Saturday, November 19, 2005
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1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all: women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
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Friday, November 18, 2005
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has released
new information that shows 157,252 people were diagnosed with HIV between 2001-2004 in the 33 states that conduct name-based reporting. The report was also published in the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.
Gay and bisexual men continue to account for the largest number of new HIV diagnoses, making up 44 percent of the new infections reported in 33 reporting states.
Okay boys, it is time for me to preach. If you are having sex, how difficult is it to slap on a bag? We've known how HIV is transmitted for twenty years, so there really is no excuse. If you are having "bareback" sex (or is it suicide) with strangers you are a stupid idiot. If you are using crystal meth and having unprotected intercourse, you are doubly stupid.
Respect yourself. Respect your partner.
No excuses.
Period.
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At the Creating Change conference in Oakland, NGLTF Executive Director Matt Foreman delivered a
strong speech and was on the mark with just about everything. It is worth reading.
"We need to stop seeing and talking about this wave of constitutional amendments that are anti-marriage, anti-any-form-of-relationship-whatsoever as political contests that we ought to be winning if only we did something better.
When you boil it all down, these amendments are about inviting the public to vote on whether they deem us as good as they are, whether our love and our families are worthy of respect; put simply, whether we are fully human."
He also makes a strong case that we need to hold the Democrats more accountable and that we should approach anti-marriage ballot measures as educational opportunities for the long-haul. This is a wise approach that will lead to successful and enduring results.
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Thursday, November 17, 2005
Speaking before a
Washington dinner of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, a conservative research organization, Cheney said last night that Democrats who say they were bamboozled by Bush are "making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war." The admonishment, Cheney said, threatens to undermine the morale of U.S. troops while "a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie." Cheney went even further in his attacks.
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone," Cheney said last night. "But we're not going to sit back and let them rewrite history."
Hours later, at a news conference with Asian leaders Bush went on the attack.
"I expect there to be criticism. But when Democrats say that I deliberately misled the Congress and the people, that's irresponsible." Bush seemed personally irritated. He said it is "patriotic as heck to disagree with the president. It doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when people are irresponsibly using their positions and playing politics. That's exactly what is taking place in America.
Bush and Cheney ought to be ashamed of themselves. They seem to forget a few simple facts:
1) There is evidence that they had a hard-on for Hussein even before 9-11 and that the Neo-cons wanted the attack for at least a decade. They were determined to make this happen and did - and now we suffer.
2) Congress DID NOT have access to the same intelligence as the White House. Congress received scrubbed reports that minimized or omitted opinions that undermined the Bush administrations weak case.
3) Bush put together the secretive cabal called the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to plot for a war they desperately wanted, but America did not need.
3) Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has stonewalled on a report detailing how Bush misled the nation into war. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., had to briefly call a closed session in the Senate before the GOP agreed to take action.
4) Here is the most important evidence: The Administration deliberately hyped false information about Iraq's weapons programs to scare Americans into supporting the war. They said that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear materials. As proof, they claimed that Saddam was importing aluminum tubes that could
only be used for a nuclear program and that Iraq was trying to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger. Both stories were fabrications or forgeries that Bush and Cheney KNEW to be false. The administration also knowingly made false links between Iraq and Al Quada, using as evidence a meeting in Europe that never took place.
Folks, this is called
scumbaggery. There is no doubt that Bush and Cheney hyped false information and likely pressured CIA analysts to fix intelligence. What they did was immoral, sickening and evil. Now, they want to claim that criticism of their perverse plan is hurting the troops morale. If you ask me, the morale of the troops would be much better if they had never gone to Iraq and were home with their families.
Bush and Cheney have abused America's trust, lied to voters and placed our military personnel at unnecessary risk. It is now up to the Democrats not to shrink from battle and stand up to these pathologicl politicians. If they Dems fight they will win. If they flee, Bush will once again rise in the polls. Let us hope they elect to take the former course of action.
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Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee, said the desire of GOP conservatives to see a newly constituted Supreme Court eventually overturn Roe v. Wade could produce a
political backlash, particularly in the suburbs. "It would be a sea change in suburban voting patterns," Davis said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
"If Roe v. Wade is overturned," Davis said, "you're going to have a lot of very nervous suburban candidates out there. . . . It's easy to say you're for a culture of life, but the answer is what do you do about it at that point."
Davis also claimed that that frustration over the war in Iraq and Bush's and Vice President Cheney's continued refusal to publicly address the CIA leak investigation continue to serve as a drag on the party. "I think the vice president and the president both right now probably are not helpful in a lot of marginal congressional seats," he said.
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On Tuesday, FEMA announced that on Dec. 1 it would
stop paying hotel bills for 50,000 families in hotels around the United States, except in Louisiana and Mississippi, where the cutoff date would be Jan. 7. This could strand more than 19,000 people who are still in hotel and motel rooms in the Houston area.
If your house has ever fallen into a lake you would know that it is not that easy to pick up the pieces and move on. This is a rare opportunity for President Bush to step in and demonstrate compassionate conservatism by extending hotel stays through February. Just think of it as "late check-out" - like when you oversleep after a late night clubbing, and you look at the clock and it's already noon.
The people at these motels have lost everything and they need a helping hand. Sure, some people will be lazy and not look for a way out and mooch off government assistance. But, if there was ever a time to give people the benefit of the doubt, it is in the aftermath of Katrina, a disaster created and exacerbated by government incompetence at the federal, state and local level.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Today,
The Washington Post blew the lid off of Dick Cheney's oleaginous scheme to have oil companies and polluters set America's energy policy. This is absolutely scandalous and points to the Bush administration's utter contempt for honest and open government.
According to the
Post, aWhite House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but
denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.
Folks, this breach of trust with the American people is huge. Instead of creating a comprehensive, environmentally friendly energy policy that benefited average Americans, Cheney used American policy as a giveaway to oil companies. We knew Cheney was slippery, but this now proves the extent he is in the pocket of energy lobbyists.
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The Bush administration has been infiltrated on every level with ideologues who are hostile to science. So, it is no surprise that the
morning after pill, known as Plan B, never stood a chance of becoming an over the counter medication, even though the FDA's own scientists said it was safe.
Yesterday, the truth became known when the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, concluded in a report that the Food and Drug Administration's May 2004 rejection of the emergency contraceptive application was unusual in several respects.
The officials' decision to ignore the recommendation of an independent advisory committee as well as the agency's own scientific review staff was unprecedented, the report found. And a top official's "novel" rationale for rejecting the application contradicted past agency practices, it concluded.
Of course, the most serious charge was that upper management had FDA scientists go through the motions of testing and reviewing the product, when its rejection was predetermined by upper management.
The report suggested that it quickly became apparent that the agency was not going to follow its usual path when it came to the pill. "For example," it said, "F.D.A. review staff told us that they were told early in the review process that the decision would be made by high-level management."
Even though the evidence is overwhelming, FDA officials deny that report was accurate. The ease at which right wingers lie can never be underestimated. What the FDA did was sleazy and a waste of taxpayers money at the expense of women's health.
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Weekly ColumnAmerican democracy has become professional wrestling.
Both are fake, belligerent sideshows with vicious combat, verbal sparring and sycophantic cheerleaders. And like pro wrestling, democracy goes through the motions of being a true competitive sport, while in reality the winner is all too often a foregone conclusion.
On Sunday, an op-ed by Robin Toner in The New York Times discussed how Congressional redistricting has turned modern politics into a predictable cakewalk. According to the article, in the last three Congressional elections, the incumbent reelection rate has hovered from 96 to 98 percent. In 1992, 103 Congressional districts voted for one party's candidate for president and another party's candidate for the House. In 2004, there were only 59 such districts.
President George W. Bush is in Asia this week lecturing on the virtues of democracy. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi's have perished in the name of establishing free elections in the Middle East.
Yet, right here at home, politicians have rigged the system to discourage real competition in electoral politics. Even in years of great political upheaval, such as 1982 or 1994, only about ten percent of incumbents are defeated.
The reason for this, of course, is that the party in power at the state level gets to redraw district lines creating "safe seats". Using sophisticated computer models, nearly impregnable districts are designed making entire regions the fiefdom of one party or another.
This is really no more than the tribalization of democracy, with each side avariciously grabbing power at the expense of the American political system. This is devastating to America and producing a politics of polarization where mainstream voters are squeezed out of the system.
What, after all, is the incentive to seek compromise if you are a member of Congress in a district that tilts dramatically to the left or right? The current system undermines true democracy in several ways:
Voter Turnout: If a television network broadcast a football game, but everyone knew the final score beforehand, the ratings would plummet. The same goes for politics, in that there is little reason to vote in a district that has been set up where one party always gets trounced. If we want to increase voter turnout, people must believe their vote counts.
Corruption: Gerrymandering creates a situation where politicians can run amok with few consequences. In Texas, former House Majority Leader Tom Delay has been indicted. Still, he is expected to win reelection because his district tilts heavily Republican. If districts were instead created with competition as the main objective, politicians would have to be more accountable for their actions. Feast or Famine: The tribalization of districts has created feast or famine politics. If your tribe wins, you reap the spoils. However, if your tribe loses, you have a congressman in office with little incentive to listen to anyone outside his tribe. This creates a scenario where millions of Americans are frozen out of the process and feel disenfranchised.
System Failure: Districts are now set up to give special interest groups undo power. The result is disincentives to compromise, find common ground or discover real solutions to America's problems. This produces gridlock and turns people off from greater involvement in civic life.
Gay Rights: One can see the harmful affects of feast or famine tribalism by looking at the Human Right's Campaign's Congressional scorecard. Most of the politicians have either stratospherically high ratings or abysmal ones. However, politicians with 100% ratings or zero percent do not reflect where most Americans stand on gay rights, which I would guess hovers around an HRC score of 65-80 percent.
The implications of this are huge. It means that when conservative Republicans control Congress, anti-gay legislation opposed by most Americans has a good chance of passing. If Congressional districts reflected mainstream American values, the United States would have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation more than a decade ago.
The way out of this quagmire is for both parties to agree that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed. The same advanced computer systems that gerrymandered districts to create partisan "safe seats" can be commandeered to create "competitive seats".
Imagine an America where the vast majority of races were highly competitive and the winner wasn't actually known until Election night. Visualize a nation where margins of victory were so close, that politicians had to pander to mainstream voters rather than fringe groups. Picture a political system where politicians were rewarded for fixing problems, rather than obstructing solutions.
This vision can become a reality as soon as we stop treating redistricting like a jobs program for the party in power - whether Democrat or Republican. It is time we wrestle control away from those who would undermine democracy and once again turn politics into a competitive sport.
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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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FBI agents have
arrested Candice R. Martinez, 19, the "cell phone bandit" at a home in Centreville, Va. after an FBI agent spotted a car nearby with license plates they had been searching for. She had been suspected of robbing four banks in suburban Virginia while appearing to be talking on a cell phone.
Today's young people can be so damn rude with their mobile phones. I was even at a movie house recently, when a guy received a call during a movie. Even worse, he actually MADE a call and described what was happening on the screen to a friend.
Manerless Martinez has taken this obnoxious habit to a whole new level. She is so rude, that she didn't even have the decency to get off the phone and rob a bank with some class. Serves her right for getting busted.
Soon she'll be taken to the police station where she'll hear the awful words: "You've got one phone call."
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As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court nominee Samuel
Alito wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." Now we know why right wing groups on the lunatic fringe are orgasmic over his nomination. His controversial comments came in a job application to then-Attorney General Edwin Meese in 1985, when Alito was seeking to climb the career ladder at the Justice Department.
Alito, an assistant in the Office of the Solicitor General at the time, said he was "particularly proud" of his contributions to cases in which the Reagan administration had argued before the Supreme Court that "racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." He said it had been a "source of great personal satisfaction" to help advance such legal causes -- positions in which he said "I personally believe very strongly."
There are no more guessing games and semantic tricks. Alito is an ideologuee. He is one of the right's house boys and to ensure a fair court, the Democrats must filibuster. I'm hoping new information comes along that changes my opinion. But as of now, I say that Alito's nomination must be thwarted or aborted.
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Monday, November 14, 2005
Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, an organization that supports President Bush's judicial nominees said today that
anti-gay rhetoric will be employed against liberal groups opposed to Samuel Alito.
Mr. Rushton said the [liberal] advertising campaign would end up helping Judge Alito by enabling conservatives to mount their own campaign in his defense, attacking the liberal groups for their stands on gay rights and other social issues. When Judge Alito testifies, the conservative groups' commercials "will just paint the accusers as the shrill and extreme ones," Mr. Rushton said.
It is amazing how conservatives can only win by spreading hate, mistrust, fear, lies and misinformation. Without wedge issues, where would they be? They only use these smear campaigns because they know their elitist ideas are bankrupt and do nothing for average, middle class families.
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In a
New York Times op-ed, Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine makes a compelling case that the members of the Republican coalition have nothing in common and that this could lead to the party fracturing. He points out the absurdity of libertarians sharing the same "big tent" with Christian moralists.
"Over the past decade, the coalition has grown from its original libertarian base to include Christian Right activists whose agenda of moral regulation represents a flat rejection of libertarian values. It is the modern-day equivalent of Bella Abzug, the New York feminist, and James Eastland, the Mississippi segregationist, attending Democratic conventions together in the 1960's. It is too ridiculous to last, and it won't."
What he says makes sense. Communism and the 9-11 attacks helped paper over these very real differences. However, the Harriet Miers debacle and the upcoming elections will make holding the GOP together an increasingly difficult task. Even Bush's lies that served as the glue have come undone. Expect a reallignment of the political world in the next two years.
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The Independent in London reports that Andrew Stimpson, 25, was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 2002 but found to be clear of the virus in 2003. He has stunned the medical world. If doctors can establish why this happened, without treatment, it could benefit the 34.9 million virus carriers worldwide.
But Chelsea and Westminster Healthcare NHS Trust, which carried out the initial diagnosis tests, said Mr Stimpson has so far declined to undergo further tests with it.
Okay, this guy is either a fraud (My guess) or the most selfish human being in the history of the planet. If he can help cure millions of people but declines to take further tests, I think....(I'm not even going to say it).
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Ex-Gay Watch has uncovered a newsletter from the "ex-gay" group Exodus International where it appears their leader, Alan Chambers, has gone nuts. He offers a paranoid vision of an imaginary world where he is persecuted by gay agents of Satan.
"Can you imagine a world where ministries like Exodus International were illegal? There is a move not only to silence the voices of the redeemed but to eliminate the redemption. At the core of it all, this isn't a battle about whether homosexuality is right or wrong, it is a battle between good and evil. One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can. Our job is simple: wage war against the Kingdom of Darkness and save souls."
Would someone get Chambers a good shrink. He sounds increasingly desperate and grasping at supernatural straws. There once was a time where he was a reasonable guy who truly seemed compassionate. But now, he has abandoned tolerance and embraced the raw, unadulterated hatred of the religious right. His enemies are no longer human beings, but pawns of Satan and part of the Kingdom of Darkness (how Star Wars). While we are just going about our private lives, Chambers wants to wage war.
I'm sorry, but this clown has become a nutjob. He's about two newsletters away from a butterfly net and a time share in Belleview Mental Hospital.
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Sunday, November 13, 2005
You've got to love "ex-gay" leader Chad Thompson. He runs the world's first ministry with a velvet rope. Turn on the disco, it's Studio 69!
In his world, God judges a man by his pecs, not his prayers. If you are too old, fat or not cool enough, it appears you can't get in his Bel Ami Bible Club. I wish someone would teach me the secret handshake (or is it milkshake) so I could join.
Why are there no girls in any of his pictures? Why are all of his friends twinks with tight bodies and angel faces? Is this a ministry for models? Inquiring minds want to know, or at least get a date.
I e-mailed the pimp daddy preacher to find out and he didn't respond. Who can blame him? Heck, if I was surrounded by so many club kid studs, I wouldn't have time to e-mail a pesky activist either. Hats off to you Chadwick. You've managed to be a darling of the Religious Right and STILL surround yourself with hot young gay boys. God does answer prayers, indeed.
To Visit Chadwick's Twink-a-teria Click Here Additional Pics of Chad's Lads Click Here
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