil water or use for any other use, which may give rice cooker excess and be a cause of disorder.

When there is not boiled rice in inner pot. when there is not anything in pan, please surely pull out plug. Otherwise it may be heated and cause a risk.

When warming boiled rice and cold boiled rice together, which may be a cause of bad smell.

Handling With care If you fall rice cooker down or and strong impact, which may be a cause of disorder.

With the rice scoop indicated If you use a metallic rice scoop which may be a cause of the boiled rice being scorched because of peeling off coated film of inner pot.

The fresh hotness: election fraud.

2010-09-07T10:03:00.000-05:00

Locally we saw Jackson County Legislator Henry Rizzo put Diane K. "Crystal" Williams in the primary to siphon off votes from the Crystal Williams running for his seat.

Of course, Rizzo denies that he was involved, making him a liar on top of perpetrating election fraud. His scheme backfired bigtime, and the real Ms Williams won.

Then there was Alvin Greene, the unemployed crackpot who somehow managed to produce a $10,400 filing fee (despite previously claiming to be indigent to secure a public defender to represent him in his pending felony indecency trial) to run as a Democrat against incumbent South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint.

Today I read that Log Cabin (read: "self-loathing gay") Republican Steve May, a former two-term Arizona legislator and returning candidate for the legislature, went down to his local skid row to collect accommodating bums to run as Green Party candidates to siphon off votes from his competition.

May — unlike Rizzo — admits to the fraud, even while pretending it's somehow not a dirty trick.

“Did I recruit candidates? Yes. Are they fake candidates? No way. Are you fake, Benjamin? Are you fake, Thomas? Are you fake, Grandpa?"

Christ, what an asshole.

The article mentions that other Arizona Republicans also recruited sham candidates (to divide and conquer the dirty liberals).

What they are doing is not substantially different than hacking into electronic voting machines to manipulate data. These assholes ought to be in jail right now, and barred not only from ever seeking any public office, but also from working in any capacity (including advisory or consulting jobs) for any government or political candidate.

But apparently, this shit is not even illegal.

This country is circling the drain.

Well played, Mr. Herrera.

2010-08-17T08:22:00.002-05:00

As you've almost certainly heard, Federal District Judge Walker held Proposition 8 (California's most recent attempt a enacting a same-sex marriage ban) all kinds of unconstitutional. Since the attorney general of California won't appeal the verdict, the citizen-bigots who brought Prop 8 are demanding an emergency stay on the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and insisting they have legal standing to bring an appeal.

You may have even heard that since the citizen-bigots can't demonstrate how they'd be individually harmed by the issuance of such marriage licenses, they're not likely to have a legal basis for their emergency stay or appeal.

Dennis Herrera, the city attorney of San Francisco, separately filed an opposition to the request for an emergency stay, noting there's yet another reason why the citizen-bigots (herein, "Appellants") lack standing to appeal:

In light of Supreme Court's decision in AOE, and in light of the fact that California law is no different from Arizona's, Appellants presumably could have included a provision in Proposition 8 that would have authorized them to represent the interests of the State in any litigation involving the measure. Indeed, another initiative measure on the very same ballot contained an analogous provision. The measure created a legislative redistricting commission, and gave the commission, rather than the Attorney General, sole authority to defend any action...Proposition 8's sponsors, having failed to include a similar provision in their initiative, cannot now complain about their lack of Article III standing.

One hopes Mr. Herrera's point will be the requisite coup de grâce.

It will probably turn out that most of these initiatives didn't include the provision allowing the various citizen-bigot organizations to stand in the shoes of the various attorneys general for the purpose of appeal — which might be helpful where a particular attorney general understands the concepts of "equal protection," "due process," and "fundamental rights."

Anyway, it just gets interestinger and interestinger.

Cf.

2010-08-15T13:54:00.000-05:00

The conservative that gets it.

2010-08-08T14:34:00.001-05:00

Ted Olsen schools Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

Beautiful.

Clever.

2010-07-27T09:48:00.000-05:00

The single best thing I've read about the current vampire craze is this post titled I Know Why the Vampire Sparkles.

Please to enjoy.

Surprising news.

2010-07-26T11:06:00.000-05:00

Today, a U.S. President who faces contentious elections in three months ignored overwhelming public opinion against and signed an executive order desegregating the military just because he thought equality as a principle was important enough to actually do something about it.

It was today, 62 years ago. The president was Harry Truman. He informed Congress he had, “instructed the secretary of defense to take steps to have the remaining instances of discrimination in the armed services eliminated as rapidly as possible.” Of course, then as now the glorious leadership of our armed forces thought "rapidly" meant 15 goddam years.

Today, there is overwhelming public support for removing the institutional discrimination against gay soldiers. It polls at 78%. Seriously, nothing polls at 78%.

However, the "Homosexual Conduct" law has not yet been repealed and there continues to be zero movement to enact any kind of federal antidiscrimination law to protect gay citizens within or without the military. In fact, the momentum seems to be to continue to heap increasingly more legal disabilities on top of existing discrimination — y'know "state's rights," and all. Viva Jim Crow!

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Daniel Choi was officially discharged two days ago, and the Obama Administration is currently in federal court defending the military's gay ban as rational, reasonable, and necessary in Log Cabin Republicans vs. United States of America.

Nice work, Democrats.

President Truman once offered your party some valuable advice you persistently ignore: "If you give the people a choice between a watered-down Republican and a Republican, they will choose the real thing every time."

Probably too late now.

±$1,150,000,000,000.00

2010-07-26T02:08:00.000-05:00

That's how much our post-9/11 wars have cost...so far.

If you took hundred-dollar bills and stacked them, the stack would be over 780 miles high. If you built that stack in Kansas City, and it tipped over, the top would land in Pittsburgh.

We haven't even started paying for either war, because neither was funded. We just put them on the credit card. Seriously.

Military spending currently represents 54% of the federal budget. Adjusted for inflation, we are currently spending more on the military today than we spent when we were fighting in World War II — which, for us, only lasted four years. And that enemy had submarines, ships, tanks and aircraft. The current enemy has...donkey-bombs.

I have reached the inescapable conclusion that despite being provided nearly infinite resources and a highly trained, willing corps, either our military leaders cannot win these wars, or they will not.

I don't know which is worse.

Goddamit so much.

2010-07-24T10:18:00.001-05:00

Kenneth Feinburg was appointed "pay czar" by the Obama administration for the purpose of investigating the outlandish compensation the bailed-out banks persisted in paying their executives.

He has completed his report. His conclusion: do nothing.

That's right. Nothing.

From Wapo:

The report declined to name individual executives whose pay was deemed excessive. Feinberg said he didn't want his findings to trigger a round of private lawsuits and congressional hearings.

"I think it's sufficient they voluntarily accept this [pay contract] break position, that we all move forward with lessons learned and that we put this sad chapter behind us and look forward," said Feinberg, who will soon shift his attention to overseeing the $20 billion BP oil spill compensation fund.

Emphasis added because holymotherfuckingshit...are you kidding me?

Honestly, it's like GWB never left.

She won!

2010-07-20T10:12:00.000-05:00

Remember Constance McMillen, the Mississippi high school student who got tricked by school administrators into going to a fake prom because she had the temerity to be a lesbian?

She won.

CBS reports:

the Itawamba County School District to pay $35,000, plus attorney's fees. As part of the agreement, the school district also said it would follow a policy not to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity in any educational or extracurricular activities...

"I hope this means that in the future students at my school will be treated fairly," McMillen said.

Given the Itawamba County School District seems disproportionately populated with liars and bigots, I doubt that'll happen.

But hey — by settling and adopting a nondiscrimination policy, they conceded that Ms McMillen was right.

Good job, kiddo.

Thanks, ACLU.

Congrats to Argentina.

2010-07-16T00:38:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled Argentina passed marriage equality, but it's pretty depressing at the same time.

When I was an undergrad, South Africa was a racist hellpit and Argentina was a creepy semifascist state where people got snatched off the streets by plainclothes government agents.

I never would have believed that only a couple of decades later gay citizens of South Africa and Argentina would have more rights than I have as a citizen.

Some people in this country aren't going to be happy until they prove Margaret Atwood right.

Christ, I need a drink.

Money talks.

2010-07-12T18:21:00.001-05:00

Send a message to the do-nothing politician in your life.

Please to download and enjoy.

Those lesbian mice are FucM knockouts.

2010-07-12T11:34:00.000-05:00

Molecular geneticists Dongkyu Park, Dongwook Choi, Junghoon Lee, Dae-sik Lim, and Chankyu Park from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology published an article on July 7, 2010 in BMC Genetics 2010 claiming they could create lesbian mice through genetic manipulation.

They created a strain of mutant female mice lacking one particular gene (FucM) that produces a particular enzyme, and these mice are called the "FucM knockouts."

"The FucM knockout mice displayed an abnormal sexual receptivity...although the animals were fertile." In other words, the FucM knockouts weren't interested in smelling the urine of, or having sex with male mice, but were totally down with the ladies. Fertility was established among some of the FucM knockouts by...well, rape. (In case you were curious, the scientific term for rape is "forced intromission.")

The researchers also discovered that the brain structure of the FucM knockouts was atypical among females, but resembled the brain-development of ordinary male mice.

While the research is certainly interesting, as this article points out, it's important to note that the enzyme doesn't function exactly the same way for gender development in humans. Stanford University's Dr. Simon LeVey, says "Nevertheless, it is probably only a matter of time before molecular geneticists identify genes that influence sexual orientation in humans."

I care about your safety.

2010-07-06T12:20:00.000-05:00

Lifehacker published this very excellent article about how to protect yourself from malicious dickweeds who exploit public wi-fi networks.

Just because most wireless routers have a firewall to protect you from the internet doesn't mean you're protected from others connected to the same network. Lots of wireless hotspots these days are completely unencrypted...this leaves you unprotected against malicious users in the same coffee shop, so there are a few settings you should always make sure to tweak when you're connected to a public network. We're going to show you which settings are the most important ones, as well as how to automatically change your settings to the appropriate level of security every time you connect to a public network.

The article contemplates both Mac and Windows users and it's nicely illustrated.

Please to enjoy.

Dismantling homeopathy.

2010-06-30T16:20:00.000-05:00

If you've ever wondered what "homeopathy" is all about, read this brief and brilliant illustrated history from the blog Darryl Cunningham Investigates.

In short, faith-healing remains faith-healing, even when the faith is veneered by bogus "science."

Read it. Now.

Like Jackie Robinson was an "activist" ballplayer.

2010-06-29T14:50:00.006-05:00

I have only this to say regarding the conservative senator's invitation to Tony Perkins (head of the antigay Christian hate group The Family Research Council) allowing Perkins to interrogate Elena Kagan for her presumed sympathies to gay rights:

It is in no way different from inviting The Aryan Nations to the Senate interrogate to Kagan for her presumed Zionism.

It is, to say the least, a novel interpretation of the "advise and consent" clause to allow some extremist, religiously motivated ideologue the right to confront a judicial candidate for her moral shortcomings with the imprimatur of the United States Senate. Kagan is a candidate for judge, not bishop.

No, the law and your morality are not interchangeable, you sanctimonious dumbasses.

And speaking of sanctimony, this really turned my stomach.

Since he was not there to defend himself, permit me put Justice Thurgood Marshall's quote in context. Every year the judicial clerks of the Supreme Court have a formal lunch with a sitting justice in attendance. One year it was Justice Marshall's turn. When asked by a clerk to define his judicial philosophy, Marshall replied, "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up."

He was correct. Very often the law lags behind the Constitution.

It's probably difficult to notice that when you're a rich white man who's never had a single opportunity foreclosed based on your race, gender, religion or sexuality, and you've never been shackled by an unfair and unreasonable legal disability or received anything but the benefit of any disparate treatment, and never even been slightly harmed by the institutional bigotry of the State.

No, I suppose the legal status quo looks just peachy from where you sit, senator.

It would be absurd and unhinged to believe that Justice Marshall — in his capacity as a Supreme Court Justice, in a statement to the world's most elite law students — meant to say that what he thought was "right" might justifiably be untethered or unharbored to what he thought was Constitutional.

Yet the conservatives are making precisely that specious argument. In fact, that is exactly their definition of "judicial activism," at least to the extent they object to the outcome.

They have no problem with conservative judges inventing doctrines like "standing" that prevent people from having their day in court, or deciding that corporations have all the benefits of legal "personhood" with few of the liabilities, or carving out new exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause, or discovering some "automobile exception" to the Fourth Amendment, etc.

That's all fine, but when a black judge decides in a way that benefits black people, that's "judicial activism." And such "activism" is precisely the reason conservatives are terrified that Dean Kagan might decide in a way that benefits...softball players.

Ultraconservatives prefer the "originalist" judicial philosophy of Justice Antonin Scalia as followed slavishly by Justice Clarence Thomas. Scalia doesn't do what he thinks is right. Oh, no! He performs some kind of Shirley McClaine-style past-life regression where he grasps the prevailing morality of 18th Century post-colonial America in one hand (as if there was ever one "community standard") and the collective intent of the Founding Fathers (as if they ever unanimously agreed on anything) in the other. Scalia is thus steered by Madison et al, in the same way spirits move a planchette across the Ouija board.

"Originalism" is law-by-seance, with Nino Scalia as medium. Yet the "judicial activism" of Thurgood Marshall merits...ridicule?

How can any serious person suggest Marshall's positions were "outside the mainstream"? He favored full civil rights for racial minorities, favored a woman's right to make family planning decisions, opposed the death penalty in all cases, and believed the government needed warrants to tap your phone and arrest you in your home. Those may not be your positions, Senator John Kyl, but they're all squarely within the mainstream public debate. Or are you still pissed off by Thurgood Marshall's "outside the mainstream" belief that the Constitution was wrong about slavery, that Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson were wrongly decided, and "separate but equal" is not, in fact, equal at all?

Here's a question from Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III:

Does the judge understand that they can’t utilize the power — the lifetime appointment — to redefine the meaning of the Constitution? To have it promote an agenda in an activist way that the American people won’t vote for?

What? No. Actually senator, a first-year law student wouldn't "understand" your absurd construction that makes a mockery of the Separation of Powers generally, and the independent judiciary specifically. In fact, it is most definitely and even explicitly the "power," as well as the competence, and even the obligation of judges to utterly ignore the collective will of any plebiscite that acts in contravention to the letter of the Constitution, its purpose or its principles.

Senator Sessions is himself a failed nominee to the federal bench. Apparently that is what qualifies him to lead the conservative assault on Elena Kagan. It's another thing he will fail at.

Conservatives, seriously — read a fucking book.

Absolutely badass.

2010-06-28T13:07:00.000-05:00

This lady probably makes the toughest hombre you know look like a pussy. Read her story.

A few words on the demise of Robert Byrd.

2010-06-28T10:55:00.000-05:00

Senator-for-life Robert Byrd is being tenderly eulogized today in the media, who dutifully reminds us of his early KKK affiliations, then tells a noble tale of redemption by his later virtuous work on behalf of civil rights.

It's all such bullshit.

When Byrd was finally forced to abandon his disgusting racism, he simply refocused his foul bigotry on gay Americans.

Transferring one's bigotry to a different group doesn't redeem a goddam thing.

The world is a fractionally more intelligent, nicer place today.

Boy Scouts continue to suck.

2010-06-25T01:57:00.001-05:00

One day, the Boy Scouts of America decided to rid itself of gays, starting with James Dale — Eagle Scout, assistant scoutmaster, and Hollywood-handsome New Jersy guy.

The Supreme Court of New Jersey said not so fast, BSA. Because you let any boy join, and because of your heavy reliance on public funding and public property, you are indeed a public accommodation. Mr. Dale's presence within the BSA does not affect your organization's ability to accomplish its purpose, and merely having one incidentally gay employee doesn't work as an institutional endorsement of homosexuality. New Jersey's public accommodation law reasonably prohibits discrimination, so you can't kick out Mr. Dale just because he's gay. Un-revoke his membership and give him back his job.

BSA appealed it to SCOTUS, and the ultraconservative Rehnquist Court unsurprisingly and unquestioningly accepted the BSA's revised argument that Scouting is not only a selective private religious membership club, but it is — more importantly — an expressly anti-gay organization. Ergo, the BSA cannot be compelled to include gays (for the same reason than the KKK can't be forced to include blacks.)

The BSA and the conservative justices believed that Mr. Dale's private romantic behavior could somehow be detected by every Scout in the United States, utterly undermining the BSA's own "values" instruction regarding young men's sexuality, which was...nothing. The BSA admitted that it assiduously directed Scoutmasters to avoid the topic of sexuality entirely. They simply insisted they had a double-secret "NO HOMO" policy down at the Texas headquarters, and that ought be good enough for the Court.

It was.

Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas decided that New Jersey's laws intended to promote equal protection under the law (pursuant to the purposes of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments) were ultimately goals less worthy of Constitutional protection than the BSA's First Amendment right to express contempt for gay people generally, and the subsidiary right to hound one particular college kid out of his job (despite the fact that no allegation was made that Mr. Dale behaved in any sexually inappropriate way with any Scout, and without any evidence that Mr. Dale had, or ever intended to discuss his sexuality in his capacity as an assistant scoutmaster.)

Justice Stevens, in dissent, noted that neither the majority nor the BSA bothered to dispute the fact that their bigotry had caused serious harm to gay Americans. Stevens then concluded that the majority's decision had created a "constitutional shield" for antigay bigotry, and that they had fallen into the trap of converting their prejudice into legal principles.

His dissent was prescient.

On Wednesday, a federal jury unanimously decided that Philadelphia's anti-discrimination law barring organizations that discriminate from using publicly funded facilities also unconstitutionally failed to accommodate the BSA's First Amendment right — and avowed institutional purpose — of expressing its contempt for gays. (The BSA lost on two other Constitutional arguments).

"We can't be kicked out of the building or evicted and we don't have to pay any rent," cooed the BSA attorney, William McSwain, who essentially relied on the "constitutional shield" argument.

He's not entirely right. The lease apparently allows the city to evict the Scouts without providing a reason.

While that lease provision might ultimately provide a favorable outcome to the dispute, the perverse outcome of the Dale decision is that the government can put you out for no reason, but it can't evict you for being a hateful gaybashing bigot freeriding on amenities subsidized by the very people you willfully discriminate against.

Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts continue to accomplish their purpose without engaging in discrimination or bigotry,

Click this. Seriously.

2010-06-09T12:04:00.002-05:00

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-tallest-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249/

The Banana Republic of California

2010-06-09T11:33:00.000-05:00

California election results:

Billionaire Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, spent $81 million to win the Republican primary election for governor, about $70 million from her own account. She received 1,101,528 votes. That's $73.53 per vote. On a California governor's salary, it would take her 463 years to earn $81 million.

Here's Whitman's financial promise: "Cut SPENDING: Meg will ensure that Sacramento spends no more than it takes in...[and] give Californians faith their money is well spent..." Her most serious opponent spent about $20 million, or approximately the amount of money sitting in Whitman's couch cushions.

More than 1 in 4 California Republicans wanted lunatic conspiracy theorist Orly Taitz to be California's next Secretary of State. Jesus tapdancing Christ, people! Really?

Voters approved Proposition 14, which effectively prevents third-party candidates from holding statewide or federal office. It accomplishes this by limiting the general election ballot exclusively to the 2 candidates who got the most votes in the primary election (which will always be 1 Republican and 1 Democrat), and also eliminates "write-in" candidates.

So to the dozens of candidates who ran as Green, Libertarian, American Independent, or Peace and Freedom party candidates, and to the tens of thousands of people who voted for those candidates, here's the message: your neighbors have decided that you have no right to be "unconventional," or to embrace or promote any idea that departs from the mainstream. Not sure how to deal with that? Ask your gay neighbors.

Well, I'll be damned.

2010-06-08T23:25:00.000-05:00

The Supreme Court of New Mexico has decided that the crime of "driving while intoxicated" requires the perpetrator to be driving.

Sleeping it off in a parking lot is no longer considered "driving."

How absolutely...sensible.

Know the real enemy.

2010-06-06T19:15:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: Received the following anonymous email since I originally posted:

I am one of the victims in this case.

a. the JAG did not agree with this deal.

b. That was a follow up e-mail to notify the victims of the sentence the judge gave. The JAG had already called me to break the bad news about the plea deal. I believe she called the others too, since it said as much in her e-mail. it was clear it was a follow up. Too bad no one printed the whole thing.

This is an outrage, but the anger needs to be focused on the right area...namely, the people who agreed to this deal.

__________________________________

ORIGINAL POST:

Twenty-three different soldiers on two continents had accused the Navy physician of manually raping them during routine medical examinations.

Last month, his victims received the following email from the Judge Advocate General's office after it secured the doctor's guilty plea:

...the judge awarded a sentence of 24 months, a $28,000 fine to be paid right away or else an additional 6 months would be imposed, total forfeitures of pay, and most iportantly [sic], a DISMISSAL from the Navy.

However, the JAG cagily omitted the details of its plea agreement with Lieutenant Commander Anthony L. Velasquez, M.D.

The deal allowed the doctor to avoid both the prison sentence and the fine as long as he can avoid being convicted for raping anyone else within the next 730 days. Twenty-nine counts of sexual misconduct and related charges were dropped in consideration for a guilty plea on 2 counts of wrongful sexual contact and 2 counts of conduct unbecoming an officer. Ultimately Lt. Cmdr. Velasquez served a whopping 7 days in the brig — less than 7 1/2 hours incarceration, per rape. Even the astonishingly misogynistic government of Afghanistan demands that rapists pay a fine.

Had Dr. Velasquez's victims been male soldiers instead of females, I'm sure that would be used as evidence during the upcoming DADT hearings that gay soldiers clearly have no place within our outstanding, honorable military. The homophobic hate group The Family Research Council (co-founded by George "Rentboy" Rekers) has already helpfully invented some statistics regarding homosexual military rape and then released a "study" of their imaginary data. Conclusion: gays rape about 3X as much as straight ones, and repeal of DADT will inevitably turn the military into a homosexual-rape free-for-all.

The reality is, according to 2006 Defense Department study, that 3.5% of male servicemembers experienced military sexual assault, compared to 23% of females, and 1.2% of male servicemembers filed a complaint alleging rape, compared to 11% of females.

Last year, Chair the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence Jane Harman (D-CA), pointed to more recent DOD statics that demonstrate that "Military women are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq." Those more recent statistics include 2,280 solid cases where there was both physical evidence and a victim willing to testify. Only 317 of those cases went to courts-martial, such as the case of Lt. Cmdr. Velasquez. Another 247 received some type of unspecific "nonjudicial" discipline.

There's a pretty serious problem with "unit cohesion" in the armed services that deserves to be confronted.

And it isn't gays.

Homebrewing with the bastard.

2010-06-02T02:24:00.003-05:00

I love me some pineapple, and eat one every week or so. I was butchering one on Friday when Beloved reminded me of my threat to make Tepache, a lightly fermented agua fresca drink also known as Mexican Prison Wine. Mmmm, prison.

Bea says I need to work on my sales pitch.

Okay, um...it's not Mexican Prison Wine, which would be equal parts ridiculous and disgusting. It's...um, tropical hard cider. Yep, that's what it is.

So anyway, I did a little innertoobs research to get a sense of the ingredients and proportions, cobbled together my own recipe inspired by several others, and whipped up a batch over the weekend.

Besides being cheap and easy, it's freaking awesome! Seriously. It's moderately sweet and astringent, and lightly effervescent like a pineapple lime soda with some vague woody, spicy bottom notes. Delightful! I first had to assure Beloved it wasn't like bathtub gin, so blindness was unlikely. After that, tastiness was conceded. However, you, dear reader, homebrew at your own risk.

The only Spanish I know is, "Tu madre tiene mucho pelo en su pinga," so the best I could do was:

Tepache del Bastardo

1 large ripe pineapple, well-rinsed
~ 8 c. water
1 1/3 brown sugar or piloncillo
1 stick canella or cinnamon
4-6 cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp nutmeg

Crock Pot Slow Cooker
stock pot
colander
cheesecloth
funnel
bottles sufficient to contain 2 liters, clean with tight-fitting lid/s

Note: Don't scour the fruit with cleaners or boil your water — you'll destroy the microbes you need for fermentation.

Rinse and butcher a ripe pineapple. Compost the leafy top, pack up the edible parts for snacks. Chop the remaining rind and core coarsely, and chuck 'em in the Crock Pot. Dissolve the sugar into warm water, and put enough water in the Crock Pot to cover all the fruit. Add spices. Cover and turn the Crock Pot on LOW for a half-hour, just to mingle the mix so it feels sexy. Keep the Crock Pot somewhere warm, but ferchrissakes — don't leave it turned on.

On Day 2, remove the lid, give it a stir, replace the lid. Don't panic if you think it's too sweet — the yeasts will eat most of that sugar up during fermentation. On Day 3, stir and recover again. You should be seeing the frothy evidence of fermentation. It's still going to be a bit sweet — don't flip. Put the stockpot in the sink and the colander in the stockpot. Dump the Crock Pot into the colander. Wrap the fruit inside the cheesecloth and wring out as much juice as you can, compost what's left.

Using a funnel, bottle your Tepache, leaving some headspace in each bottle, like a beer. Don't screw the lids on yet! Leave the bottles on the countertop with the bottle's mouth covered by a kitchen towel. On Day 4, cap and refrigerate. There's going to be some bottle fermentation happening (like champagne), so open the bottles sloooooowly over a sink. Apparently, if you don't drink Tepache fairly promptly, it turns into gourmet pineapple vinegar.

Heh, I reckon there's very little danger of that at Chez Bastard.

DADT repeal? No, it is neither.

2010-05-28T18:58:00.000-05:00

Passage of the "Liberman Amendment" currently in the news does not repeal DADT, does not allow gays to serve openly in the military, and furthermore, it doesn't even require the replacement policy to be nondiscriminatory.

Like Obama's "extending benefits to LGBT federal employees," it's another cynical "Look at me, I'm doing the right thing!" performance piece for the benefit of the Democrat base, bereft of any actual benefit to the LGBT community.

1. It isn't DADT.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is a policy directive, not federal law; thus, it is not subject to Congressional repeal.

DADT is the nickname for Department of Defense Directive 1304.26, issued by President Bill Clinton late in 1993. DADT was intended to ameliorate the effect of the very extreme "Homosexual Exclusion" law (10 U.S.C. §654) hastily passed by Congress earlier that year. The law Congress is currently considering repealing is this Homosexual Exclusion law.

Like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton campaigned on the promise of enacting a military nondiscrimination policy, and he was elected. Congress, then as now, sensibly responded, ZOMFG! TEH GHEYZ R N UR BOIZ BATHROOMZ!!11! EVRYBDY PANCKE!!! and House Armed Services Chairman Ron Dellums (D-CA) hastily inserted language into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994 (10 U.S.C. § 654) which he'd cribbed from Ronald Reagan's Department of Defense Directive 1332.14, itself an absolute bar on gays serving in the military, period.

The Defense Authorization Act with Dellums' Amendment passed Congress with veto-proof bipartisan majorities about six months after Clinton's election, and only four months after Dellums proposed the language — proving that when they need to do something really important (like keeping gays in their place) Congress can act with terrifying speed. Clinton signed it, enacting bigotry into federal law and breaking his campaign promise.

Late that year, President Clinton issued Defense Directive 1304.26 (Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Harass, Don't Pursue) as a "compromise" to allow deeply closeted gay people to join and serve as long as their sexual identity was neither disclosed by themselves nor disclosed by others.

DADT wasn't a policy that directly discriminated against all gays, only the honest ones. Openly gay people continued to be excluded from joining and discharged if already serving. While DADT might have been intended to stop witch-hunts, as a practical matter it didn't. DADT also discriminated against the unfortunate. Vengeful comrades or former partners routinely rat out gay servicemembers, who are discharged on such "evidence."

Meanwhile, a military desperately hungry for fresh meat issued thousands of waivers to applicants with inadequate aptitude scores, health problems, and criminal convictions beginning in 2003 and lasting until the recent financial depression helpfully created mass unemployment. Even as the military welcomed violent armed robbers, it discharged more than 13,500 otherwise qualified soldiers for their insufficient fascination with penis-in-vagina sex.

2. It isn't repeal.

The Lieberman Amendment merely provides a mechanism for possible repeal, leaving the status quo in place while the Defense Department (1) completes its year-long "comprehensive review" (by prior agreement with POTUS, due in December), and (2) promulgates new rules (no deadline provided). Discrimination and discharges will continue to be the rule for the foreseeable future.

The amendment also allows that if either the president, secretary of defense, or chairman of the joint chiefs of staff refuses to "certify" those new DOD rules as being, in his opinion, inconsistent with "military standards," the repeal mechanism isn't triggered and it dies, leaving the law as is.

Ultimately, the Lieberman Amendment grants the DOD the power to both conceive the replacement policy and obtain its late-term abortion. That's not repeal, it's a scheme for the possibility of repeal at the unanimous discretion of a three-party body, two of whom are unelected and military.

3. It doesn't end discrimination.

It is significant that nothing in the Lieberman Amendment requires the DOD's new rules and policies to be nondiscriminatory. I fully expect military discrimination to continue in fresh new ways, (even as I fully expect President Obama to hold his "certification" hostage until after his election in 2012, to guarantee the LGBT vote).

It's also noteworthy that Congress didn't require any supporting study or formal review to enact an extreme antigay law, but repealing that law necessitates a year-long "comprehensive review," followed by another unspecified period for the top brass to careful study that review.

This somehow critically important "comprehensive review" is indeed comprehensive to the extent that it that includes the input of everyone except gay servicemembers and their families. In thoroughly kafkaesque fashion, if a servicemember volunteers how antigay policy actually affects or might affect them as a gay person, that's a sufficient "tell" to initiate discharge proceedings under DADT. Seriously, could that be more fucked up?

Even if everything goes optimally, reasonable new policies are enacted and the Homosexual Exclusion law is repealed, the Uniform Code of Military Justice's Article 125 consensual sodomy ban (unaffected by the Lieberman Amendment) will almost certainly continue to be applied with virtual exclusivity against only the gay practitioners of oral or anal sex, as civilian sodomy laws were until 2003's Lawrence v Texas. There's no way bigots are going to permit the foreclosure of every legal process to rid themselves of unwanted gays.

Here's the Lieberman Amendment in full if you want to check my work. It's a pretty easy read, so I guess it's got that going for it. For extra credit, compare that sack of crap it to the vastly superior Murphy/Tauscher bill.

Here's the bigoted company we keep.

Kill some time today.

2010-05-27T10:00:00.001-05:00

Jam Band Fan or Taliban?

Guess whether the bearded idiot is into weed or jihad!

See? It's harder than you think.

Please to enjoy.

Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.

2010-05-20T12:24:00.000-05:00

Apparently the US Coast Guard — a branch of the US military — is now under the command of BP executives, having been tasked with enforcing BP's corporate policy against the media.

(It is not noted in this excerpt that South Pass is the very tip of the Louisiana bayou in Plaquemines Parish.)

Had you still harbored a shred of belief that this country is not actually run by corporations, I hope that clip has disabused you of that notion.

Waterways are inherently public and public use is always paramount; so said the Supreme Court in Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois (1892) (blocking the state legislature's attempt to grant title to most of Chicago's Lake Michigan shoreline to the corporation).

I'm not sure why BP imagines it has a right to bar the public from public waterways. I'm also unclear as to why Coast Guard officers have chosen to enforce corporate policy rather than a law they really should be familiar with.

I also wonder why the CBS reporter didn't tell them, "I'm national broadcast media, you idiots. So please, PRETTY PLEASE, arrest me right here, right now, on camera. While you're at it, be sure to arraign me in a BP Corporation court and sentence me to a BP Corporation prison, too. Seriously, are you people insane?"

If only, Reverend. If only.

2010-05-18T20:24:00.001-05:00

My circle of friends is surpassingly fussy about the language. It's the source of a number of inside jokes.

For example, recently Beloved and I were relishing someone's hilariously inapt use of the word "literally," when I decided that I was going to start using the term wrong purposefully. Bea got in on the joke and promptly became the past master.

Bastard. He does everything better than me.

Anyway, I got my biggest laugh of the day from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He was quoted thus in an article, Ex-Obama Pastor: 'Obama Threw Me Under the Bus'

"No one in the Obama administration will respond to me, listen to me, talk to me or read anything that I write to them. I am 'toxic' in terms of the Obama administration," Wright wrote the president of Africa 6000 International earlier this year.

"I am 'radioactive,' Sir. When Obama threw me under the bus, he threw me under the bus literally!"

[emphasis added]

Oh lordy, that was glorious.