Rocker Needles

OUT magazine recently got the truth out of ‘Drag Race’ winner, Sharon Needles, and she comes clean about her recent brush with the law.

Lady Bunny

“Earlier this week, after attending drag legend Lady Bunny‘s “Hot Mess” party at Manhattan nightclub XL, RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Sharon Needles found herself in a bit of a quandary: she had to drain the snake.

Unfortunately for Needles, she had already left the nightclub and what she thought was a secluded corner ripe for some natural graffiti turned out to be one of the worst possible places for a queen to take a leak. That’s right, a police station.

“I had gone to Lady Bunny’s show that night because whenever I get a chance, I love to watch other entertainers,” Needles tells OUT exclusively. “I had a couple of drinks with friends, I had a lot of Red Bull. I was on my way home and it hit me: I had to pee so bad.”

And when a drag queen has to pee, folks, it’s no simple matter.

Ryan Reynolds demonstrates

“Drag queens do something that’s called tucking,” Needles explains for those who might not know. “It’s the art of putting your testicles up inside your body and taping your penis near your anus.” Needless to say, tucking makes the act of relieving yourself a bit complicated. In Needles’ own words, “I was literally going to pee into my butt because of where my penis was.”

Having crossed Broadway, the Pittsburgh-based beauty spotted what she thought was an alley and she sidled up between two parked cars and a dumpster to answer nature’s call. Unfortunately, the other line rang in the form of an unexpected visitor.

“I felt a tap on my shoulder—it was a policeman,” a still shaken Needles recalls. “He asked if I usually pee on police stations, and I looked up and there it was: A police station. There were cop cars all lined in a row, but I hadn’t even noticed because I had to pee so bad.”

Non-effected Officer Latrice Royale

An attempt to reason with the officer wasn’t effective.

“I tried to apologize and said I had seen dogs pee on the street a million times and it was just natural,” she says. “I tried to explain tucking to the officer and he didn’t understand, so he took me in.”

The result? A 20 minute wait for the gift of a ticket for public urination. Not, Needles stresses, the arrest that wags have been whispering about.

Looking back on the incident, America‘s Drag Sweetheart can see the humor in the situation.

*insert evil laugh here*

“It wasn’t on purpose, but I think it was funny that it was a police station,” she says. “Because I find theres so much unnecessary angst and brutality from American police officers.”

All in all, Needles says the ordeal wasn’t nearly as bad as has been reported.”

We are glad that she is safe and got nothing more than a public urination charge.  Next time before peeing outside, look up.

Related articles

• Sharon Needles Prize Money Purchase (lezgetreal.com)
• Sharon Needles Wants to Cruise with YOU (lezgetreal.com)
• My Life in Drag (lezgetreal.com)

Wile E. Coyote & The RoadRunner

Wile E. Coyote (also known simply as “The Coyote”) and The Road Runner are a duo of cartoon characters from a series of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters (a coyote and a roadrunner) were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Bros., while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese. The characters star in a long-running series of theatrical cartoon shorts (the first 16 of which were written by Maltese) and occasional made-for-television cartoons.

In each episode, instead of animal senses and cunning, Wile E. Coyote uses absurdly complex contraptions (sometimes in the manner of Rube Goldberg) and elaborate plans to pursue his quarry.

Wile E. Coyote & Bugs Bunny

The Coyote appears separately as an occasional antagonist of Bugs Bunny in five shorts from 1952 to 1963: Operation: Rabbit, To Hare Is Human, Rabbit’s Feat, Compressed Hare, and Hare-Breadth Hurry. While he is generally silent in the Coyote-Road Runner shorts, he speaks with a refined accent in these solo outings (except for Hare-Breadth Hurry), introducing himself as “Wile E. Coyote — super genius”, voiced with an upper-class, cultured English accent by Mel Blanc.^[1] The Road Runner vocalizes only with a signature sound, “Beep, Beep”, recorded by Paul Julian, and an occasional tongue noise.^[2]

To date, 48 cartoons have been made featuring these characters (including the three CGI shorts), the majority by Chuck Jones.

Starving Coyote

Creation

Jones based the Coyote on Mark Twain’s book Roughing It, in which Twain described the coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton” that is “a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” Jones said he created the Coyote-Road Runner cartoons as a parody of traditional “cat and mouse” cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, which series Jones would work on as a director later in his career.

The Coyote’s name of Wile E. is obviously a play on the word “wily.” The “E” was said to stand for Ethelbert in one issue of a Looney Tunes comic book, but its writer hadn’t intended it to be canon.The Coyote’s surname is routinely pronounced with a long “e” (/kaɪˈoʊtiː/ ky-OH-tee), but in one cartoon short, To Hare Is Human, Wile is heard pronouncing it with a diphthong (/kaɪˈoʊteɪ/ ky-OH-tay). Early model sheets for the character prior to his initial appearance (in Fast and Furry-ous) identified him as “Don Coyote”, a play on Don Quixote.

Another ACME product

Acme Corporation

Wile E. Coyote often obtains complex and ludicrous devices from a mail-order company, the fictitious Acme Corporation, which he hopes will help him catch the Road Runner. The devices invariably fail in improbable and spectacular ways. Whether this is result of operator error or faulty merchandise is debatable. The coyote usually ends up burnt to a crisp, squashed flat, or at the bottom of a canyon (some shorts show him suffering a combination of these fates). Occasionally Acme products do work quite well (e.g. the Dehydrated Boulders, Bat-Man Outfit, Rocket Sled, Jet Powered Roller Skates, or Earthquake Pills). In this case their success often works against the coyote. For example, the Dehydrated Boulder, upon hydration, becomes so large when it crushes him, or the Coyote finding out that the Earthquake Pills bottle label’s fine print states that the pills aren’t effective on road runners, right after he swallows the whole bottle, thinking they’re ineffective. Other times he uses items that are implausible, such as a superhero outfit, thinking he could fly wearing it (he cannot).

RoadRunner, Beeper, Wile E., and Calamity in Tiny Toon Adventures

How the coyote acquires these products without money is not explained until the 2003 movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which he is shown to be an employee of Acme. In a Tiny Toon Adventures episode, Wile E. makes mention of his protege Calamity Coyote possessing an unlimited Acme credit card account, which might serve as another possible explanation. Wile E. being a “beta tester” for Acme has been another suggested explanation. Wile E. also uses war equipment such as cannons, rocket launchers, grenades, and bayonets which are “generic”, not Acme products. In a Cartoon Network commercial promoting Looney Tunes, they ask the Coyote why does he insist on purchasing products from the Acme Corporation when all previous contraptions have backfired on him, to which the Coyote responds with a wooden sign (right after another item blows up in his face): “Good line of Credit.”

The company name was likely chosen for its irony (acme means the highest point, as of achievement or development). Also, a company named ACME would have shown up in the first part of a telephone directory. Some people have said ACME comes from the common expansion A (or American) Company that Makes (or Making) Everything, a backronym of the word. The origin of the name might also be related to the Acme company that built a fine line of animation stands and optical printers; however, the most likely explanation is the Sears house brand called Acme that appeared in their ubiquitous early 1900s mail-order catalogues.

In one Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote short film, “Ajax” was used instead of Acme. In another short, the names “A-1″ and “Ace” are used.

Anyone have an Excedrin?

Laws and rules

As in other cartoons, the Road Runner and the coyote follow the laws of cartoon physics. For example, the Road Runner has the ability to enter the painted image of a cave, while the coyote cannot (unless there is an opening through which he can fall). Sometimes, however, this is reversed, and the Road Runner can burst through a painting of a broken bridge and continue on his way, while the Coyote will instead enter the mirage painting and fall down the precipice of the cliff where the bridge is out. Sometimes the coyote is allowed to hang in midair until he realizes that he is about to plummet into a chasm (a process occasionally referred to elsewhere as Road-Runnering or Wile E. Coyote moment).

The coyote can overtake rocks (or cannons) which fall before he does, and end up being squashed by them. If a chase sequence happens upon a cliff, the Road Runner is not affected by gravity, whereas the Coyote will realize his error eventually and fall to the ground below. A chase sequence that happens upon railroad tracks will always result in the Coyote being run over by a train. Its Formula. If the Coyote uses an explosive (for instance, dynamite) that is triggered by a mechanism that is supposed to force the explosive in a forward motion toward its target, the actual mechanism itself will always shoot forward, leaving the explosive behind to detonate in the Coyote’s face.

Too bad they can't read.

Similarly, a complex apparatus that is supposed to propel an object like a boulder or steel ball forward, or trigger a trap, will not work on the Road Runner, but always will on the Coyote. For instance, the Road Runner can jump up and down on the trigger of a large animal trap and eat bird seed off from it, going completely unharmed and not setting off the trap; when the Coyote places the tiniest droplet of oil on the trigger, the trap snaps shut on him without fail. At certain times, the Coyote may don an exquisite Acme costume or propulsion device that briefly allows him to catch up to the Road Runner. This will always result in him losing track of his proximity to large cliffs or walls, and the Road Runner will dart around an extremely sharp turn on a cliff, but the Coyote will rocket right over the edge and fall to the ground.

Good Book

In Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times Of An Animated Cartoonist, it is claimed that Chuck Jones and the artists behind the Road Runner and Wile E. cartoons adhered to some simple but strict rules:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” — George Santayana).
4. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
11. The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner. (The robot that the Coyote created in The Solid Tin Coyote caught the Road Runner so this does not break this rule. The Coyote does catch the Road Runner in Soup or Sonic but is too small to eat him.)

In an interview years after the series was made, writer Michael Maltese said he had never heard of the “Rules.”

In popular culture

Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner have been frequently referenced in popular culture. The Villain (directed by Hal Needham) is a parody of these animated shorts as well as being a spoof of westerns. In The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!, Road Runner gets run down and dies, after which Coyote commits suicide by shooting himself in the head with a prop gun.

In a sketch on In Living Color (Season 5, Episode 10), Wile E. Coyote (played by Jamie Foxx) is put on trial by Congress for displaying excessive violence in his cartoons; Elmer Fudd (played by Jay Leggett) is his lawyer. In the film UHF, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s character introduces a Road Runner cartoon as a sad, depressing story of a “pathetic coyote” futilely chasing a “sadistic roadrunner”. The characters were referenced in The Simpsons, The Cleveland Show, Bounty Hamster, Kick Buttowski, What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, Robot Chicken, and South Park.

On Family Guy

In an episode of Cheers, some bar patrons discuss the Road Runner cartoons. The discussion continues and builds in intensity as a minor subplot throughout the entire episode until at the end of the show some of the bar patrons are boisterously declaring that the Coyote character is meant to be symbolic of the Antichrist. Wile E. Coyote appeared briefly in an episode of the live-action show Night Court, where he was admonished by Judge Harry Stone for chasing a bird. Wile E. Coyote has appeared two times in Family Guy (voiced by Seth MacFarlane): his first episode, I Never Met the Dead Man, depicts him riding in a car with Peter Griffin; when Peter runs over the Road Runner and asks if he hit “that ostritch”, Wile E. tells him to keep going.^[13] In PTV, Wile E. appears in a flashback when Peter offers a store credit when Wile E. claims a refund for a giant sling shot that “slammed me into a mountain”. In the Dexter’s Laboratory episode “Road Rash” Dee-Dee does an impression of the Road Runner after Dexter falls down a man hole.

Humorist Ian Frazier created the mock-legal prose piece “Coyote v. Acme”, which is included in a book of the same name. Karen Salmansohn wrote an article on The Huffington Post centering on the characters. Guitarist Mark Knopfler created a song called “Coyote” in homage to the cartoon shows of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, on the 2002 album The Ragpicker’s Dream.

These days you can see new Wile E. Coyote & RoadRunner cartoons on Cartoon Network’s The Looney Tunes Show.

Related articles

• The rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons (kottke.org)
• Education from Cartoons (lezgetreal.com)
• Time Warner Cable to kill off Road Runner Internet branding (neowin.net)

They note that:

Support for same-sex marriage has been growing in the general population since at least the mid-1990s. That trend has been evident among blacks as well — but at a considerably slower pace. A poll conducted by Pew Research in April, just a few weeks before Mr. Obama’s announcement, found 39 percent of blacks supporting gay marriage and 49 percent opposing it. By contrast, a plurality of white Americans supported gay marriage in the Pew poll, as they have in most other recent surveys.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 59% of Blacks favor same-sex marriage.

538 also notes that:

There is reason to be cautious in interpreting these numbers. First, polling has tended to overestimate support for same-sex marriage ballot referendums by about seven percentage points. In addition, the sample sizes for demographic subgroups like African-Americans are small, producing large margins of error.

In the end, the thinking is more that Obama’s announcement made it easier for various Blacks to actually voice their support rather than actually changing people’s minds. A study conducted by Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison found that the race of the caller in polling actually effects support for same-sex marriage. Michelson stated that “So if it was an African-American calling an African-American, then they were much more likely to say they were a supporter of same-sex marriage. We don’t think people were changing their minds, but they felt more comfortable” expressing support for same-sex marriage.

J. Michael Bitzer also noted “I certainly want to see several more polls. But if these kinds of early signals are being sent, then we could see a significant transformation on same-sex marriage in the African-American community.”

Still, basically, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a lot of people leaving Obama over same-sex marriage.

New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez

And that’s not saying much……

In the past 12 months, the state of New Mexico has added 900 jobs. The state’s job growth rate was 0.1% in April, the worst in the Western states and 1.3% behind the national average. Luckily for Republican Governor Susana Martinez, she’s not up for re-election until 2014. Running on “my job record is better than Scott Walker’s” isn’t a winning slogan.

Wisconsin has lost jobs every month since Walker took office in January, 2011, but he lies about that by citing the number of jobs created and ignoring the larger number that were lost.

New Mexico’s Department of Workforce Solutions has published a full report on the jobs situation in the state, available at their website, but the simple version is this….New Mexico is lagging behind even Nevada at creating jobs.

If New Mexico had kept pace with the national average at job creation, there would have been 11,700 new jobs created. Even keeping up with the rest of the Western states, it would have created 9,890 jobs. Nevada, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate, gained jobs at almost twice the rate of New Mexico in the first four months of 2012, 0.7% to 0.47%. Utah’s job growth was an impressive 2.37%, five times the rate of New Mexico, twice the national average.

Related articles

• New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez on Romney: ‘Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign’(abcnews.go.com)

  ---

• Who Is New Mexico’s Rising Star: Governor Susana Martinez and Her Ultimate Immigrant Story(thehispanicblog.com)

  ---

• New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, rumored VP possibility, criticizes Romney’s immigration strategy(boston.com)

  ---

• New Mexico Governor’s Hairdresser Quits Over Her Opposition to Gay Marriage: VIDEO(towleroad.com)

  ---

William Marbury, plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison

The Federal Ethics Center, a private group, is requesting that Congress hold hearings concerning the actions of judges in the Federal 5^th Circuit. One of the judges demanded that Attorney General Eric Holder “confirm that the rule of Marbury v. Madison applies to the President.,” a really weird request since the 1803 case had one of the most convoluted decisions in Supreme Court history and appears to have nothing to do with anything the President has done. It involved a lame duck president and congress appointing 16 judges to newly created benches and the incoming Secretary of State, James Madison, refusing to deliver the commissions. A President telling the Supreme Court that one of their decisions sucks is not a violation of the separation of government branches.

Congress does not have jurisdiction over stupidity on the Federal bench. The Senate has jurisdiction over the confirmation of new judges to fill vacant seats, and President Obama simply stopped sending nominations to the Senate when all of his were filibustered into the trash can. There are around 80 current vacancies in the Federal Courts. The last time it was this bad was when Republican senators refused to confirm any of Bill Clinton’s appointees. It took Sen. Patrick Leahy over a year to clear the backlog when he became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When a Federal judge is behaving in an unprofessional manner or a Federal court is being mismanaged, members of the district’s bar associations – lawyers who work with that court – file complaints with the Judicial Review Board in Washington. And investigation team is sent in to analyze the court and the actions of the judge. They report to the person in charge of the Federal judiciary – the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Review Board can be a waste of time. They have been known to make arrangements to have other judges in a jurisdiction “ease the caseload” of erratic or unprofessional judges who are nearing retirement. It’s a way of containing the damage without destroying a good man’s record. They also have a bad habit of not doing adequate follow-ups after a review, especially if their review discovered problems in the management of a court. They walk away and let good people be hurt by vengeful managers who were embarrassed by the review.

Congress has only one real power when it comes to the Judicial Branch, and it’s the reason we should restore the Democrats to power in Congress. They can impeach a Supreme Court Justice. The power of impeachment does not cover the charge of being ethically impaired, but it does cover Justice Clarence Thomas’ disdain for the rules of financial disclosure and de facto bribery.

The cases that the Federal Ethics Center has alerted Congress to could also provide cause for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts if it is discovered that complaints of unprofessional behavior or evidence of impairment in a judge have been properly reported to the Federal Review Board and no action has taken place. But the FEC needs to follow routine procedures, and not try to give Congress a power it is denied in the Constitution.

This is not a good time for removing bad judges. Our Federal courts are dangerously understaffed. In order to comply with the Speedy Trial Law for criminal cases, civil cases are being back-burnered. We must retain all the judges we have, good or bad, because we cannot push justice any further into the future for those awaiting it. If the FEC truly wanted to help clear the benches of bad judges, they would be loudly and persistently petitioning the Senate Republicans to get off their obstructionist asses and fast-track nominations to the bench. They claim they are preventing the Federal Courts being overrun with vermin liberals, but what they are really doing is flexing their little filibuster muscles. If they can stop judicial nominees, as they did to Clinton, they can run on the message that the courts are malfunctioning under Obama.

The ironic thing is, Marbury v. Madison reaffirmed the separation of the three branches of government.

Related articles

• Marbury v. Madison Debate Sparked by Obama’s Supreme Court Health Law Remarks(blippitt.com)

  ---

• Senator Leahy Threatens Justice Roberts In Advance of the Obamacare Decision(independentsentinel.com)

  ---

• Shaw: Pushing and tugging on the Supreme Court (osvdailytake.com)
• Holder reaffirms Marbury (scotusblog.com)
• AG Eric Holder to 5th Circuit: We’re aware of Marbury v. Madison (legaltimes.typepad.com)

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

On Thursday, the Senate passed on a 96 to 1 vote for a new bill that will speed federal approval of medicines, including generics for biotechnology products. Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders was the sole “no” vote, saying the bill didn’t go far enough to reduce medicine costs.

The bill requires pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies to pay $6.4 billion over the next five years to pay for this fast-tracking of testing and approving new medicines and treatments. It also creates a new fee for review of generics and lower cost biotechnology devices. The House is considering a similar bill.

Fast tracking approval of medications is a tricky balancing act. Often, problems with new medicines do not become evident for years, because their ill effects are cumulative or the damage they do is slow and progressive. It took over a decade to learn that an osteoporosis medication causes slow, but deadly kidney damage. But medical devices and biotechnology should be fast tracked. The experience we have had with implants tells regulators what to look for. We have learned from things like leaking silicon breast implants and joint replacements that cause infections.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

The bill also requires the drug industry to notify Congress if there is an imminent shortage of a drug. For Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that part of the bill was very personal. His wife, Landra, is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and the drug being used for her chemotherapy has suffered shortages in the past year. The bill would make it possible for searches to be conducted for alternative sources of drugs, such as in other countries.

The bill also requires the F.D.A to do studies of health-related software programs for smartphones and mobile devices, and inspections of foreign companies that provide drugs for importation into the United States. It increases criminal penalties for counterfeit drugs and provides for better tracking of drugs from manufacturer to patient.

The Congressional Budget Office is pleased with the bill. It should, according to their statement, “lead to earlier marketing of lower-priced drugs,” which would reduce costs to Medicaid, Medicare and subsidized health insurance policies in the Affordable Care Act by as much as $750 million over 10 years.

From Creative Commons

Both the Democratic and Republican versions of a bill to prevent student loan interest rates doubling on July 1 failed to break their filibusters in the Senate on Thursday. Without the 60 votes needed for cloture, the bills remain filibustered and cannot even be debated.

The battle is not over the interest rates on the loans. Both parties know that the lower interest rates are very popular. What is being fought over is the manner for funding the program. The Republicans want to pay for the program by eliminating the preventative care fund in the Affordable Care Act. If they can’t repeal it, they plan to defund it one step at a time. The Democrats want to eliminate a provision in the tax code that allows some people earning over $250,000 a year to take their income as business profits instead of wages, so they don’t have to pay the payroll taxes. Unless they are claiming all of their income that way, the measure doesn’t make much sense. Payroll taxes are only collected on the first $108,000 of income. Republicans say that’s not right because all payroll taxes are supposed to go to Social Security and Medicare. Finding a relatively painless compromise, such as raising the capital gains tax a half-a-percent, is about as possible as finding life on Mercury.

The Senate is recessed for a week, while the House will be returning on Tuesday from a one-week recess.

At stake are the debts of seven million students.

Interest Rates (Photo credit: 401K)

Related articles

• Payroll Tax Cut Bill Rejected by the House(turbotax.intuit.com)

  ---

• Republicans Prioritize Tax Loophole For The Wealthy Over Stopping Student Loan Interest Rate Hike(thinkprogress.org)

  ---

• Scott Brown filibusters student loan assistance to 177,000 Massachusetts students(dailykos.com)

  ---

• Harry Reid: We should have done filibuster reform(dailykos.com)

  ---

• Senate Republicans Block Bill to Avert Rise in Student Loan Rate(nytimes.com)

  ---

The old ‘if you hate them, put them in concentration camps’ part of the Bible, right?

David Freidman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in Washington, DC, stated “Pastor Worley’s videotaped remarks are deplorable, inexcusable and incompatible with the tenets of his faith. Pastor Worley owes the LGBT community and the people of Maiden, North Carolina a swift and unequivocal apology.”

The Huffington Post reported that:

Christopher Brook, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said the church had posted the entire sermon on its website for a few days, and the Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate had grabbed the clip and posted it on YouTube. The clip had been viewed 689,000 times by Thursday.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious liberty watchdog group, has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service, asking that it investigate the tax exempt status of Providence Road Baptist Church.

Reverend Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United said “Pastor Worley’s vicious and mean-spirited assault on gays and lesbians is bad enough. His pulpit command that people not vote for President Obama is a violation of federal tax law. I urge the IRS to act swiftly to investigate the matter.”

In the sermon, Worley not only denounces same-sex marriage, but President Barack Obama’s support for it, and even goes so far as to state in the sermon that “our president getting up and saying that it was all right for two women to marry or two men to marry. I was disappointed bad. The Bible is against it, God is against and I’m against it. . .Somebody said, ‘Who are you going to vote for?’ I ain’t going to vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover. You said, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ You better believe I did.”

Lynn stated that Worley’s statements are a clear violation of federal law because it prohibits all non-profit groups from intervening in elections by endorsing or opposing candidates. The demonstration is set “for Sunday morning at the Catawba County Justice Center in Newton, North Carolina, according to an invitation posed on the Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate Facebook page.”

According to Stevie “The nurse is reading the ultrasound and says, ‘Huh, this says you’re a female.’ It was very liberating. I had spent so much energy after the age of 13 constantly evaluating how people looked at me and acted towards me.”

Her wife and six children have all accepted her identity. Stevie stated “We told them individually. Some were in person and some weren’t. Every one of them said, ‘We don’t care one way or the other. We love you for who you are and you’re still my dad.’”

Debbie, Stevie’s wife of twenty-five years, has been very supportive, even taking her to buy his first bra. Debbie stated “You know, when I first saw you, I said to myself, ‘He runs like a girl.’

Stevie said “I think we were pretty good when she began to mourn the loss of her husband. We worked through what we needed to. The concept of unconditional love is a larger story.”

Some form of intersexuality strikes one in every 1500 children. The term covers a variety of different disorders including mixed genitalia and sex organs- what was classically called hermaphroditism- to genetic disorders including Turner’s Syndrom and Klinefelter’s. While transsexuality and intersexuality overlap, they are not necessarily the same.

Stevie hopes to advocate for those who are part of the QUILTBAG spectrum stating “I think of bullying, because I haven’t heard anyone talk about this. It’s important to talk about. People need to be accepting and understand. I was born this way, and loving each other and supporting each other will always be the main factor in our household.”

Addendum:

Upon further research, I learned that Stevie did decide to transition into a woman. The ABC article that I had used as my original source did not make this clear and referred to Stevie as ‘he’ throughout. Given that, this is what I did as well.  I have changed some of the pronouns in this article to reflect this new information.  As one in a similar situation, it is really upsetting that ABC chose to ignore the new identity.

Miss Alexandra Chase, VT drag queen & BFF

Do you miss a certain drag queen in your life? I know that I do. We used to co-DJ at a gay club that is now closed, shop for her gowns together (the ladies at Fashion Bug loved us.), and even did drag together the year I won my first drag contest singing Billy Joel‘s “Piano Man”. Over 10 years later, we are still good friends. She doesn’t do drag anymore because she doesn’t fit into her old gowns, but that is a different story.

–BUT if you are missing the queens from seasons past of RuPaul’s Drag Race, then have no fear my lovelies! They will be back as guest professors of RuPaul’s Drag U!!!

Check out the promo for it from LogoTV.com.

That’s right, if you love the drag queens from RuPaul‘s Drag Race, then have no worries darlings! You can watch them on the upcoming season of RuPaul’s Drag U, where they are drag professors helping ordinary women became absolutely fab! It’s basically “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy“, but with drag queens instead of gay men and women instead of straight men.

I know I’ll be watching because I can’t wait to see Sharon Needles, Chad Michaels, Raja Gemini, Latrice Royale, and others as teachers of their fabulous aesthetic craft. I hope you tune in as well. June 18th on LOGO. It will also be available for free online.

Related articles

• RuPaul’s Queens Sell Out (lezgetreal.com)
• Sharon Needles Prize Money Purchase (lezgetreal.com)
• Who’s ready for ‘RuPaul’s Drag U’? (popbytes.com)
• RuPaul’s Drag Race Queens Get A Disney MakeOver! (perezhilton.com)

Barry toking a Joint

New insight into the early life of Barack Obama has been recently made available in the form of excerpts from his forthcoming biography, “Barack Obama: The Story.” Apparently young Barry Obama, like countless of his contemporaries, enjoyed partaking in the use of marijuana. The president even was a trendsetter amongst his peers:

As a member of the Choom* Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.”

Roof Hits w/ Cheech & Chong

Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.

He also was unafraid to go against proper smoking protocol:

Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted “Intercepted!,” and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind

Barry giving a speech

What is clear from these anecdotes is that not only did Barry Obama try cannabis, but he was what many would refer to as a recreational user, a “stoner” if you will. Which begs the question, when exactly did Barry Obama, who participated in three foot bong hitting contests, become President Barack Obama, who laughs off the issue at town hall meetings and ramps up the war against medical marijuana to new heights?

It is time the President says publicly what he already knows personally: Responsible marijuana use should not be a crime and it is time we put an end to the war on cannabis consumers.

(Personally I’m all for a president that smoked pot over one that smoked crack. Just sayin’…)

*Choom is Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana.

Related articles

• “Barry the Stoner.” (stevengoddard.wordpress.com)
• POTUS Barry Obama is now for gay marriage – yeah right! (bonjupatten.com)
• Obama’s transgender ex-nanny an outcast in Indonesia (miamiherald.typepad.com)

“The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results. The purity of the public morals, the moral
and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of civilization . . . all require that [the races] should be kept distinctly separate,
and that connections and alliances so unnatural should be prohibited by positive law and subject to no evasion.”

And

“The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results. The purity of the public morals, the moral
and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of civilization . . . all require that [the races] should be kept distinctly separate,
and that connections and alliances so unnatural should be prohibited by positive law and subject to no evasion.”

Oh, and my favorite:

“[T]he State’s prohibition of interracial marriage . . . stands on the same footing as the prohibition of polygamous marriage, or incestuous marriage, or
the prescription of minimum ages at which people may marry, and the prevention of the marriage of people who are mentally incompetent.”

And, if those look familiar, well, that is because they are being said today about same-sex marriage.

It is not surprising that the decision by the NAACP to come out in support of same-sex marriage has angered some of the more ardent bigots within the religious community, and that many pastors are harshly critical of this. For instance, Pastor Derek McCoy, the executive director of the Maryland Marriage Alliance- a group dedicated to the destruction of marriage through exclusivity- called the NAACP’s stance “unfortunate” and claimed that it would contribute to the “further demise of the family”, though he seemed to not have any actual statements regarding how.

McCoy claimed that the NAACP was “endorsing an epidemic” of fatherless households, perhaps not quite grasping that the problem is not not having a father, but not having a two parent household. Recent polling has shown that there is a shift, though, in the Black Community towards acceptance of same-sex unions thanks to the decision of President Barack Obama, General Colin Powell, actor Will Smith and the NAACP coming out in favor of these unions.

According to the Catholic News Agency:

McCoy said that redefining marriage is redefining the family in a way that is “hazardous” for children.

“Gay marriage” teaches that fathers and mothers are both dispensable, he explained, and “this is absolutely going to harm the family.”

The absence of a father has been linked to higher rates of crime, poverty, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy throughout the U.S.

Actually, the absence of two parent households have been linked to crime, poverty, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy in the US. The studies used to attack same-sex marriage are almost always ones which compare two parent households to single parent households. Studies have shown that there is little appreciable difference between same-sex parents and opposite sex parents when it comes to parenting, how their children will grow up, and the like. This is deliberately ignored by the Religious Right.

McCoy also tried to dismiss attempts to “compare” same-sex marriage opponents to those who oppose interracial marriage claiming that it is not the same issue at all, and that “The core essence of a marriage is the two sexes coming together.” Which is a religious based belief, and is reflected in the attacks on interracial marriage all those decades ago.

Alveda C. King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr and ardent homophobe, also tried to claim that her grandfather and uncle would never have “embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda.

Reverend William Owens, founder of the Coalition of African American Pastors, also claimed that “We who marched with Rev. King did not march one inch or one mile to promote same-sex marriage.” Owens also went on to claim that same-sex marriage was counter to Dr. King’s work because it was an attempt to “declare that an act contrary to God’s law and to the natural law is a civil right. We call on all Americans to respect the legitimate civil rights of gay people to be free from violence, harassment, to vote, to hold jobs. But none of us has a moral or civil right to redefine marriage.”

Back about fifty years ago, this was said:

“[A]t the very time the Constitution of the United States was being formulated, miscegenation was considered inimical to the public good and was frowned upon by the colonies, and continued to be so regarded and prohibited in states having any substantial admixture of population at the time the 14th amendment was adopted.”

And this:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his
arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

It is ultimately sad to hear the words of the racists in the mouths of those they sought to oppress.

President Obama

Getting President Barack Obama to fight for LGBT rights has not always been easy, but he has done quite a lot for LGBT rights over the past four years. In the above campaign spot, Obama and supporter Jane Lynch outline what Obama has done in four years to secure more LGBT rights. Obama has done a lot for LGBT rights, and his decision to support same-sex marriage has only helped to secure some more moderate votes, but has not driven away any of the votes that would never have voted for him anyway.

I’m delighted to announce that 2012 will mark the eighth year of my annual Pride Party. This event has become a hallmark of Pride weekend and is guaranteed to be one of the hottest tickets in town. This year the San Francisco Pride Committee has named us an official event! What started out as an alternative little party for a few friends has now become a staple at Pride in SF – with guests coming from all over the world. Over the past seven years you have helped us raise big money just by purchasing a ticket and attending this awesome event.

With all the progress the LGBT community has seen in the past year, I thought it seemed only fitting to make my annual Pride celebration bigger and better than it’s ever been before. I’ve booked two of my favorite venues, each a spectacular space featuring grand outdoor and indoor settings. With shuttles running between the two locales every 10 minutes, you’ll be sure not to miss a moment’s celebration. And, if all that wasn’t enough, the list of performers and DJ’s I’ve lined up is sure to keep things festive well into the night. But, just as importantly, Pride is not only about celebration, but also recognition. Each year I donate the entire proceeds of my fabulous party to an outstanding organization benefiting our community, and this year I’ve chosen to honor the San Francisco LGBT Center in recognition of it’s ten years of unparalleled support and outreach.

Join me this Pride as we come together to celebrate our community and remember, this year, there’s MORE! to celebrate.

You’ll find everything you need to know about the party here on my website. Please add me on Twitter for up-to -the minute updates before and during the party!

Loads of Love,
Juanita

The unmanned spacecraft was launched by SpaceX’s Dragon 9 rocked on Tuesday. This is a means to replace the space shuttles, which were retired by NASA recently. Currently, NASA relies on Russia and the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft to get supplies and crew to the ISS.

The Huffington Post reports that:

NASA awarded $381 million to SpaceX as part of a 2006 agreement, according to press materials from the company. SpaceX has spent $1 billion over the last decade, the Associated Press reports.

NASA has also awarded $266 million to Orbital Sciences Corp., a Virginia-based space technology company, which has a goal of launching a rocket and spacecraft by the end of the year.

There has been a big move towards privately funded or organized space exploration in recent years as the federal government and other governments have cut back severely on funding space exploration.

Meghan and Cindy McCain for the NoH8 Campaign

Meghan McCain is finding out that the Republican Party is no place for a Center Right individual. She spoke to Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC about the ideological divisions within the GOP, and just how she is facing a lot of problems in the Party for being a moderate.

McCain stated “I’m a proud moderate Republican, but using the word ‘moderate’ in the Republican party today is considered a dirty word. Many people in the Republican party treat me like I’m a freak, like there’s something wrong with me and that I’m a mutant from the original design.”

At one point she even states “I wish I knew more where it came from I don’t understand the popularity of Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart and people who exacerbate people’s fears.”

Actually, that has long been a part of the GOP strategy going back to, oh, Richard Nixon. It’s at the very core of the Southern Strategy.

McCain did say that she will “always stand here and say you can’t actually kick me out of the Republican Party.” True, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sugiyama is, truly, a eunuch.

Sugiyama did take the operation to become a eunuch a bit far. He offered up to anyone who would buy them for 100,000 yen the offer of cooking for consumption his own genitals. That is correct, Sugiyama offered to cook his penis, scrotum and testicles for the buyer. Cannibalism is not illegal in Japan. This all occurred on 13 April.

According to Calorie Lab:

After initially considering eating them himself, Sugiyama offered the meal on Twitter in mid-April to the first person willing to pay 100,000 yen (about $1,250). But after the notoriety that his tweet caused, he organized a public banquet, dubbed “Ham Cybele – Century Banquet,” at the “Asagaya Loft A” event space in the Suginami Ward of Tokyo. “Century” in Japanese is a homophone for the Japanese word for “genitals”; “Ham Cybele” refers to the Anatolian mother goddess, prefixed with an appropriate word for tough meat to create a phrase whose initials match Sugiyama’s artist name of HC.

You can read about the rest of the event at Calorie Lab.

Part of the issue that surrounds this is the fact that people have been saying that Sugiyama is transsexual. The question, of course, is whether or not this is correct. The standard definition of transsexual usually includes the words “opposite sex” as in, a transsexual is someone who has the gender of the sex opposite that which they were assigned at birth. Our society, which is very binary, does not have a third option. So, is this person just an asexual who chose to take that to the logical conclusion? Is this person agender instead of asexual?

It seems like there is so much that needs to be discussed about gender and sex that this should bring up. Unfortunately, most people are probably going to just ignore the whole issues brought up by it and focus on the ‘ew’ factor of the cannibalism and the removal of this person’s genitals.

It still brings up the question- how does one define what a transsexual really is?

The decision is in a class-action lawsuit. It is the first decision to be handed down since President Barack Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage.

Wilken is just the latest judge to rule in this manner. Conservative and liberal judges have upheld the Constitution and its provisions which render DOMA unconstitutional. Wilken found, like many others, that Section 3 of DOMA, which is the federal definition of marriage and spouse, “vilates the equal protection rights of Plaintiff same-sex spouses.” Furthermore, subparagraph C of Section 7702B(f) of the Internal Revenue Code “violates the equal protection rights of Plaintiff registered domestic partners.” The court found that “both provisions are constitutionally invalid to the extent that they exclude Plaintiff same-sex spouses and registered domestic partners from enrollment in the CalPERS long-term care plan.”

Wilken ordered CalPERS not to use DOMA or that tax provision to deny enrollment to same-sex spouses and domestic partners in California. She also ordered that the federal government not disqualify CalPERS’ plan from the beneficial tax treatment for following her order. The order, however, has been stayed to see if there will be an appeal.

According to MetroWeekly:

The case comes about because, even if CalPERS wanted to allow the participation of same-sex married couples or domestic partners in its long-term care program, Section 7702B(f)(2) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) disqualifies a state-maintained plan from favorable tax treatment if it provides coverage to individuals other than those specified under the tax-code provision, which was signed into law a month before DOMA was in 1996. As Wilken noted, “The list of eligible individuals in Section 7702B(f)(2)(C) includes state employees and former employees, their spouses, and individuals bearing a relationship to the employees or spouses which is described in subparagraphs (A) through (G) of 26 U.S.C. § 152(d)(2).” Wilken found the decision to include subparagraphs (A) through (G) — and not (H) — of the underlying tax provision relevant because subparagraph (H) would have allowed for coverage for domestic partners, among others.

So how to celebrate the changing of our culture? I’m looking back at how it changed my life. I was born a year before Return of the Jedi came out. My first Halloween costume was as a baby Princess Leia. My cousins also dressed as the characters that Halloween and we went Trick-or-Treating as the cast. Growing up with my grandmother I vividly remember the year she was given a 12″ Chewbacca doll for Christmas. I was about 4 years old. Around 5 years old my cousin, Paul, began having a Star Wars collection of action figures. I remember wanting to play with all of them, but always getting stuck playing Boba Fett when I really wanted to be Leia or C3-PO.

It was over 10 years later when I finally sat down and watched the movies that my life had evolved around. At age 15 I didn’t really know what to expect when I sat down to watch the first 3 Star Wars movies. I remember sitting with my mother and grandmother on a couch in Florida. It was a cool Summer night and they were showing the movies in a marathon on tv. Strangely enough the first thing I noticed about the first movie was the everyone’s outfits were really plain and uninteresting. I decided then that the future should have color in it.

When Lucas decided to do the prequels I didn’t quite know what to think. I’d never heard of a “prequel” before and it took me a bit to understand that it was an entire movie of backstory. That seemed odd to me at first. Now it is a norm in the movie industry. So I went to the prequels and learned a new story of the characters. What bothered me most was that while I now knew the characters Vader, C3-PO, Chewie, Yoda, the births of Luke & Leia, and R2-D2′s back stories, I wanted to know about Han Solo. I wanted to know how he and Chewie hooked up as friends, what type of life had turned Han into the swaggering, cocky pilot he was in the originals. What made him like fiesty princesses? When was Lucas going to answer these questions?…It’s 2012 and I’m still waiting….

And so today we celebrate the creation of a movie franchise that has found it’s way into every corner of our pop culture, from movies, toys, cartoons and music. Thank you Mr. Lucas for giving us new planets to dream about and new adventures to wonder about.

Related articles

• Movies Reimagined: Star Wars.2 (lezgetreal.com)
• May the 4th Be With You (lezgetreal.com)
• Star Wars at 35/ Space age fairytales: Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)/ Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) ~ Review (georgesjournal.wordpress.com)

Towel Day is celebrated every year on the 25th of May as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author, as referred to in Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after Adams’ death on 11 May 2001.

He never got to see his books make it to the big screen. He died right before HGttG made its big screen debut.

Author Douglas Adams

I first read Adams’ books when I was a sophomore in high school. I fell in love with the characters and the vision of Space that I’d never imagined before with 2-headed politicians, book researchers from far off planets, and meals that sold themselves to you. By the time the movie came out in 2001 I had read every book of Adams’ that I could get my hands on. I read the whole Hitchikers “trilogy”, in addition to his other works like “Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency”, “The Meaning of Liff“, and “The Deeper Meaning of Liff“. The man knew how to write and how to enrapture the mind in ways no other man could. His work meant the world to me and when he died…I cried.

So to commemorate this man’s great, silly, wonderous works, don’t forget your towel.

Related articles

• Interstellar Hitchhikers, Rejoice: It’s #TowelDay! (geeksaresexy.net)
• To Do Friday: International Towel Day (comicsbeat.com)
• It’s Towel Day (travelbetweenthepages.com)

NBC News and Marist managed to poll cell phone users this week in Florida, Ohio and Virginia. The numbers were enlightening, but not surprising.

In Florida, landline households prefer Mitt Romney 48% to 45% for President Obama. But cell phone-only households prefer the President 57% to 34%. Virginia, landline households favor Romney 47% to 46%, while cell-onlies like Obama 54% to 34%. The President leads on landlines in Ohio, 44% to 41% and increases the lead to 47% to 37% for cell users.

In Ohio and Florida, 28% of those responding to the poll use cell phones only, and 27% of Virginians. That’s below the national number for those households that use only cell phones, which is 31.6%. The last statistic available for landline-only homes was in 2010, when they had dropped to 12.9% of American households. Roughly 55% of us have both landlines and cell phones.

It really is impossible to equate cell phone usage with any particular demographic. Many think that cell phone users are younger and more affluent, while landliners are older and poorer. Others bitch constantly at how welfare recipients and the homeless have cell phones. There are more dynamics involved than age or income. We went all cellular because I got tired of the too-familiar repairmen from BellSouth knocking on my door and just saying “dead squirrel” or “tree trimmer.” Geography can have a major impact on the choice to go cellular. The city I lived in had not upgraded their phone wires since they were installed during World War II. Geography can have a lot to do with the choice as well. The homeless buy prepaid phones so they have a phone number to give on job applications. It can be cheaper to have a cell phone if you make a lot of long distance calls, as we do.

What matters in this poll is not some attempt to connect the type of phone service people prefer with some voting bloc. What matters is that a missing 31.6% of voters are being reached to be polled.

Frankly, my math skills are not good enough to work out how to add those results and arrive at a better result for all responders. Get me past ordinary averages and percentages and I’m a lost cause. But if the polls are finally making the effort to include cell phone-only households, we may be able to get a better gauge of what is going on in this election.

Related articles

• Cell vs. Landline: Where do you take your calls? (grasshopper.com)

At the time, Emanuela was 15.

Amorth was appointed to his post by Pope John Paul II and claims to have carried out tens of thousands of exorcisms. Amorth is also one of the people who attacked Harry Potter calling the books the “work of the devil” and has claimed that “the devil was at work in the Vatican” with regards to the child sexual abuse scandal.

The Vatican has insisted that they have done everything that they can to help solve this mystery.

TJ Lane

Judge Timothy Grendell has determined that Chardon High School shooter TJ Lane will be tried as an adult in the deaths of three students. It is clear, according to Grendell, that Lane planned to murder people at the school in a deliberate and calculated manner. Grendell also ordered that Lane be held without bond.

Lane’s grandparents were in the court, along with relatives of those who were murdered. The court did hear from a Geauga County Sherrif’s deputy and both prosecutors and defense attorneys before making its ruling. Lane’s lawyer has stated that Lane admitted that no one picked on him or bullied him. Geauga County Sheriff’s deputy John Bilicik stated that Lane admitted to the crimes when interviewed by the police.

According to NewsNet5, this exchange occurred:

BILICIK: “Why did you shoot people?”
LANE: “I have no idea. I don’t really understand it myself.”

BILICIK: “How many did you shoot?”
LANE: “I don’t know. I was aiming for heads so they wouldn’t suffer.”

BILICIK: “Did someone piss you off?”
LANE: “No one pissed me off. I have no problem with people.”

Footage from cameras in and around the high school was shown in court, but the Media was not allowed to see it. Prosecutors were concerned that it would prejudice a future jury. Lane’s defense attorney wanted him to remain in the juvenile court system because of his diagnosis of having schizophrenia and unspecified psychosis.

Lane admitted to opening fire in Chardon High School, killing three students and injuring two others.

Regarding the first, Servicemembers Defense Network stated:

“SLDN and our allies have been working on Capitol Hill this year to encourage the Senate Armed Services Committee to pass a common-sense defense spending bill that does not seek to turn the clock back on the progress we have made in this first year of implementation of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ repeal. We now turn our attention to making sure the full Senate passes the committee bill and that the harmful language included in the House version is stripped away in conference committee,” said Sarvis.

The House passed its version of the NDAA on May 18 and included two harmful amendments put forth by opponents of LGBT military equality. The first would give so-called “conscience protections” to chaplains and service members who do not wish to minister and work with gay and lesbian service members. A threat to military readiness and unit cohesion, this amendment would allow service members to actively harass their fellow comrades for their perceived or actual sexual orientation. It would allow chaplains to discriminate against service members by religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, or any other religious belief simply by arguing that ministering to them would be contrary to their “conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs.”

A second amendment adopted to the House version of the bill would limit the use of Department of Defense property for same-gender marriage ceremonies.

“The Department of Defense has already made it clear – and appropriately so – that decisions about the use of facilities should be made on a sexual orientation neutral basis. This is yet another attempt by a few opponents of military equality who are looking to turn the clock back on progress and relegate gay and lesbian service members to second-class status,” said Sarvis.

With regards to women in front lines combat, the NDAA unveiled by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain includes a proposal put forward by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York which would order the military to develop a plan to send women into battle. The Pentagon has already begun relaxing ground ground combat exclusion policy for women, and opening more jobs closer to the battlefields. This would require the commanders to come up with plans to remove those final barriers.

The Huffington Post notes:

Women constitute about 15 percent of the armed forces, and 144 have died in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 900 have been wounded there. Supporters of opening all war zones to women say such a change would also remove obstacles to women’s advancement in the military, where battle experience is a key to promotion.

“Women are already fighting and dying for our country shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers in uniform on the front lines, but without the formal recognition that is essential for them to advance and obtain the benefits they have earned,” said Gillibrand in a statement. “Just like it was wrong to discriminate against service members because of whom they love, it is also wrong to deny combat roles to qualified women solely because of their gender.”

Meanwhile, two female soldiers have filed suit in order to gain combat roles for women. Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, both Army Reservists, have stated that the exclusion based upon their sex violates their rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. They stated in the filing that “This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits.”

The video is above.

According to sources, Hernandez came forward to confess his crime. According to some, he has cancer and is facing marital problems. According to police, Hernandez worked at the bodega that Patz visited when he went to go buy a soda. That store was right near Etan’s apartment, the very area that was searched last month. According to what we know, Hernandez has confessed to the crime of strangling Patz after he was lured down into the basement. Afterwards, Hernandez threw Etan’s remains into the trash. Hernandez has been a suspect in the past, and apparently has confessed to several people, but only just now come forward to the police.

Back in 1979, prosecutors identified Jose Antonio Ramos, a child molester, as the criminal. Ramos is currently serving jail time for molesting children, and is scheduled to be released in November 2012.

What makes the Patz story so remarkble is that he was the first child to appear on milk cartons across the country.

Actors Mike O'Malley (L) and Chris Colfer

If you are a fan of Glee and saw the finale, you know what Kurt‘s father, Burt, gave him for his graduation gift. When I first saw it, I laughed my ass off so hard. It was beautiful and funny and sweet. So awesome it is, that I’m sharing it with you. This is how every father with a gay son should show the pride he has for his son. So now, Senator Burt Hummel (Mike O’Malley) performing “All the single Ladies” with the help of 2 Glee members.

Related articles

• ‘Glee’ Season Finale Recap: The Show Is Over, Say Goodbye (hollywood.com)
• Glee: Season 3 Episode 22: Goodbye – TV Review (screencrave.com)
• Glee ‘Dance With Somebody’ Preview: Wedding Jitters, Blowout Fights, and Crazy-Good Music (tvline.com)

Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, the head of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, told reporters that, although the girl fell pregnant after being abused by her stepfather, her twins had “the right to live, and could not be eliminated.” He also stated “It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons. Life must always be protected.”

Showing off that the Catholic Church is more interested in preserving male superiority than actually helping the poor or preventing the need for abortions, the Catholic Church has not acted in any manner against the alleged abuser. The police believe that the girl was sexually assaulted for years by her stepfather, and that it was not until she was rushed to the hospital because of severe stomach pains that it became known that she was pregnant and required an emergency abortion. Odds on are that neither the girl nor the two fetuses would have survived the pregnancy.

According to the Belfast Telegram:

The controversy represents a PR nightmare for the Vatican. The unnamed girl’s mother and doctors were excommunicated for agreeing to Wednesday’s emergency abortion yet the Church has not taken formal steps against the stepfather, who is in custody. Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the conservative regional archbishop for Pernambuco where the girl was rushed to hospital, has said that the man would not be thrown out of the Church, because although he had allegedly committed “a heinous crime”, the Church took the view that “the abortion, the elimination of an innocent life, was more serious”.

Former President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva even got into this stating “As a Christian and a Catholic, I deeply regret that a bishop of the Catholic Church has such a conservative attitude. The doctors did what had to be done: save the life of a girl of nine years old. In this case, the medical profession was more right than the Church.”

The girl’s stepfather is also accused of abusing her handicapped 14-year-old sister, and could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

One of the doctors involved in the abortion, Rivaldo Albuquerque, has stated that he will continue to attend Mass despite what the archbishop orders.

MN Machine

Why is it that whenever I hear about a story like this, all I ever get going through my head are songs like “Men in Tights” by Mel Brooks or “Real Men” by Joe Jackson? There are two stereotypes that abound regarding the gay man- the every effeminate ones and the really butch ones. The Catholic group Courage is holding their 13th annual sports camp for gay men to try and get them to stop being attracted to one another, or at least remain celibate. After all, nothing quite says straight like running down a field and tackling someone.

The camp is where “men physically compete on the field while enriching their souls through a daily regimen of prayer, confessions, mass, and the Liturgy of the Hours.”

According to Philly.com:

The member, who asked not to be identified, said the weekend was a “tutorial sports event” and “not some sort of brainwashing camp that tries to make someone into something they’re not.”

He also said all different kinds of people were expected to attend, including married men “who had this issue in the past” and those who face “social blockades” because of their ineptitude when it came to sports. While no drinking is allowed, according to the registration form, in previous years participants celebrated at the end of the week with cigars and cognac.

That isn’t all that has been said about sports and ineptitude leading to homosexuality. Apparently Pal Kleponis of the Institute for Marital Healing in West Conshohocken stated at various Courage conferences that he believes that homosexuality is rooted in childhood rejection and trauma. Robert Fitzgibbons, the therapist who runs the Institute, has written about this stating that boys who are rejected because they cannot play sports “begin to identify with the female instead of the male.” He contends that the root of the problem is poor hand-eye coordination.

BTW, that was the sound of a thousand gamers hitting their heads on their desks. I have kept abreast of the pro-gaming circuit, and while none of these guys are the stereotypical gamer, very few of them look like they would excel at sports. Still, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination and stamina to last through a 45 minute Starcraft II game- and there are some of those that go on for even longer. Then again, at the end of this article, is a partial list of gay male sports stars.

Ed Coffin, director of Peace Advocacy Network, stated that “They think that in offering people with same sex attraction the chance to learn how to play sports they will learn to be manlier. It’s a ludicrous assertion. There are many, many out gay athletes and many gay men who play sports,”

This, of course, comes on the heels of Dr. Robert Spitzer renouncing his 2001 study claiming that highly motivated lesbians and gays could become straight through therapy, and the World Health Organization calling reparative therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — and even the lives — of affected people.”

Philly.com noted that:

“It’s been a really bad week for this whole movement to change one’s sexual orientation,” said Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, which fights against antigay theory and religious extremism.

The idea that gay people are bad at sports “is an insult to common sense and is contradicted by reality,” he said. “The idea that sports has anything to do with one’s sexuality is confusing science with stereotypes.”

One guy named Robert who provided a testimonal about the sports camp stated that:

“Because of my lack of athletic confidence, I’ve often felt less than a man . . .It felt so true and good to see myself as a peer and competitor to the other men instead of believing that I didn’t belong with the other members of my own sex. Instead of feeling intimidated or repulsed by the physical contact, I liked it … One time a teammate gave me a sweaty celebratory hug. He was humbly secure in himself, just as he was, selflessly and joyfully showing affection to others. I also liked when one man, whom I’d felt intimated by, gave me a pat on my belly, meaning ‘way to go!’ His touch made me feel accepted as one of the guys.”

And probably much more than that. Really, what this comes down to is this notion of being a ‘failure’ as a man because they do not live up to the stereotype that society imposes upon them, and while it may take away their fear of being unable to live up to the stereotype, it seems unlikely that they will ever stop being attracted to men.

Billy Bean is a former Major League baseball player. It seems that he did not get the memo about gays not being good at sports. He came out in 1999 and says that Courage’s take on sports is “is discrimination and archaic stereotypical belief, that is inexcusable. We are born the way we are born. I find it heartbreaking that anyone would subject a young man into believing he should suppress who he is, in a way that is so potentially damaging.”

Courage’s ideas about homsoexuality come from Fitzgibbons’ research primarily and supposedly gay men’s lack of confidence comes from rejection by parents and others. Al, who runs a Scranton Courage support group, stated “I never met a man with same sex attraction that had a healthy relationship with his father.”

In truth, he has it backwards. There are many gay men who have healthy relationships with their fathers, but because his experience is limited to just those who hate themselves, the likelihood is that his view is skewed. In truth, gays who hate themselves probably have a toxic relationship with their parents.

Here, incidentally, is a list of gay athletes via Wikipedia:

Graham Ackerman,
John Amaechi,
Eric Anderson,
Jim Barnett,
Billy Bean,
Thomas Berling,
Mark Bingham,
John Blankenstein,
Brendan Burke,
Glenn Burke, I
van Bussens,
J. P. Calderon,
John Curry,
Donal Óg Cusack,
Steven Davies,
Michael Dos Santos
Robert Dover
Justin Fashanu
Edward Gal
Rudy Galindo
Vicky Galindo
Ed Gallagher
Terry Garvin
Bobby Goldsmith
Andrew Goldstein
Peter Häggström
Matthew Hall
Kyle Hawkins
Bruce Hayes
Anton Hysén
Patrick Jeffrey
Gus Johnston
Orlando Jordan
Chris Kanyon
Peter Karlsson
Johan Kenkhuis
David Kopay
Daniel Kowalski
Greg Louganis
Robert McCall
Ray McDonald
Lindsy McLean
Hans Peter Minderhoud
Matthew Mitcham
Chris Morgan
Jim Morris
Ondrej Nepela
Robert Newton
Scott Norton
Rudolph Nureyev
Graeme Obree
Ryan O’Meara
Brian Orser
Nigel Owens
Dave Pallone
Bob Paris
Sandy Parker
Pat Patterson
Lee Pearson
Otto Peltzer
David Pichler
Aslie Pitter
Brian Pockar
Ian Roberts
Ronald Robertson
Olivier Rouyer
Matthew Rush
Will Sheridan
Roy Simmons
Brian Sims
Blake Skjellerup
Blyth Tait
David Testo
Mark Tewksbury
Gareth Thomas
Bill Tilden
Ted Tinling
Esera Tuaolo
Louis Van Amstel
Dan Veatch
Mike Verschuur
Tom Waddell
Ji Wallace
Johnny Weir
Rick Welts
David Wilson
Scott Woodward-Smith

The NHTL wants the protections that LGBT South Africans enjoy stripped from the Constitution. They submitted a proposal to the constitutional review committee, which is charied by Chief Patekile Holomisa. Chief Holomisa is also the chairperson of the NHTL, so, of course, the petition was then referred to the parliamentary party caucuses. Reports are that Holomisa is antagonistic to LGBT people, and is vehemently opposed to civil unions and same-sex marriage.

African National Congress chief whip, Dr. Mathole Motshekga, issued a statement stating that the ANC will not accede to any submission seeking to amend the nation’s Constitution to strip LGBT people of their protections.

However:

Subsequently on SAFM AMlive, Xolani Gwala conducted an interview with Contralesa which exacerbates concerns despite the statement issued by the office of the ANC chief whip. It was suggested that people who are lesbian and gay foster declining population figures in South Africa because they are not actively engaged in sexual reproduction, and thus stop people from having babies.

Whomever put forward this argument would seem to be blithely ignorant of Statistics South Africa’s population statistics, which shows an impressive increase in the population of our country over time; but the point is evidently not the question of fact but rather the prejudices which informed the statements.

It was suggested that lesbian and gay persons do not make appropriate adoptive parents of children, and that adoptions by same-sex couples should be discouraged. Holomisa also claimed that, traditionally, people who were homosexual were subjected to certain rituals which transformed them from socially and culturally unacceptable “sexual deviants” into “normal”, socially and culturally acceptable heterosexuals.

It appears that many of the lies being spread by the anti-LGBT groups in America have now shifted fully into every corner of Africa. The question is, will South Africa follow Uganda and other nations backwards into the Darkness or will they stand up and keep moving forward.

Officer Taking Child

At 5:30 a.m. on May 10, armed men broke into the bedroom of Kirk Kyle Farrar’s 12 year-old daughter and shook her awake. The men led her downstairs at gunpoint and forced her to lie on the floor next to her mother and father, with her hands behind her head. Another armed man took Farrar’s two-year-old son from his crib, and would not let his parents hold him. “My son screamed for his mother for what seemed like an eternity,” Farrar wrote in an email to friends, obtained by Reasontv.com. “I will never forget the hopeless feeling of not being able to comfort my son or daughter.”

The armed men who broke into Farrar’s home were officers with the Meridian, Idaho, Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were executing a federal warrant for Farrar’s arrest for the crime of selling bongs.

A Bong

Farrar’s wasn’t the only family traumatized that morning. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Idaho National Guard, and four Idaho police departments raided the homes of 13 other headshop owners and employees on May 10. All of the headshops had their inventory seized. One shop lost more than $80,000 worth of merchandise (bongs and pipes marketed as “tobacco water pipes”). Another headshop owner had his and and his employees’ vehicles seized.

The investigation into these 13 shops and their employees (two of which are still at large) for selling drug paraphernalia was led by U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson, a Barack Obama appointee. Nine of the shops were also accused of selling “Spice,” a synthetic alternative to the prohibited and significantly safer drug marijuana.

In his email, Farrar denies selling spice. “Piece of Mind Boise has never carried these products EVER! We made a commitment from the start not to carry it because we believe it is dangerous and not being used in a legal fashion.” 

He also notes that his cousin, “[who] has never previously committed a crime and has absolutely no criminal record,” has been charged “with 4 Federal felony charges stemming from selling tobacco products.” 

“The open sale of drug paraphernalia promotes unlawful drug use and helps drug traffickers thrive,” Olson said at a press conference on May 10. “These indictments show federal, state and local law enforcement partners will attack drug trafficking on all fronts.”

During a speech at the Center for American Progress earlier this month, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said that the law enforcement-only approach to America‘s drug problem was not “humane, compassionate” or “realistic.” He also said that the Obama administration does not believe it can “arrest its way out of the drug problem.” 

Reasontv.com spoke to one headshop owner. At his attorney’s behest, this owner declined to go on the record, but did say that local police had been aware of the store’s existence and sales of glass pipes for years, but had never threatened charges or discouraged the business from operating. The owner believes that the raids came at the behest of federal law enforcement officials.

According to the Idaho Statesman, “the DEA, Idaho National Guard, IRS and the U.S. Marshals and Attorney’s offices worked on the case,” which the agencies built over the course of an entire year.

Tommy Chong

As if more evidence were needed that President Obama’s drug war looks a lot like George W. Bush’s: The charges against Farrar and the other Idaho headshop owners are reminiscent of the federal prosecution of actor Tommy Chong under Bush’s DOJ. Chong was convicted in 2003 for distributing paraphernalia through his company Nice Dreams Enterprises. Chong was fined $20,000, and made to forfeit his domain name, all of his inventory, and $103,514 in cash.

Related articles

• Penn Jillette SLAMS Obama on Marijuana, Drug War (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
• Obama’s War on Bongs: Capitol Hemp Edition (reason.com)
• 5 Ways Law Enforcement Has Bungled Drug War Raids (alternet.org)

Elton John

Elton John is in a Los Angles hospital being treated for a serious respiratory infection, CNN reports.

The 65-year-old entertainer became ill last weekend in Las Vegas while performing his “Million Dollar Piano” show at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. John returned to Los Angeles to undergo testing at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Wednesday.

“Those tests resulted in the attending Cedars-Sinai physician recommending that Elton not perform any concerts for approximately seven days with complete rest and antibiotic treatment to cure his respiratory infection and prevent any damage,” a statement from the publicist says.

We hope he recovers quickly.

Related articles

• Cedars-Sinai first West Coast ALS clinic to implant breathing-assist device under new FDA approval (medicalxpress.com)

Dylan in 2011

Today we wish a very happy 71st birthday to a musical legend, Mr. Bob Dylan.

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan’s early songs, such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, became anthems for the US civil rightsand anti-war movements.

Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan’s six-minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.

Dylan age 19

Dylan’s lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard,Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

Dylan with guitar

Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica. Backed by a changing line-up of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, but his greatest contribution is generally considered to be his songwriting.

Since 1994, Dylan has published three books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries.As a songwriter and musician, Dylan has received numerous awards over the years including Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards; he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.“  In April 2012, President Barack Obama named Dylan as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Let’s listen to some Dylan together with one of my personal favorites, Tangled Up in Blue from 1974.

Related articles

• Bob Dylan: 20 best lyrics on his birthday (csmonitor.com)
• Bob Dylan to the White House next week (politico.com)
• Bob Dylan, Albright to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom (dawn.com)

The fire blazed through most of the night, only being extinguished this morning.

Mitt and Ann Romney campaigning

Aware that he is having problems connecting with women, even with his wife explaining how much work goes into raising five sons, Mitt Romney is trying to bridge his gap with “personal” stories of women he has met and spoken with at small, private gatherings away from the press. He has quite a collection.

The press is not permitted to meet these women or to have names or addresses to verify their existence. And in some instances, those omissions raise questions about how these women’s stories relate to the policies Romney advocates. At a fundraiser last week, Romney explained to potential donors that “In some towns that I go to, I ask to get a group of women business owners, and I meet with them. I have them describe their experiences.” So, here are some of the stories he presents to rallies and fundraisers…

Romney describes the woman whose unemployed husband signed up for an upholstery class. When she queried her husband about his choice of retraining, he explained that there was a shortage of upholsterers in their area. She realized he was right, and opened an upholstery business where she employs her husband and 40 others. Romney thinks that was “pretty impressive.”

The first question I want answered is when did this happen? Forty employees is not something one starts off with, it’s something that is built up to. And then, where? I used to live in a small city in Georgia, population 17,000. There was an upholsterer in town, total personnel four people. Most of the furniture refinishing businesses I’ve known over the years are very small operations and upholsterers are even smaller. We have become a society that replaces furniture instead of refinishing it or reupholstering it, unless it’s an irreplaceable piece, an antique or something with great personal value. So, where and when, please?

Next up is a woman married to a caricature artist. As Romney explained, “It’s hard to make a great living out of just being a caricature artist. He does caricatures at county fairs and so forth.” So, the woman decided that she had to become the primary breadwinner. Having been born in Mexico and being fluently bi-lingual, she got a job translating construction manuals from English to Spanish. It’s “just remarkable!”

Really? How about visiting a Federal Court in the near future? You will find freelance translators in a variety of languages who are contracted for suspect interrogations and court proceedings. Pick up a newspaper or check jobs websites in any state with a large Hispanic population. You will find ads for bi-lingual employees. I’m not putting down this particular woman, but her story isn’t really all that remarkable. It is somewhat remarkable that she chose to support an artistic husband. It’s a pity Romney didn’t ask her about birth control which makes it possible for her to pursue her career instead of being perpetually pregnant and stuck at home collecting welfare or forcing her husband to go flip hamburgers and abandon his art.

One of Romney’s favorites, because it is twisted to his party’s narrative, is the lady who owns a trucking company. She used to buy new trucks every year and employs both men and women to drive them. But, now, she is waiting to buy new equipment, she is “uncertain how many new regulations or taxes the Democrats might force upon her in the coming months and prefers to wait to purchase big ticket items until a Republican is in the White House. She runs the place with a very strong hand, a very successful hand.”

New regulations, huh? She must be a Fox News viewer or has right wing radio on at work all day. President Obama has pushed to streamline business regulations, not increase them. She’s a small business owner. Her taxes have been reduced by this administration. The administration wants to make taxes more fair, not just heap new taxes on people, and there are new tax incentives for her business, like the credit for hiring unemployed veterans, many of whom have great experience at driving trucks. Interest rates are at nearly historic lows, so this is a perfect time for making large purchases. They will cost less over time. I’ve known truckers. The trucking industry suffers when gas prices are high. Long haulers are expected to take larger loads in less time. In a recession, with businesses closed and factories stilled, there is less cargo being shipped. There are a lot of reasons for this woman’s business to be suffering, but the threat of new regulations and phantom tax increases are not among them.

Now, this one defies explanation for why Romney includes it. He says he met a woman in Cleveland who just graduated from college, but is going back for a second degree because she can’t get a job in her field and can’t afford to make payments on her student loans, which are currently sitting at $40,000. If she goes back to school, she can put off making payments on her loans. Romney explains “She can’t find a job, so she’s doing three part-time jobs. She doesn’t know how they’re going to make it. She’s having a hard time.”

Oh, let me at it. She can’t find a full-time job because of four lovely people at the top of the Forbes 400 whose company showed American businesses that if they limited their employees to part-time, they would not have to provide benefits. It’s called “the WalMart model” inside the retail and hospitality industries, and it has spread to health care now. Kids who were working in supermarkets during college are still working there because they can’t find full-time jobs. Three that I knew had their degrees in education, where we are losing jobs instead of recovering them as states and town tighten their belts. And let’s not forget, Mitt Romney told students to get a loan from their parents to go to school or start businesses, and the Republicans are insisting on cutting programs to pay for lower interest rates for that woman’s student loans. Just how the hell is anything the Republicans are offering going to help this woman, or the millions of students and graduates out there who are holding a total of nearly one trillion dollars in debt?

Finally, Romney talks about a woman he met in Appleton, Wisconsin. She sells perfume in a department store. She and her husband had planned on being retired at this point, but the real estate they bought, two duplexes, have decreased in value. He says he has met other older women who are finding retirement eluding them.

I really don’t understand the duplex lady. How did the decrease in her property values decrease her income from three rental properties? Did her mortgage payments rise? If she lives in Wisconsin, I know that her property taxes have not risen in the past year, but did state property taxes impact their profit from the rentals? If the expenses of the properties rose, why didn’t they raise the rent? Any other landlord would have. This story makes less sense than any of the others.

When I look at my own situation, facing eleven months when my husband will be on Medicare and we don’t know how we will be able to afford medical insurance for me; when I get ready for work or watch my husband go off to work instead of enjoying a comfortable retirement, that’s when I remember something that happened in 1992. H. Ross Perot was running for President and had to release his tax returns. In 1991, Perot threw a million dollar wedding for his daughter Margo, but he paid less actual money in Federal income taxes than my family did – a family of four at a median income. Today, both Perot and his son are in the Forbes 400 billionaires list and my husband and I are working part-time to supplement his Social Security and pension. I don’t resent Mr. Perot’s wealth. I resent the taxes he didn’t pay and the entirely legal way he avoided paying fair taxes. And I resent the idea that I’m supposed to suffer cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare to pay for men like Henry Ross Perot to get even bigger tax breaks and better ways to avoid taxes.

Mitt Romney suffers from something greater than being out-of-touch with ordinary Americans. He’s intellectually lazy. He has this set of beliefs and he fits what he hears into them, even if he has to chop bits off the round peg to put it in the square hole. He only half-listens to what people are saying to him and has no point of reference to evaluate what is being said. I’m not sure which is worse, Mitt’s problems connecting with reality, or the fact that the Republican Party and their well-paid media shills have done such a spectacular job of turning their followers’ brains to mush.

Related articles

• After backing Romney in 2008, Ross Perot declines to endorse anyone for 2012(trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com)

  ---

• Mitt Cites Perot (thepage.time.com)
• ‘A woman who. …’: Romney’s stories court females (goerie.com)

Most of those achievements have involved voting against legislation to help women or voting in favor of stuff that hurts women.

The Hill notes that:

The committee mission statement explains that the group “is organized for the purpose of influencing, advancing, leading, and communicating the Republican agenda in the House of Representatives. The Women’s Policy Committee is dedicated to the principles of job creation, less government, lower taxes, regulatory relief, personal responsibility, individual freedoms and a strong national defense.”

Rep. Mary Bono Mack (Calif.) will serve as committee chairwoman.

Bono Mack stated “As mothers, grandmothers, daughters, wives and sisters, women often see things in a different context,” she said in a statement. “As Republican women, we have some really unique ideas for moving our nation forward, and we’re excited about working together to find solutions.”

The Hill also notes:

“Republican women in Congress are making a real difference,” says Bono Mack in the video.

“While our backgrounds are different, one thing is not,” continues Rep. Kay Granger (Texas).

“We are all conservative reformers,” says Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.).

“We know what it’s like to run a budget, a business and a family,” explains Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.).

So far, these women have mostly supported every male-oriented bit of legislation to come out of the Republican Party with the aim of hurting women. The problem the GOP is facing is not that there is a lack of women in the GOP, but rather, that they have crafted policies which attack the basic rights of women, and are often bombastic in their assaults on those very rights. Some of those attacking women have been women themselves.

All this does is create a target, really.

Ravi was facing up to ten years in prison for using a webcam to spy on his roommate Tyler Clementi during an intimate encounter. While typically bias laws are aimed at those who act out of utter hatred for a minority, they can target those who act with malicious intent out of a biased or prejudiced manner such as Ravi did.

According to NJ.com:

Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman sentenced Ravi to 30 days in the county jail, three years of probation and 300 hours of community service. The judge also ordered him to have counseling and contribute $10,000 to a state-licensed, community-based organization dedicated to assisting victims of bias crimes.

The sentence was a stunning departure from state sentencing guidelines that require the judge to find extraordinary circumstances to overcome the presumption of a prison term for the second-degree convictions and replace them with probation. Second-degree convictions carry a presumption of five to seven years in prison.

Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey president Leslie Sinemus feels that there is a good likelihood that the sentence will be overturned and stated “I’m not sure 30-day sentence as condition of probation sends the defendant or future defendants the message.”

What may be at issue is the fact that Judge Berman did not agree with the Grand Jury’s finding of a bias crime, nor the verdict of the jury that there was a bias crime. Berman called the spying “cold, calculated and methodically conceived”, but only handed down a thirty-day sentence over ‘trying to hinder his own apprehension by lying to investigators and tampering with evidence by removing tweets from his Twitter account.’

There are 7 Catholic organizations and 43 Catholic Dioceses that have filed a law suit on Monday against the federal government mandate requiring employers to include birth control in their health care plans

Catholic leaders contend the President Barack Obama’s-endorsed health care initiative requires employers to include coverage in their health benefit plans for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and artificial contraception, “all of which violate the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life and the dignity of the human person.

While individual State Catholic Conferences took the issue to court, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has not involved themselves in this strategy as a national Catholic Conference. There appears to be a difference within the Conference on how best to approach this topic without getting involved in partisan politics. Currently 13 Dioceses out of 200 Catholic Dioceses are involved in this partisan political strategy of aligning with the GOP by taking a coordinated court approach which is sure to generate a lot of media coverage.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago while supporting the efforts of those state conferences has not allowed the Illinois State Conference to get involved. Two dioceses in Illinois Springfield, and Joliet, however have decided to side with Cardinal Timothy Dolan and against Cardinal George’s approach to steer away from patrician politics.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress, and we’ll keep at it, but there’s still no fix,” in explaining why Catholic institutions have resorted to the courts.

Cardinal Dolan has yet to explain what has our federal government done to impede the religious rights and intrude on religious freedoms? He can’t see through the mist of dogma.

Erin Shields, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department, said Monday the agency does not comment on pending litigation. The liberal advocacy group Catholics United accused the bishops of serving a “right-wing political agenda.”

The differences in approach highlights I think a division in US Conference of Catholic Bishops on strategy. Cardinal Dolan promotes the idea of victimization by the government of the Church; Cardinal George on the other hand promotes the idea of religious freedom. While the Rainbow Sash Movement disagrees with both of these approaches and supports women’s health over dogma. It would seem that Cardinal George is attempting to be reasonable in promoting his idea, while Cardinal Dolan foams at the mouth.

Besides Illinois, the lawsuits have been filed in seven states and the District of Columbia by the archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, Catholic Charities in Mississippi, Missouri and Indiana, health care agencies in New York and two dioceses in Texas.

In any case, the horse has left the barn. If the Supreme Court found for the government against Amish paying social security and unemployment taxes the court will have no other recourse than to support the government’s current position on the birth control issue as far as Roman Catholic Hospitals, Universities and Charitable organizations are concerned, despite their religious belief.

Clearly there appears to division among Roman Catholic Bishops on what the best strategy should be. Now that the issue is in hands of the court only time will tell.

Powell, if everyone remembers, was the architect of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which has now been repealed. Powell told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “It was the Congress that imposed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it was certainly my position, my recommendation to get us out of an even worse outcome that could have occurred.”

For Powell, the issue is not about religion, but about public policy. He stated “I respect the fact that many denominations have different points of view with respect to gay marriage and they can hold that in the sanctity in the place of their religion and not bless them or solemnize them.”

He also stated that he has “a lot of friends who are individually gay but are in partnerships with loved ones, and they are as stable a family as my family is and they raise children. And so I don’t see any reason not to say that they should be able to get married under the laws of their state or the laws of the country.”

Powell served as President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, and is a moderate Republican.

Aubrey Sarvis, SLDN’s Executive Director and an Army veteran, stated “This Memorial Day, we remember those who have paid the ultimate price for our freedom, but we must also recognize that our gay and lesbian service members and their families pay a price every day even as they serve our country – a price their straight counterparts are not required to pay. It’s time to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and honor these brave patriots by treating them equally.”

The petition states:

The so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) forces the military to treat married gay and lesbian service members and their families differently than it treats all other married service members and their families. Please end this discriminatory and unequal treatment of our service members and veterans by repealing DOMA.

“When Congress repealed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ it meant that our gay and lesbian service members could serve openly, but not — as long as the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is on the books — equally,,” said Evan Wolfson, founder and President of Freedom to Marry. “It is time for Congress to repeal DOMA so that service members and their families will no longer be unfairly denied important protections and so that their employer – the military – can treat all personnel and their families fairly and equally.”

The Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry joint campaign launched last week with the release of a compelling online video illustrating the real injury inflicted on gay and lesbian military families who, because of the federal government’s refusal to respect their marriages, are denied the support and protections that all other military families receive. Already, the video has been viewed more than 50,000 times.

Because of the ‘gay exception’ created by DOMA, America’s legally married gay and lesbian couples are denied more than 1,100 federal responsibilities and protections, including access to military insurance programs, Social Security survivors benefits, equal treatment under U.S. immigration laws, and the opportunity to take leave to care for a spouse. On May 9, 2012, President Obama cited conversations with service members as part of his reason for supporting same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. The President had already endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal DOMA, and had instructed the Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending DOMA in the courts based on the Department of Justice’s determination that DOMA is unconstitutional.

In October 2011, SLDN filed landmark litigation on behalf of eight married gay and lesbian service members and veterans challenging DOMA and three other federal statutes that may be interpreted to prevent the military from providing the same protections and support to all families. For more information on the case, click here.

Freedom to Marry’s federal program works to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and make the case for marriage to government officials, opinion-leaders, and political operatives in Washington, DC. Freedom to Marry jointly leads the Respect for Marriage Coalition, a diverse group of nearly 70 organizations working together to repeal DOMA, and regularly hosts salons to engage Democratic, Republican, and independent opinion-leaders and operatives in conversations about why marriage matters to same-sex couples. Since the introduction of the Respect for Marriage Act, the bill that would restore the historic practice of federal respect for lawful state marriages, the number of cosponsors has increased from 18 to 32 in the Senate, including every Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and from 108 to 144 in the House of Representatives.

For more information on Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry, visit www.freedomtomarry.org/serve.

“The poll also finds that 59 percent of African Americans say they support same-sex marriage, up from an average of 41 percent in polls leading up to Obama’s announcement of his new position on the matter. Though statistically significant, it is a tentative result because of the relatively small sample of black voters in the poll.”

It is also not surprising that the National Organization for Marriage pretty quickly screamed about this poll. Frank Schubert, their national policy director, called into question the poll’s accuracy by pointing to the number of polls that have overestimated support for same-sex unions before state ballot measures. Schubert actually stated:

“There is not a chance in God’s green earth that African Americans support same-sex marriage. [The President’s endorsement has probably] created a lot of angst and conflict in that community, but his opinion of same-sex marriage is not going to be changing the opinion of African Americans in a significant way.”

Actually, Schubert is comparing apples to kumquats here. This poll is of all Americans, and does not reflect the voting public in, say, North Carolina or any given state, for that matter. Support has also grown in a number of places where, back in 2004 and 2006, they passed anit-marriage amendments.

The New Civil Rights Movement noted that:

In the past week, the NAACP, actor Will Smith, and rappers Jay-Z and 50 Cent have all joined the president in declaring support for same-sex marriage.

NOM’s corporate policy is to drive a race wedge into the politics of marriage and attempt to make being anti-marriage equality a badge of honor.

The President will be inaugurated on January 20, 2013. The automatic spending cuts go into effect on January 1, 2013, and the expiration of the tax cuts happens on December 31, 2012. The two laws involved do not have any “grace period” built into them.

Could someone please explain to this man how to read a calendar and how our Federal government works?  On second thought….

Related articles

• CBO warns Obama, GOP about tough tax choices – USA TODAY(content.usatoday.com)

  ---

• Romney says Congress should wait to act on economy (wcnc.com)
• Romney says Congress should wait to act on economy (kansascity.com)
• Cutting Boehner’s Expectations And Non-Threats (lezgetreal.com)
• Tax Cuts Disguised as Reform (economistsview.typepad.com)

Diaz states:

“I am hopeful that through this press release, my message to Pastor Sean Harris and his followers will be heard and he will see the errors of his ways.

“The sermon Pastor Sean Harris gave that has been broadcast online and covered in the media is, to say the very least, not Christianly. As followers of Jesus, Christians must oppose violence and hatred toward all human persons. I implore all parents to always love their children and never abuse them or turn their backs on them for any reason. It is an outrage that anyone, especially in the name of Christ, would ever suggest putting any human persons in concentration camps or mistreating each other.

“Jesus’ message to love one another is the core of Christianity even if we disagree with the actions of others or with their way of life. There is nothing in Christianity that permits us to become savages or treat each other with violence and contempt. Pastor Harris’ teachings are not based on Christ’s teachings at all.”

Senator Diaz may want to go back to the Bible and start reading everything that Christ said about homosexuality, and realize that his opposition to homosexuality and to marriage equality is not rooted in his faith, but in his fears about what it means to be a man, or a failure as a man. His own hatred and bigotry is not found in the words of Christ, but in the fears that haunt his mind.

And Diaz may want to remember that, whether he likes it or not, he is just like Harris even if he will not use those hateful words. It is his hateful actions that will hurt many a child in this nation.

However, there is something going dangerously wrong with their electronic control. Somehow, DVDs, USB sticks and file sharing are punching holes in North Korea’s careful control of information.

In the failing days of the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s, where Radio Free Europe had failed to make much of a difference in Soviet society, West German television was rocking the state to its foundation. It was showing the Soviet people the world that they never knew existed, a world that included such American shows as Dallas. This is what is happening now in North Korea.

South Korean television shows are being shared and traded, along with “K-Pop,” Korean popular music.

A 31-year-old North Korean defector confirmed the impact, saying “I was told when I was young that South Koreans are very poor, but the South Korean dramas proved that just wasn’t the case. His statement was part of the InterMedia report prepared for the United States State Department, which surveyed hundred of NK defectors who entered South Korea through China. Chinese merchants smuggle the physical media in and some people along the border illegally access foreign TV channels or radio broadcasts and record them.

If the experience in the Soviet Union is any indication, these little breaks in the wall of isolation will do more damage to the Kim regime than any sanctions anyone can impose. Nothing harms an isolationist regime faster than losing the isolation.

Related articles

• Illegal File-Sharing Opens North Korea to World(livescience.com)

  ---

• North Koreans getting more foreign media than ever, study says(latimesblogs.latimes.com)

  ---

• In the News – N. Korea suspected of involvement in China’s arrest of S. Korean activists(mouonekorea.wordpress.com)

  ---

• China allows N. Koreans to leave for Seoul: reports (vancouverdesi.com)

Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Alec Gutierrez explained that the sales trend is very unusual. “During a typical post-recession recovery, we would expect to see auto sector gains being driven by broad economic growth. In the first quarter, the opposite was true, as auto sales were the primary driver behind GDP growth and have consistently been a bright spot in an otherwise slow-paced recovery. It this point, it is almost as if the tail is wagging the dog.”

A year ago, the earthquake and tsunami virtually stopped all imports of Japanese cars to America. Both companies have recovered. Kelley expects Toyota to pick up some market share, with a corresponding loss of share by General Motors, For, Hyundai-Kia and Nissan, but expects gains for Honda and Chrysler as well as Toyota.

The second piece of crushing news for the Republicans came from the oil industry. The price of oil dropped below $90 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since November 1, primarily due to increased production in the United States. American oil supplies hit 900,000 barrels last week, the highest level since 1990. It is expected to gain an additional 750,000 barrels this year.

Oil prices had risen because of the problems in the Middle East and difficulties with Iran, but Saudi Arabia lived up to its promise to increase production and the United States has kept pass with that.

U. S. gas prices have dropped 25.8¢ per gallon since the first week of April, and is now 16.5¢ below its price a year ago. Heating oil fell by 4.14¢ and wholesale gas lost 5.1¢. Natural gas has gained 7¢ per cubic foot.

Brent crude, which sets the price for oil imported into the United States, dropped to a new low, losing $2.64 to $101.77 per barrel in London.

The only truly bad thing about all this news is the apparent inability of the Democratic Party to break through the white noise of the right wing and make people hear this news. The DNC really needs to hire better PR people.

Related articles

• Oil prices slide to 7-month low(money.cnn.com)

  ---

• Memorial Day Sales Events Will Drive Auto Industry To 14.2 Million SAAR, According To Kelley Blue Book Analysts (prnewswire.com)
• Oil drops below $90 for 1st time since Nov. 1 (fuelfix.com)
• Whatever happened to $200 oil? (theglobeandmail.com)

MSNBC explains that:

The video, posted on YouTube, tells the story of the fictional 12-year-old Hailey Bennett (played by Jessica), who lost her mother at age 3, is abused by her dad and is all alone after her only friend moves away. Hailey gets bullied at school daily, is mocked on her fake Facebook page, and ultimately, ends her life. The video and the Facebook page had disclaimers saying Hailey was a fictional character, according to TODAY.

A parent saw the Facebook page, which did include an update saying “I wanna be dead”, called the police, who in turn called the school, and Jessica was called into the assistant principal’s office. There, she was confronted by printouts of the page which did not include the disclaimer.

MSNBC explains:

“I tried explaining it so much … they had the printouts of the page but none of the printouts that they had were the ones where I specify that it was a fake page,” Jessica said, adding that the person who handed them over “hadn’t been able to go down far enough to see that it was fake.”

Jessica’s mother did bring printouts that had the disclaimer, but school officials did not really seem to be bothered by it. School Superintendent Allan Gerstenlauer told WNBC New York that the video, which was posted online, was “unfortunate in that it created a substantial disruption to the school.”

This leaves some of us baffled since it seems that the person who created the disruption was the parent who didn’t read the site fully or the police who did not check the site properly to see if it was not a work of fiction.

Jessica cried hysterically when the school punished her, and stated that “I couldn’t even believe that I was getting in trouble for something that I had worked so hard on, and the only intent of it was good.”

Jessica now faced a suspension hearing at school, and her father is hoping that it will be reversed, erased and that she can turn in the project. He stated that “This is a great project. There’s thousands of people that love it, and it can be fixed. This can be fixed, simple. I’m very proud of the things she’s done here.”

Jessica stated that “They’ve been been teaching us since we were in kindergarten that you treat people the way you want to be treated and not to bully. Then I make some type of movement in it and I get punished for it.”

Actor Parsons

Award-winning actor Jim Parsons reveals he’s gay and in a 10-year relationship, according to a New York Times profile.

Parsons, best-known as Dr. Sheldon Cooper on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, discusses his work in last year’s production of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer‘s searing chronicle of the AIDS epidemic in New York City during the early 1980s. The Times‘ Patrick Healy writes, “The Normal Heart resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship…”

Parsons & Spiewak

The 39-year-old (really?) actor publicly thanked his partner Todd Spiewak from the podium of the Golden Globe awards ceremony while accepting the trophy for best actor in a comedy series.

Parsons is currently headlining the revival of the classic comedy Harvey as Elwood P. Dowd which will open June 14 at New York’s Studio 54 theatre.

Related articles

• Theater: Jim Parsons Prepares for His Lead Role in ‘Harvey’ (nytimes.com)
• Harvey’s Jim Parsons featured on the cover of Time Out New York (boneaubryanbrown.com)
• Dr. Sheldon Cooper Does Broadway (lezgetreal.com)

Eugene Polley

Eugene Polley, an inventor whose best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television, died on Sunday in Downers Grove, Ill. Mr. Polley, the inventor of the wireless television remote control, was 96.

His death was announced by the Zenith Electronics Corporation, where Mr. Polley began his career in the stockroom before rising through the engineering ranks to invent the device, called the Flash-Matic, in 1955.

An ad for Zenith’s Flash-Matic. Zenith sold 30,000 televisions with the remote control.

“Just think!,” an advertisement breathlessly proclaimed that year. “Without budging from your easy chair you can turn your new Zenith Flash-Matic set on, off, or change channels. You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen.”

The Flash-Matic remote, which worked like a flashlight, was shaped like a snub-nosed revolver. The shape was a considered choice on Mr. Polley’s part, as he explained in 2000, letting viewers in the age of ubiquitous TV westerns “shoot out” commercials.

Flash-Matic made the TV audience less captive, though also less active. For the first time, viewers could comfortably exercise dominion over sound and image without simultaneously exercising the body on the march between couch and dial.

B&W TV w/ Dials

(The “dial” was a round thing with numbers on it — all the way up to 13 — by which viewers changed the channel through the direct application of fingers and wrist. One did not so much surf channels in those days as ride their gentle swells with all due deliberateness.)

As Mr. Polley, by then 86, proudly told an interviewer in 2002: “The flush toilet may have been the most civilized invention ever devised, but the remote control is the next most important. It’s almost as important as sex.”

For his invention, Mr. Polley received a thousand-dollar bonus. But his device was soon supplanted by a more efficient, more enduring and far better-selling one, developed by a Zenith colleague, Robert Adler.

News accounts over the years have often described Mr. Adler erroneously as the TV remote’s sole inventor. Mr. Polley, a plain-spoken man who seemed to avail himself of his own internal mute button only rarely, was largely relegated to the margins of history, a condition that rankled.

“Not only did I not get credit for doing anything,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2006, “I got a kick in the rear end.”

BIOGRAPHY

Eugene Theodore Polley was born in Chicago on Nov. 29, 1915. (He disliked the name Theodore and adopted his confirmation name, Joseph, as his middle name.) His father, a bootlegger, abandoned the family when Gene was about 10.

A Zenith Radio

The young Mr. Polley studied at the City Colleges of Chicago and the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), but lacked the money to complete a degree. At 20 he joined the Zenith Radio Company, as it was then known, as a stock boy earning 40 cents an hour.

Mechanically adept, he worked his way into the engineering department. During World War II Mr. Polley, on loan from Zenith, worked for the United States military on bomb fuses and ship-detecting radar.

After the war, as TV sets began to colonize American homes, Zenith’s president, Eugene F. McDonald, faced a quandary. Mr. McDonald, who held a utopian view of the new medium, was certain that viewers would revolt en masse against television commercials, by his lights a growing scourge.

But until that halcyon day arrived, Mr. McDonald knew, he needed to offer consumers a stopgap, and he enlisted the company’s engineers to make it.

Ad of Lazybones remote

The first TV remote, called Lazy Bones, was introduced by Zenith in 1950. It had one profound drawback, however: a cable snaking from the remote to the set, over which users were inclined to trip.

Mr. McDonald enlisted Mr. Polley to build a wireless remote, and the Flash-Matic was born. The hand-held device emitted a visible beam of light, which consumers could point at a compatible TV set.

The new, purpose-built sets had a photo cell embedded in each corner of the screen; the viewer activated the cell by “shooting” it with the remote. One cell changed the channel up, another changed the channel down, a third muted the sound, and the fourth turned the set on and off.

A 1955 Flash-matic remote

The device proved popular: during its first and only year of existence, 30,000 Flash-Matic sets were sold.

But there were difficulties. Because the system was light-activated, sunlight hitting the TV screen could cause the channels to change in spontaneous roulette. Viewers also had trouble remembering which corner of the screen controlled which function.

Mr. Adler improved Mr. Polley’s device by making it responsive to sound instead of light. His remote, called Space Command, used inaudible, high-frequency sound waves to control the set. It, too, had problems — it could be set off by the sound of jangling keys or rattling coins — but was deemed enough of an improvement on its predecessor to be brought to market in 1956.

A Space Command Remote

From that year to the early 1980s, when infrared remotes became standard, more than nine million sets controlled by Space Command technology were sold.

Mr. Polley, a longtime resident of Lombard, Ill., had lived most recently in Glen Ellyn, Ill. He is survived by a son, Eugene Jr., and a grandson. His wife, the former Blanche Wiley, died before him, as did a daughter, Joan Polley.

With other colleagues, Mr. Adler and Mr. Polley represented Zenith when it was given a special Emmy Award in 1997 for its development of wireless remotes.

Mr. Adler died in 2007. Zenith has said publicly that it considers him and Mr. Polley the joint inventors of the device. Mr. Polley begged to differ. “A father has to be present at conception,” he said in a 2002 interview. “And if you’re not, you’re not that father.”

From one lazybones who spend a lot of time in front of the tv, Thank you Mr. Polley. I’d be much more active if it were not for you.

Related articles

• TV Remote Control Inventor Eugene Polley Dead at 96 (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Eugene Polley, inventor of TV remote, dies (variety.com)
• Eugene Polley, Inventor Of The TV Remote, Has Died | Complex (thehiltonburnellfiles.wordpress.com)