Lez Get Real

House Passes Emasculated Violence Against Women Act

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:13:16 +0000

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

And the Republican War on Women continues apace as they pass in the House a neutered version of the Violence Against Women Act. It is version that has the support of a misogynistic “men’s rights” group, opponents of LGBT rights, and even a few businesses that make their money essentially selling foreign women to men as brides.

The Republican version of the bill strips out provisions that protect undocumented, Native American, and LGBT victims of domestic violence. Those are in the Senate version. It now goes before the conference committee.

Think Progress notes that:

23 Republicans voted against the passage of the bill, while 6 Democrats voted in favor of it.
Update

196 men voted in favor of the watered-down version of the bill today: 191 Republicans, 5 Democrats.

The House’s vote comes as there has been a great deal of politicization of the bill by Republicans trying to gain points politically while trying to strip women of just about every right they have. DNC Chair, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told reporters that she had actually heard House Speaker John Boehner order his caucus to move the VAWA as far to the right as they could in order to score political points. Think Progress reports:

RYAN GRIM of the Huffington Post: I’d heard that the Republican leadership wasn’t very happy with the committee for going how far right they went with this. Had you heard anything that–

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Actually, I’d heard that this was a direct directive from John Boehner himself. So…

GRIM: What’s the thinking in that?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: You know, I think their obsession with opposing immigration at every possible turn has permeated every single possible bill, including things that are normally as mom and apple pie as reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

The House version also got the support of the National Coalition for Men. They argued in a letter Tuesday written by Harry Crouch stating that “Those opposing H.R. 4970 loudly assert that VAWA serves all people, which is absurd on its face given the name of the Act. Opposing versions, by omission and lack of specificity, generally exclude men, particularly heterosexual men, regardless of specious arguments to the contrary.”

Crouch wants heterosexual men to be included in the act’s protection, but still dismisses any criticism of the House’s version of the bill stating “It’s almost like people want to say we want to go out and abuse women. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. It’s total idiocy to see an intelligent person elected to Congress stand up and look across the aisle and accuse someone of being in favor of opening the doors to abuse for more people. . .As far as I know, we’re the only gender-inclusive organization of our type on the planet, so I would hope that our organization would be helpful. And I think we have been, since for the last two years we’ve been participating in outreach and education efforts to bring to light some of the issues with respect to the current VAWA.”

While the NCM claims that it is there to raise awareness about the ways that sex discrimination affects men and boys, they often do so in misogynistic ways that often hurt women’s rights at the expense of advancing their agenda.

Sugar Makes You Stupid says New Study

J. Wolffe — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:08:48 +0000

A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning — and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract the disruption. The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology publishes the findings in its May 15 edition.

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”

While earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, this study is the first to uncover how the sweetener influences the brain.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup

The UCLA team zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We’re not talking about naturally occurring fructose in fruits, which also contain important antioxidants,” explained Gomez-Pinilla, who is also a member of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute and Brain Injury Research Center. “We’re concerned about high-fructose corn syrup that is added to manufactured food products as a sweetener and preservative.”

Gomez-Pinilla and study co-author Rahul Agrawal, a UCLA visiting postdoctoral fellow from India, studied two groups of rats that each consumed a fructose solution as drinking water for six weeks. The second group also received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the synapses — the chemical connections between brain cells that enable memory and learning.

“DHA is essential for synaptic function — brain cells’ ability to transmit signals to one another,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “This is the mechanism that makes learning and memory possible. Our bodies can’t produce enough DHA, so it must be supplemented through our diet.”

The Testing;

The animals were fed standard rat chow and trained on a maze twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. The UCLA team tested how well the rats were able to navigate the maze, which contained numerous holes but only one exit. The scientists placed visual landmarks in the maze to help the rats learn and remember the way.

Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats’ ability to recall the route and escape the maze. What they saw surprised them.

“The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats’ ability to think clearly and recall the route they’d learned six weeks earlier.”

Average Lab Rat

The DHA-deprived rats also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates synaptic function in the brain. A closer look at the rats’ brain tissue suggested that insulin had lost much of its power to influence the brain cells.

“Because insulin can penetrate the blood–brain barrier, the hormone may signal neurons to trigger reactions that disrupt learning and cause memory loss,” Gomez-Pinilla said.

He suspects that fructose is the culprit behind the DHA-deficient rats’ brain dysfunction. Eating too much fructose could block insulin’s ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar for the energy required for processing thoughts and emotions.

“Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning,” he said. “Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new.”

Fudge Sundaes...Yum

Still planning to throw caution to the wind and indulge in a hot-fudge sundae? Then also eat foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, walnuts and flaxseeds, or take a daily DHA capsule. Gomez-Pinilla recommends one gram of DHA per day.

“Our findings suggest that consuming DHA regularly protects the brain against fructose’s harmful effects,” said Gomez-Pinilla. “It’s like saving money in the bank. You want to build a reserve for your brain to tap when it requires extra fuel to fight off future diseases.”

Sugar Makes You Stupid: Study Shows High Fructose Diet Sabotages Learning and Memory (neurosciencenews.com)
US scientists discover sugar erodes mental prowess (thehimalayantimes.com)
High-Fructose Corn Syrup Can Make You Dumb, U.S. Scientists Warn (cryptogon.com)

Bill Maher On US’s “First Gay President”

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:34:34 +0000

Comedian Bill Maher

Newsweek has declared that Barack Obama is, somehow, the “First Gay President”. . .just like Bill Clinton was the “First Black President”. Personally, I think the whole idea of declaring who is the first of something when they aren’t really part of that minority is rather stupid. Last night, Bill Maher went on “Conan” where he shared some thoughts about the whole thing by first noting that the headline on Newsweek was an allusion to Toni Morrison’s remarks about Bill Clinton.

Maher stated:

She said [Clinton] was the first black president because she said so many things about him were similar to the black experience. Single mother, working class, grew up poor. Then she said ‘saxophone playing,’ as if all black people do that. McDonald’s eating… Okay, so Clinton was like black people for those reasons. What about Obama is gay? I don’t understand how this translates. What does he do that’s gay?

Raven-Symone Outted by OUT Magazine

J. Wolffe — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:58:27 +0000

from Thats So Raven

Some of you may remember Raven Symone as the adorable Olivia on The Cosby Show. You may know her from Disney’s The Cheetah Girls, or even watched her shows Thats So Raven or 2011′s State of Georgia. She may have just joined Broadway’s Sister Act as a faux-nun, but now it seems the actress Raven-Symoné (the way she’s currently spelling it) is being outed as something else entirely: a lesbian.

According to an excerpt of a report obtained by MediaTakeOut: “Sources close to Raven say she’s GAY and has shacked up with AzMarie Livingston, the androgynous beauty seen on America’s Next Top Model. The two are living together in Raven’s luxury $11,00-a-month New York City condo. She’s at a point now where she doesn’t care what her family thinks, and she’s in love with AzMarie. She’s a lesbian and wants to live that way.”

Symone as nun

In a March interview, when the 26-year-old joined Sister Act, the actress seemed to want to keep her personal life out of the spotlight when she answered an interviewer with “The best advice that I can give is: It’s about the work. It’s really about you putting yourself into your work and your career and focusing on that, and not going for the shiny, fake gold teeth that you find out later are not real gold. Go for the long haul. And hopefully it works. I don’t talk about anything else but my work, and that’s what I’m doing and that’s what I portray.“

While it all could be rumors and tabloid fodder at this point, but the angle they’re going with this is that “She’s at a point now where she doesn’t care what her family thinks, and she’s in love with AzMarie. She’s a lesbian and wants to live that way.” And if that’s the case, we say: Good for her!

(Editor’s Note: This is being reported in both the National Enquirer and OUT Magazine)

Raven-Symone And Whoopi Goldberg Talk About “Sister Act” On Broadway [VIDEO] (hellobeautiful.com)
Teen Choice Awards: Raven-Symone (fabsugar.com)
Raven Symone Sister Act Broadway Debut Photos (binsidetv.net)

Homophobia War Opens Up Between Suge Knight, Tupac Shakur’s Family

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:56:11 +0000

Apparently there is something of a feud going on between Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur’s family over whether or not the late rapper was homophobic. Shakur’s family point to a great friendship between Shakur and Gianni Versace, who is openly gay. Knight has been on a media tour lately and stated that Shakur ended his professional relationship because Suge thought that Shakur was gay.

Shakur’s family has told TMZ that the claims are “totally false”. TMZ also reports that the family “point to his friendship with the famous designer Gianni Versace, who was an openly gay man. In fact, Tupac reportedly participated in a Versace fashion show in Italy back in 1996 … and even rocked a Versace suit on the catwalk.”

Maddow Exposes FOX’s Latest Manufactured Scandal

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:59:00 +0000

For anyone who has been part of the LGBT Rights Struggle for the last several years you know that those on the Right are terrified about losing business. In fact, they want to remain as far in the dark as they can because they know that their hatred of others. FOX is desperate to try and manufacture something- anything- to smear President Barack Obama, and are apparently peeing all over themselves because they cannot seem to manage to actually come up with anything at all coherent.

Of course, you know, the idea that the Obama is targeting Romney’s donors could backfire. . .just the way that the National Organization for Marriage and others discovered soon after they started pushing the idea that they have to keep their donors secret because they could be targeted.

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

Cartoons Reimagined: Teen Titans

J. Wolffe — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:03:32 +0000

Some of you may remember a show called The Teen Titans. If not you can catch episodes on Boomerang every night around 11pm. For those of you familiar with the crime-fighting team; here’s some re-imagined art fr you based on the group.

Teen Titans Grown up

Movie for TT

Costume Swap

Titans Prom Pix

Gender Bent Titans

PowerPuff Titans

Civilian StarFire & Raven

StarFire Grown

Victorian Raven

Costume swap

BeastBoy

Cyborg cosplay

KND's # 5 as Robin

Raven & BeastBoy Grown

Cyborg Pencil

Sexy StarFire

Titan Lesbians

Starfire Meets Her Nieces And Nephews in ‘New Teen Titans’ Clip [Video] (comicsalliance.com)
First Look: New “Teen Titans” Short From Cartoon Network’s DC Nation (spinoff.comicbookresources.com)
Teen Titans Enjoy Pizza, Burping in New Scene from DC Nation (spinoff.comicbookresources.com)

Lohan Tries to Rebrand Self on Glee

J. Wolffe — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:08:14 +0000

Lohan on Glee

Linsey Lohan is trying to rebrand her image for anyone willing to hire her. After her trouble in courts and on the road, she’s a commodity that no one wants to touch…except Glee.

Appearing as a Nationals judge on Tuesday’s episode of FOX‘s Glee, the 25-year-old actress pledged her love for McKinley High’s New Directions when deliberating with judges Perez Hilton and Rex Lee as to which team should win the coveted competition title.

Lohan — appearing as herself — favored the Lea Michele and Cory Monteith-fronted group not just for their vocals, but for their heart. “They weren’t the best singers and dancers, but they were likable,” she reasoned to blogger Hilton, who played himself, and Entourage‘s Lee, who appeared as Alderman Martin Fong.

Said Lohan, who declared she was “robbed” of critical acclaim for 2003′s Freaky Friday: “I’m here because I care about young artists chasing their dreams. And who doesn’t like someone making a comeback?!”, making a little plug for herself.

Diva Lohan

During her deliberations, Lohan — who was reportedly a “diva” on set during the three-day filming session (she showed up 2 hours late for filming with no excuse, leaving the cast and crew to use a stand-in until she showed up.) — was miffed when she found out her appearance at Nationals wouldn’t be televised like other popular music competitions.

“I am in full image rebranding mode,” she said. “I come here and there’s not even a chair that can spin me around…I can’t point at a kid on stage and yell ‘I want to work with you!’ I am so firing my manager.”

In the end, Lohan’s instincts were spot-on, and she was able to convince her colleagues that New Directions should take the title, upsetting last season’s champs Vocal Adrenaline. Personally I found the choirs’ performances and Tina’s body swap dream faaar more interesting than Lohan’s attempt to save her career.

Watch Lindsay Lohan’s Hilarious Guest Spot on ‘Glee’ (5min.com)
Glee ‘Props/Nationals’ Review: “GLEE Blew My Mind For Two Hours … What a Wonderful Nationals!” (muhsadam.wordpress.com)
Lindsay Lohan and Rex Lee to Guest Star on Glee (shoppingblog.com)

No PDAs In Tennessee

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:59:24 +0000

Originally published May 12, 2012

For over a decade, the State of Tennessee has mandated stressing abstinence in their sex education courses. Now, they will stress not engaging in “gateway sexual activity” as well.

The law is kind of vague about what constitutes “gateway sexual activity” or how a teacher or guest speaker could be advocating it, but if someone decides that those vague guidelines have been breached, the teacher could face fines up to $500 and suspension and parents could sue the teacher. School district employees would be exempt from prosecution under the law, but not guest speakers, like someone from Planned Parenthood, for example.

David Fowler, president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, the group that pushed the legislation, said that it doesn’t ban kissing or holding hands from discussion, just don’t in any way intimate that it is acceptable to touch specific body parts, genitals, buttocks, breasts and the inner thigh.

Sorry, I just flashed on an incident that occurred on the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 series. There was an NBC standards rule that forbid the showing of the underside of a woman’s breast, a rule that caused Star Trek’s original costume designer William Ware Theiss to quip, “What do they think, moss grows there?” In honor of Theiss, who died in 1992, the designers on DS9 created costumes for the bar waitresses that exposed their under-breasts.

Anyway, the new rules are supposed to curtail activity by teenagers that might lead to sexual contact. No mention was made about sports team members smacking each other on the ass.

According to the most recent available statistics, Tennessee has the distinction of having 44.5% of all its babies born to unwed mothers, and 29.6% of all pregnancies were teenaged mothers. Just a year ago, 90 girls at one Memphis high school were preggers. The highest rates of teen pregnancy are in the Deep South, California and New York State. Poverty is a large factor, especially in California and New York, but ignorance is just as big a cause of unwed, teen motherhood.

With a third of all babies in Tennessee born to girls under 19, and almost half to unwed mothers, there really isn’t any evidence that abstinence-stress sex education is accomplishing anything. Or in simpler terms: How’s that no-sex thing working out for you, Tennessee?

Tennessee Approves Abstinence-Only Bill: “Gateway Sexual Activity” Leads To Evil(joemygod.blogspot.com)
Tennessee targets ‘gateway sexual activities’(maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com)
GOP Gov Acts On Controversial Bill That Targets ‘Gateway Sexual Activity’(huffingtonpost.com)
New Tennessee law aims to curb teaching ‘gateway sexual activity’(usnews.msnbc.msn.com)

Gateway sexual activity discussions banned from Tennessee classrooms (examiner.com)
No PDAs In Tennessee (pinkbananaworld.com)
New Tennessee Law Bans Sex Ed Instructors From Teaching ‘Gateway Sexual Activity’ [Sex Ed] (gawker.com)

The State Of Marriage In America

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:44:01 +0000

Marriage Certificate, 1875

Originally published May 11, 2012

The right wing avers that allowing gays to marry will destroy traditional marriage in America. They never say how, but they are sure it will happen. Too late. Traditional marriage is already in trouble, and gays had nothing to do with it. Neither did Kim Kardashian. She simply provided fathers with a really good argument against $25,000 custom wedding dresses and million dollar receptions.

Fifty years ago, 72% of Americans were married. Today, the number is just under 50%. The United States isn’t the only place experiencing this phenomenon. When my husband’s family in Canada held their last reunion a few years ago, the organizers got tired of trying to sort out spouses and non-spouses and just put “partner” on the name tags. Britain, France, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong are all reporting deep drops in the number of couples getting married.

In spite of the right wing nonsense, marriage has always been an economic arrangement. The rich and titled used marriage to join property, assure inheritances, merge businesses, cement international treaties. The poor didn’t bother to get married which is why the concept of common-law marriages arose. If two people stuck together long enough, they were considered married for legal purposes. Marriage was very much an upper-class thing until the emergence of a mercantile class. It was the middle class that set the standard of what the right calls traditional marriage. The economic factor was subtler than joining two estates or receiving a massive dowry that paid off the debtors. Money, property or value was not an open part of marriage negotiations in the middle class. Women wanted a husband who could support them because they were barred from earning their own incomes. Men often wanted a wife who might be able to advance their careers, which accounts for over half the signers of our Constitution marrying the daughter, sister or widow of an employer. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington became members of the landed gentry because of their marriages.

People in the middle class were also those most attached to a moral standard and a religious standard. So, within those moral and religious strictures, the only place for sex (which women weren’t supposed to enjoy anyway) was marriage, and sex was only supposed to be for procreation. A child born out of wedlock, and the mother, were spurned by society, relegated to the fringes of society, condemned to poverty and deprivation, or in their pregnant state, the girls were whisked off out of sight, the babies were disposed of into orphanages and the girls returned to their families to be handed over to the first man who expressed willingness to marry “sullied goods.” Discovering on his wedding night that his bride was not a virgin, was legal justification for divorce in many cultures.

Two factors blew up the traditional marriage model. The pill removed the fear of pregnancy if a woman had sex before marriage. And women started making strides in the workplace. They became able to support themselves.

There was a debate that occurred in Georgia a few years ago among black college students and college graduates. The women were questioned (more like challenged by black men) as to why they were either dating white men or having babies out-of-wedlock and dumping the fathers. They said that there were not enough black males going to college and able to match the women’s intellectual or financial achievements. As women became able to control their reproductive choices and their financial situations, men became optional.

The definition of why people got married changed. The modern prime motivation was supposed to be “love.” The only problem with that was the discovery that being “in love” is a chemical and biological state related to sexual passion and not a logical, rational emotion based on common values, goals and interests. There comes a point where the passion becomes secondary to the need for a best friend and partner. There is a moment when the ability to talk to each other overrides everything else. That revelation brought about a spike in divorce rates.

Is same sex marriage responsible for the decline in straight marriage? No way. Traditional marriage is still popular among those who live traditional lives bound on all sides by gender roles and religious morality. The problem is not that the existence of gay marriage diminishes the value of straight marriage, but that it shows young people there are alternative ways of thinking about gender roles and the structure of marriage.

Conservatives and followers of certain religious ideologies want to keep their kids locked up in a world where the only things they see or hear are “acceptable” ways of thinking or being. Tony Perkins of the American Family Research Council has stated that his children will never be gay because he and his wife raise them properly. But to keep them in that state, he must deny them access to thoughts outside of his narrow views. For that reason, Perkins wants gays back in the closet and religion to control our civil laws. For that reason, anti-abortionists also oppose birth control and fact-based sex education, and favor public shaming of those who become pregnant out of marriage. It’s a control issue, not a morality issue. They are losing, which is making them double down on their attempts to push the world back into the fantasy framework of the 1950s when no one saw or acknowledged those things that did not fit the “traditional” model, even though those non-traditional things existed all around us.

Where is marriage in America today? The following states have same-sex marriage: Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. It is pending in California, Maryland, New Jersey and Washington.

Common law marriages still exist in Alabama, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah. In New Hampshire they are legally effective for settling an estate, and in Georgia, Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania a couple who were considered “common lawed” before a certain date must obtain a legal divorce to terminate the marriage.

Civil unions exist in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. There are legally recognized domestic partnerships in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Maine and Wisconsin (the last three have very restricted rights attached).

Laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman exist in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming. The first three bar same-sex marriage while allowing civil unions.

And those states whose populations have been persuaded to amend their state constitutions because same-sex marriage will bring about Armageddon are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Nevada and Oregon have domestic partnerships.

California’s amendment is in the courts, and the result of that law suit will determine the future of all these amendments. As much as conservatives love to lament “activist judges” Georgia’s amendment is a shining example of conservative activist judges. The state constitution clearly requires an amendment have only one clause. The same-sex marriage ban has two. The amendment was argued to the Georgia Supreme Court on that single issue – it’s consitutionality under their constitution. The judges upheld the amendment, denying their own constitution.

Mecklenburg board votes, 5-4, to oppose marriage amendment(goqnotes.com)
Biblical / Traditional Marriage is … what exactly?(brgulker.wordpress.com)
Obama talks same-sex marriage on “The View”(cnn.com)

Rush Limbaugh Accuses Obama Of Leading War On Marriage (lezgetreal.com)
There Is No Such Thing As “Traditional Marriage” (outsidethebeltway.com)
Five myths about gay marriage (topix.net)
Traditional marriage and families debunked (queeringthechurch.com)

Kennedy Center Honors Ellen DeGeneres

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:36:28 +0000

Ellen DeGeneres. . .for the LGBT Community and the lesbian community especially there is no bigger name. The spokeswoman for JC Penneys, the first actor to play a lead character in a TV show to come out as gay, and devoted wife to the lovely Portia di Rossi has won the nation’s top humor prize- the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. She will get the award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on 22 October in a star studded tribute show.

DeGeneres showed her sense of humor when she asked about the award “why didn’t I get this sooner?”

Past winners include Will Ferrell, Bill Cosby and Tina Fey. The award was first created in 1998, and the first winner was Richard Pryor. Some big names have won this award besides just Ferrell, Cosby and Fey. DeGeneres is not the first lesbian to win this award, though. That honor goes to Lily Tomlin, who won in 2003.

The Huffington Post noted that:

It was 15 years ago – just before the humor prize was created – when DeGeneres came out on Time magazine’s cover and as her character on the sitcom “Ellen” to a record 46 million viewers. The popular show began losing viewers, though, and was canceled a year later. DeGeneres said at the time that ABC caved in to fear and abandoned the show. She faced tough questions over whether the sitcom was “too gay” and if she had torpedoed her career by pushing a “gay agenda.”

“When I’m accused of becoming political, I’m showing love,” DeGeneres told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a 1998 interview. “How is that political to teach love and acceptance?”

The rejection was enough to send DeGeneres into a deep depression.

“Ellen” paved the way, though, for future shows to also break the taboo of showing gay characters. “Will and Grace” would follow, along with “Glee,” “Modern Family” and others.

The prize honors humorists and comedians who have an impact on society in the tradition of Samuel Clemens. Clemens wrote as Mark Twain, and often used humor to talk about social issues, and was known as a prominent satirist.

Cappy McGarr, an executive producer for the Mark Twain Prize show and a Kennedy Center board member, stated that “She’s not just a comedian. She’s really a miracle worker. She got the president to dance, the first lady to do pushups and (Republican) Tom Delay to laugh. . .This has nothing to do with any political issue. But she’s brilliantly shined a light on society, and that’s what Mark Twain did.”

We can expect One Million Moms to condemn this move by the Kennedy Center, and for them to organize an attempt to get them to retract their decision.

Oldest Mayan Calendar Found

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:31:48 +0000

Mayan wall painting, Xultun, Guatemala

Originally published May 11, 2012

Okay, folks, stop packing or whatever you all are doing in preparation for December….the world is not going to end according to the oldest Mayan calendar ever found.

In a residence in Xultun, Guatemala, there has been found a calendar dating to the 9^th century C.E., up to 400 years before the bark-paper calendars that have convince people the world will end this year. The walls of the residence are covered with scribbles and scrawls, and mathematic equations and computations. William Saturno, of Boston University, who is leading the excavation team, said the writings on the wall appear to include the 365-day cycle of earth’s orbit, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. They may be one of the earliest attempts at combining celestial events with terrestrial events to create the calendar, which is a complex mathematical formulation in two number bases, which are frankly beyond my math skills. I barely manage in base-10 and binary. The writings seem to be an attempt to align these known celestial events with sacred rituals, which would reinforce the idea that this calendar is an early one and part of the evolution of the Mayan calendar.

Saturno wrote in the journal Science that the wall writings look like blackboard notes. “For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Mayan community. The ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this. We keep looking for ending. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”

Co-author Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University wrote, “It’s like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to the 130,000s. The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn, the Maya just start over. The most exciting point is that we now see that the Maya were making such computations hundreds of years — and in places other than books — before they recorded them in the Codices.”

Some Mayan scholars had already put forth the theory that the Mayan calendar did not call for the end of the world, but a gender shift from masculine to feminine.

Xultun, which is a 12-square-mile city where tens of thousands of Mayan lived, was stumbled upon 100 years ago, but this particular house was only found in 2010. All Central American sites suffer from this problem of being over-grown by the jungle and lost to modern man. Excavating them is a race against the jungle. Every excavation season begins with having to reclaim the parts of the sites they cleared the season before, so progress is very slow.

The house is an extraordinary find. It is common for wall paintings to survive in ancient Egyptian sites because of the desert climate, but Guatemala is a rain forest and humid climates tend to eat wall paint with molds and insects and plant roots. This is the first example of Mayan art ever found in a house interior. The house was actually buried by over a thousand years of forest decay material so it was three feet below the surface. Its position under the soil, practically an incubator for destructive forces, would make this site exceptional even if the wall paintings were pre-Columbian Audubon studies.

Islamists Hijacking Conflict In Syria, Bolstering Al-Assad

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:25:38 +0000

Burning suicide bomb cars, Damascus, May 10, 2012, from Sana, the official Syrian news outlet

Originally published May 11, 2012

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said all along that foreign terrorists are invading Syria and he is defending his country. He has been proven right, and those foreign terrorists are destroying any chance the opposition had of getting meaningful reform in Syria.

A deadly double-car bombing in a neighborhood in Damascus that houses a Syrian security building killed over 70 people and injured almost 400 on Thursday. Casualty figures are still being assembled. The recent bombings in Damascus are classic Islamic terrorist tactics, and are reinforcing al-Assad’s position and justifying his actions. They thought they could take advantage of the Syrian rebellion to influence and turn the rebellion to the creation of an Islamic nation like Iran, instead they are ruining everything. On Friday, Syrian security forces shot and killed a man who had 2,645 pounds of explosives in a car. The average car only weighs 3,500 pounds, and can only carry around 1,000 pounds of passengers and cargo. The report doesn’t say if blowing out all the tires gave the bomber away. Friday’s incident took place in Aleppo, the second biggest city in Syria.

Opposition activists both in and outside Syria say that there has been an infiltration of foreign Islamists into Syria who are carrying out these bombing attacks. They are not coming from the Free Syrian Army or citizens opposed to the regime. They are worried that the attacks, and the clear association with Islamic terror organizations, will caused the international support of the opposition to collapse.

Which leads to a difficult question…..What are these Islamists hoping to accomplish? The al-Assad regime has been a supporter of terrorism, most specifically of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s activities against Israel. So, are they hoping to destroy the opposition by proving al-Assad’s position and preserve the regime? Syria is also one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. The ruling regime is made up of members of a minority sect, the Alawites, and there is no government imposition of a specific Islamic sect. There has always been a certain degree of protection in Syria, as there was in Egypt, for Islamic sects and non-Islamic religions. Are they trying to take over the rebellion and turn Syria into an Islamic nation like Iran?

These attacks are shredding the ceasefire agreement. The double bomb in Damascus went off dangerously close to where the United Nations monitors were. There is only one thing the opposition can do to preserve their ability to force change in Syria – they must root out these foreign terrorists and let the regime know where to find them.

The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. It is necessary to be very selective of which enemy one aligns with. It’s the single greatest lesson for people in the Middle East. Both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were opposed to the emerging independent governance of the Kurdish region of Iraq in 2000-01, but for different reasons. To Hussein, they were defying his rule. To bin Laden, they were not purist establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. Bin Laden was Hussein’s enemy, because bin Laden wanted to recreate the Caliphate and that meant he would have to personally take over control of Baghdad, one of the five cities of the Arab Golden Age. Hussein stood in the way of bin Laden’s ambition. But to fight the joint enemy of the Kurds, bin Laden and Hussein sometimes exchanged messages at a single al Qaida camp and those communications were used by the Bush administration as part of the justification for invading Iraq.

The al-Assad regime must prove that it is not using these terrorists, who may have ties to organizations supported by the regime, to bolster al-Assad’s claims of defending his nation from an outside invasion. The opposition must prove that these terrorists are not part of their effort to oust the al-Assad family and allies from their forty-year grip on power. This third player must be isolated and destroyed so that the only people who matter in this rebellion can get back to trying to stop the killing and make the reforms.

Update, May 15, 2012:

There are now foreign journalists on the ground in Syria. Among the stories they have reported in the past three days, while we were off-line, government snipers attacked a funeral, shooting over 20 mourners; around 25 government troops have been killed; bombs have been detonated by the foreign terrorists and a U.N. monitors’ vehicle hit a roadside bomb, no casualties. Though the killing is described by civilians as “diminished” it is continuing, with conflicting reports as to responsibility.

23 troops killed, EU slaps new sanctions on Syria(dailystar.com.lb)
The Syria Crisis: Is Al-Qaeda Intervening in the Conflict?(time.com)
Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO) Condemns the Bomb Attacks in Damascus, Holds the Syrian Government Responsible(prweb.com)

Islamists Hijacking Conflict In Syria, Bolstering Al-Assad (pinkbananaworld.com)
Syrian Christians fear Islamist rule if Assad goes (refreshingnews99.blogspot.com)
Islamists deny Syria attack claim (bbc.co.uk)
You: How the Arab Spring Beat Al Qaeda (thedailybeast.com)

Harry Reid Finally Grows A Set

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:17:30 +0000

"Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" James Stewart -- this is what a filibuster should look like

Originally published May 11, 2012

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, has announced that on the first day of Congress in January, if the Democrats retain control of the Senate, he will reform the filibuster process. Senate rules can be changed on the first business day of a new Congress, each “Congress” being the two years of a Congressperson’s term. The first day is Constitutionally set as January 3, but is usually delayed for a few days. Rule changes can be done on a straight majority vote and cannot be delayed with a filibuster.

The filibuster was made famous in popular culture with an old movie called Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In it, James Stewart, playing a freshman Senator, engages in a classic filibuster – he talks himself into exhaustion. Vermont’s Independent Bernie Sanders is the last remaining member of the Senate who has pulled of a classic, with an 8 hour, 37 minute speech he gave on December 10, 2010, on the tax deal pending at that time.

Over time, the filibuster has evolved until it is a secret method to bar debate on a bill brought from the House. One Senator can file an objection to the bill and it can only be debated if 60 senators vote to override the filibuster, a process called cloture. The record-setting use of the filibuster by the Republicans goes back to the last two years of the Bush 43 administration, when the Democrats controlled the House. The Republicans fillibustered 139 bills, and only 61 reached the floor for debate. In the first two years of the Obama administration, they filed 137 filibusters, and 63 reached debate. Last year and so far in this year, 83 filibusters and 26 debates. When the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate Republicans killed 152 bills. With the Republicans in control of the House, they have killed 57 bills. Any bill not passed by the end of the two-year term of a Congress is dead.

The 74 bills that the filibustered killed in 2009-2010 don’t include the filibustered appointments. Those are not bills and are not counted as such. The total came in just under 300 successful filibusters. They have to be renewed after a period of time, and it fell to South Carolina’s Jim DeMint to renew them, a job he performed with unseemly relish.

In 2010, ahead of the Congressional elections, people were clamoring for changes to the filibuster rule, to drop the number of votes needed to achieve cloture or to require Senators to do a Bernie. Reid decided that if his party lost the Senate, they would want to still have the power of the filibuster, so he declined to change the rules. Now, he’s woken up to the way this has been so viciously abused. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed that the Republican’s on job in 2009 was to make Obama a one-term president, and the Republicans are using the lack of legislation passed as a hammer against the President. They have ignored the filibuster in their own media so it look like the Democrats have done nothing for three years.

If, as expected, the Democrats retain control of the Senate, even if they lose a couple of seats, Harry Reid will finally do what he should have done in 2009 – sink the Republicans’ vicious tactic which has kept our government stagnating for over three years.

I don’t think this is what Reid’s 2010 election opponent Sharron Angle meant when she told Reid to “man up.”

Editorial: Not Too Late to Curb the Filibuster(nytimes.com)
Harry Reid Calls For Filibuster Reform, 15 Months Too Late(outsidethebeltway.com)
Senate filibuster makes Washington unaccountable(blogs.ajc.com)
Harry Reid: We should have done filibuster reform(dailykos.com)
Going nuclear: Frustrated Harry Reid wants to reform the filibuster(theblaze.com)

Harry Reid Finally Grows A Set (pinkbananaworld.com)
Group sues Senate to scrap filibuster (politico.com)

NARAL Director To Step Down

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:09:10 +0000

Nancy Keenan

Originally published May 10, 2012

Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, has decided to leave her post at the end of the year. She believes that younger leadership is needed at this time.

In Keenan’s view, there is not that same level of passion defending abortion as there is opposing it, and in large part that may be because women of her generation cannot properly relate the need to the group known as “millennials” – women born between 1980 and 1991.

NARAL is 43-years-old, and for the past three years have been using surveys and focus groups to understand young voters. The group hopes to unveil its new campaign to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January.

They may have been asking the wrong people the wrong questions. NARAL should have been asking women my age and older what they think.

Younger women don’t remember the world before Roe v. Wade. They don’t know about　the women who died of illegal abortions, the women who died with their babies because their pregnancies were lethal, the women who were permanently maimed in illegal abortions. They don’t understand illegal abortion at all. They don’t understand what it means that a half-million illegal abortions were performed in Argentina last year, a country of only 40 million people where birth control is still a new concept. We oldsters are the only link younger women have to why the right to an abortion is just as important as the right to birth control. We stand in testimony to that need. We had relatives or friends who died, knew women whose lives were destroyed when they were just teenagers by having to give birth to their own father’s child, witnessed the battle over the thalidomide babies and those few women who could afford to go to Europe for an abortion. We know the emotional pain and guilt an abortion can cause, particularly if it is delayed. We know it is not a cavalier decision to improve life-style, but a heart-wrenching choice made in desperation. We understand that the current climate of reducing assistance in social programs is going to make things even more desperate and make more women feel they have no choice but an abortion, and if they cannot get those abortions legally, they will try to self-abort or find an underground abortionist. We know that the delays caused by trying to find and pay for an illegal abortion really does kill babies, viable babies.

We understand that we should not just be fighting for the right to an abortion but for all those things will make abortion less necessary – birth control that women can afford, family planning services, factual and thorough sex education, all those things that are just as much at risk as the right to an abortion.

Removing older women from the mix removes our knowledge and that is an unacceptable loss. Younger women need to know why we must fight for this right, and only those of us who were there at the beginning can explain it.

President Of Abortion Rights Group NARAL Will Step Down In January(npr.org)
NARAL endorses Obama(politico.com)

Justice Department Suing Sheriff Joe

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:05:05 +0000

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (with thanks to Creative Commons)

Originally published May 10, 2012

The Department of Justice has finally gotten tired of trying to be co-operative and rational in dealing with Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. They are going to sue him.

The DoJ had to find a way to deal with hundreds of complaints about racial discrimination in the Sheriff’s Office, ranging from vigilante sweeps of “illegals” to racial profiling to failure to investigate crimes committed against Hispanics. They tried to find a way to work out these problems without shutting down the Sheriff’s Office and turning law enforcement in Maricopa County over to the Federal Marshal’s Office or the National Guard, which is the most extreme response to a corrupt law enforcement agency. But Arpaio has fought them tooth and nail all through the investigation and is resisting the least intrusive involvement of the DoJ in “his” department.

So, it is time to prove to Joe Arpaio that it is not “his” department, but the law enforcement agency of the people of Maricopa County and that includes the Hispanic population. Maricopa County is 58.7% white and 31.7% Hispanic and Native American. Arpaio has chosen to be the Sheriff of the 60% at the expense of the 30% and that is both unethical and illegal.

The agreement the DoJ originally reached with Arpaio called for training for deputies in how to make constitutional traffic stops, how to collect data on people arrest in traffic stops, how to rebuild the department’s relationship with the Hispanic community, an essential factor in fighting drug smuggling and distribution. Arpaio was supposed to reopen over 400 rape and sexual assault cases involving Hispanic women and children, and make arrests. There was supposed to be a court-appointed monitor to make sure that the training was carried through in daily implementation.

Arpaio refuses to permit the monitor. He says it would demean his authority by putting every decision through the monitor instead of being issued by him. It has also been revealed through audio tapes of his speeches outside of Arizona that he has no intention of complying with the DoJ or pulling back on any of his racist policies.

The DoJ informed Arpaio’s lawyer on April 3^rd that the refusal to accept the court monitor was a deal breaker, and on May 9^th, Assistant U. S. Attorney General Thomas Perez notified Arpaio’s lawyers of the DoJ’s “intent to file civil action.” Perez, head of the DoJ Civil Rights Division, filed its findings with the Maricopa Sheriff’s Office more than 100 days earlier, and Arpaio’s lawyers have ignored requests for meetings since February.

Arpaio came out swinging, as always. At a news conference, he accused the DoJ of breaking off communication. “If they sue, we’ll go to court, and then we’ll find out the real story…They’re telling me how to run my organization. I’d like to get this resolved, but I’m not going to give up my authority to the Federal government. It’s as simple as that.”

He may be running out of time to bluster and fume at Federal authority. Arpaio is implicated in a conspiracy to investigate and bring criminal charges against his political opponents. His co-conspirator has been disbarred. Civil suits have been filed and criminal charges are being debated. And then there’s the election in November.

The citizens of Maricopa County must decide if backing Joe Arpaio is still in their best interests. It’s been kind of exciting to be the home of “America’s toughest sheriff” and have television shows and fading movie stars highlighting Arpaio’s work. But what is being showcased now is not flattering to Maricopa County, particularly the idea that the Sheriff’s Office refused to investigate charges of child sexual abuse in the Hispanic community because Arpaio hates Hispanics and doesn’t give a damn what happens to them. In Pima County, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has proven that all Arizonans don’t share Arpaio’s racist hatred, and his department vigorously investigates crimes against Hispanics, even as right wingers like Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly call for his recall for being a “leftist activist.” Arpaio, who will shortly turn 80, is seeking re-election this fall. The voters of Maricopa County can put their county out of its misery or they can support this corrupt, racist, strutting peacock who thinks Maricopa County is his personal kingdom and he has no obligation to abide by the Constitution of either Arizona or the United States.

The Real Arpiao Exposed At Last(lezgetreal.com)
Investigation Hits Sheriff Joe By Tangent(lezgetreal.com)
The U.S. v. Joe Arpaio: Justice Department Sues Arizona Sheriff for Racial Profiling of Latinos(democracynow.org)
Overheard on CNN.com: ‘I stand with Joe Arpaio,’ reader says about lawsuit(news.blogs.cnn.com)

Feds: We’re Taking Sheriff Joe to Court (newser.com)
Kristian Ramos: Who Still Stands With Sheriff Joe Arpaio? (huffingtonpost.com)

JP Morgan Chase Bank Posts $2 Billion Loss

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:54:51 +0000

JPMorgan Chase Tower

Originally published May 10, 2012

What’s wrong with America? How about the fact that this story was carried on the BBC, but not on Yahoo News American stories.

JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in America has lost $2 billion on investments made by their own traders. After balancing those against gains, the Chief Investment Office of JP Morgan Chase lost $800 million in the second quarter, but the losses could run higher.

JP Morgan Chase stock fell 6% with other bank stocks also falling. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America also suffered heavy losses in electronic trading which occurs after the regular stock market has closed for the day.

According to JP Morgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, the investment office has been making “reisker, more volatile and less effective” investments than the management was aware of. “There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgement. These were egregious mistakes. They were self-inflicted and this is not how we want to run a business. We will admit it, we will learn from it, we will fix it, and we will move on.”

Would Mr. Dimon like to explain again how the bailed-out banks had to shell out millions in bonuses as incentives to retain all these valuable, irreplaceable employees?

These investments are part of the internal operation of the bank, a fund used to create revenues to reduce the risk of fluctuations in the value of other assets. JP Morgan Chase was considered a very stable bank that did not make risky investments and it had emerged from the 2008 crisis in better shape than its competitors.

Mr. Dimon went on to explain that the type of trading that led to this little booboo is not banned by the Vocker rule, which is supposed to control the type of trading that banks do with their own money. Since Mr. Dimon is publicly very critical of the Volcker rule, it’s sort of strange for him to cite it as allowing this mistake.

Professor Mark Williams of Boston University, a former Federal Reserve regulator, told the BBC that “Taxpayers ultimately have to bail out these ‘too big to fail’ banks, and that’s what JP Morgan is – it is too big to fail. How could a bank that’s supposed to be the premier bank in setting the leadership role allow such risk taking?”

Easy – they’re addicted to it. This is the kind of behavior that caused the collapse of the financial sector, that caused the recession, that caused us to be where we are today. Taking risks with other people’s money is as addictive as crack and always has been. This is why the Great Depression happened, why the Savings and Loan industry crashed during the Reagan administration. After these risks, it has been necessary for our government to impose strict rules on banking and investing. The Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934 because of the horrors created by an unfettered stock market. The Reagan and Bush 43 administrations eased off the laws governing the financial markets and we paid for that pandering to the money men.

We have a new law, Dodd-Frank, that has yet to be implemented because the Republican House won’t fund it. Here we have an example of why we need this law before we are stuck bailing these gamblers again.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jaime Dimon, The Volker Rule and Too Big To Fail–Videos(raymondpronk.wordpress.com)
Wall Street’s Highest Ranking Woman To Step Down From JP Morgan/Chase(newyork.cbslocal.com)
Bankers Need to Learn to Manage Perceptions(berinkinsman.wordpress.com)

JP Morgan loss: Did US regulators know what CEO Jamie Dimon apparently didn’t? (csmonitor.com)
Raymond J. Learsy: The Wall Street Journal’s Convoluted Whitewash of Jamie Dimon (huffingtonpost.com)
Oops We Did It Again…Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase (prverdict.com)

Conventional Wisdom Wrong Again

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:51:02 +0000

La Bandera de la Hispanidad, flag for Hispanic Americans, adopted at the 1933 Pan-American Conference

Originally published May 10, 2012

Americans love stereotypes. You know them from films – the Middle Easterner is a terrorist, the Hispanic is an illegal lay-about, the black is a gangbanger, Italians are Mafioso, Jews are money-grubbers. Movies are difficult enough to live with because they subtly color public opinion. When stereotypes are applied to ordinary citizens in the political arena, they lead to huge campaign mistakes.

Take President Obama’s statement yesterday that he personally supports gay marriage. The stereotype of Hispanics and the conventional wisdom it creates says that his support of gays will diminish his support among Hispanics because they are socially conservative and deeply Catholic.

Both the conventional wisdom and the stereotype are wrong. La Raza commissioned a poll on this subject and found that 54% of Hispanics support gay marriage and among those Hispanics who voted in the 2004 and 2008 elections, the number jumps to 65%. So much for stereotypes.

There are more important issues for Hispanics in this election, and more important issues for the campaigns to concentrate on.

Top of the list for Hispanics is not so much immigration reform as the way immigration and illegal immigration is being used to harass and harm the Hispanic population. While some are not happy with the deportation record of the Obama administration, they are more unhappy with “papers please” laws and inequalities in the law between states and industries. One of the nastier ways that the Bush administration punished New England’s moderate Republicans and the party defector, Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, was to exclude dairy farms from the guest worker programs, so small family dairy farms cannot legally hire foreigners to work the farms. Shrimp and chicken processors could bring in hundreds of Mexicans to work their lines, but dairy farmers couldn’t bring in a few Mexicans to muck the barns and milk the cows. Whereas states like Arizona want cops to stop every vehicle containing anyone who looks Hispanic, states with small dairy farms like Vermont tell their cops not to stop Hispanics.

Hispanics want a unity of laws and requirements across the country. They want recognition that some of them have been here for decades and have raised very American children who want to go to college and want to enlist in the military. The Dream Act is important to Hispanic voters.

Controlling the drug trade and the gangs is important in the Hispanic community, but the harassment of Hispanics has led to distrust of law enforcement that is seriously impacting efforts to control and contain unlawful activity. Like all immigrants to America for the past two centuries, Hispanics want equal opportunity for their children, but the culture of racial hatred that the right wing has fostered is making it harder for Hispanic children in school, no matter how many generations their families have been on this side of the Rio Grande. Many of those Hispanics who have deep roots in the United States want better opportunities for assimilation without loss of culture for more recent immigrants.

The issues are complex, but the bottom line is simple. There are 53 million legal Hispanic immigrants and native-born Hispanic-Americans. They want fair laws and equal opportunities. They don’t want their lives damaged by a political party that is buying bigots’ votes by limiting their rights and painting them as parasites on American culture. They are damned tired of a country that is overboard about Mexican food and has taken a small Mexican holiday and turned it into a second St. Patrick’s Day-style excuse for others to get drunk, while punishing the people for their heritage and color. They have been fighting for equality and respect ever since white Southerners decided they couldn’t live with Mexico’s anti-slavery laws and staged a revolution in Texas, and a rogue general invaded California without Congressional or Presidential approval. And the party that has passed the laws and built their base on hatred of Hispanics is the Republican Party. A simple statement from the President about his personal views on gay rights does not negate all the harm that the Republican Party has caused Hispanics, and no Hispanic or Latino politician who supports the party’s platform and actions is going to change the balance. There are two groups of Americans, groups whose roots stretch back before the arrival of the Europeans, who have yet to achieve equality and respect in the nation that was created on their land and by conquering their ancestors. Native Americans and Hispanics have seen their fights for equality pushed aside by the battles for African-American rights and even gay rights. Together they represent 17.5% of our population, 55 million human beings who deserve all the rights, privileges, responsibilities and respect demanded by all Americans.

One religio-social issue will not override the basic issue of human and civil rights.

Perceptions Override Reality With Hispanics(lezgetreal.com)
Barack Obama shift on gay marriage energizes young Hispanic immigration activists(miamiherald.typepad.com)
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez on Romney: ‘Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign’(abcnews.go.com)

Ohio Republicans Bring Back Attack On Planned Parenthood

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:40:21 +0000

Ohio Statehouse, Columbus

Forward marches the Republican War on Women, and right now, it is focused in Ohio where “Even after thousands of Ohioans signed petitions to tell John Kasich and his ideological, extremist GOP allies in the Statehouse to shut down their attacks on women’s preventive health,” the GOP is determined to press forward with defunding Planned Parenthood.

The Ohio Democratic Party sent out a letter explaining:

Just two weeks ago, your involvement made the difference, and these radical Republicans curbed their legislative attack on women’s health organizations like Planned Parenthood. But – no surprise – now they’re trying to pull a classic bait-and-switch.

Right now, Statehouse Republicans are fast-tracking a bill that could defund Planned Parenthood and the important work they do on cancer screenings, HIV testing, and birth control. And even worse, it could be voted on in the House as early as tomorrow.

We rallied once before and stopped them. This time, we need to send these extremists thousands of messages they won’t soon forget.

If we stand together, we can beat back the radical right wing’s attempts to defund critical women’s health services. But to do that, it’s critical that you and your friends and family get involved today.

The Republicans don’t care if women die so long as they can protect a tiny number of fetuses. It literally amounts to a person’s worth in the eyes of the GOP stops the second that they are born.

An Alternative Battle Plan For Gay Rights

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:27:56 +0000

"Marriage Equality: It's A Right" from Flickr

Originally published May 10, 2012

One of the things one learns doing French Canadian genealogy is that in 17^th century France, while two Catholic cardinals served as Chief Minister to the King, religious weddings were not recognized as legal contracts. It was necessary for the colonists to sign a marriage contract in the presence of a Royal Notary for the marriage to be legal. A religious ceremony could be performed after the civil contract was certified. Napoleon spread the idea throughout Europe and today, most European countries (notably not those of the British Isles) do not recognize a religious ceremony as the legal marriage.

Having been an English colony, America adopted the British method, which was tied in to the fact that the King of England was the head of the Church of England. A marriage license could be certified by a clergyman.

A lot goes into creating a nation, so it is understandable that the simple matter of separating a civil contract of marriage, which carried with it certain legal obligations and rights, from a ceremony that binds two people within the precepts of their religion just didn’t occur to our Founding Fathers. They knew it was important to protect us from religion dictating civil law. They knew that those who came to America for religious freedom did so to escape countries where one church controlled civil law and membership in another church restricted a person’s life choices. But on this one small issue, they were blind.

It is long past time that the power to certify a civil contract which carries with it civil rights and responsibilities and can only be dissolved in a civil court be removed from any clergy of any faith. No clergyman can declare a marriage legally null and void. If they are barred from dissolving the contract, how can they been empowered to create it?

Conservatives talk about “traditional marriage” without understanding that the traditions of their faith are not the precedents of law around the world. In Muslim countries there are no civil marriages, all marriages are religious. We do not acknowledge Muslim religious marriages without a civil license in America. In all but two of our ancestral European countries, only civil marriages have legal validity and it has been that way more or less for over 200 years.

We need a Constitutional Amendment that expands and defines the First Amendment guarantee of freedom from state religion and freedom of worship. It should state that no civil legal contract can be fulfill with a religious ceremony. It should state that no law or amendment can be passed if it is based solely on religious principles and not on the need to provide legal protections to the people. It should state that definitions that impact our laws should not be based on religion but on science, as in the definition of when life is viable and independent and not when the soul is implanted.

Like the Second Amendment, which was written in language that made sense in the 18^th century, the First Amendment did not go far enough in expressing what it was intended to protect and define. We must rely on the Federalist Papers and the writings of those who wrote the Constitution to understand what was intended, and far too many people don’t bother to read them or understand them. The Second Amendment was intended to provide a fledgling nation with a militia to supplement a very small standing Army, not to give ordinary citizens the right to own weapons the founding fathers could not even imagine. The First Amendment was intended to protect us from a religion writing our civil laws and controlling the lives of those who don’t belong to that religion. That aspect got lost in the first two hundred years of our nation, and it is time to reassert it.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus Says Gay Marriage Not a Civil Rights Issue: VIDEO(towleroad.com)
Reports of Election Fraud in NC ‘Amendment One’ Battle(towleroad.com)
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: What If Government Recognized Only Civil Unions and Left Marriage to Religion?(huffingtonpost.com)
North Carolina Amendment One (aka The Marriage Amendment)(babyloniusjournal.wordpress.com)

Amendment One Reactions (joemygod.blogspot.com)
NC Amendment One Marriage Poll (joemygod.blogspot.com)
The State Of Marriage In America (lezgetreal.com)
Menachem Rosensaft: The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: Striving for the Moral Absolute of Equality (huffingtonpost.com)

U.S. Only 25th Best Place To Raise Family

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:22:38 +0000

Originally published May 9, 2012

We’re #1! We’re #1! Favorite chant of the right wing, right? In their minds, the United States of America isn’t just Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill, it is top of heap in every imaginable way in this world. That would be wonderful, if it were true. The idea that the United States is the best at everything is a myth perpetrated upon the faithful to keep them from questioning why we aren’t the best.

The United States ranks #1 in health care costs, but 37^th in health care delivery. We rank 22^nd in science education, 27^th in math and 33^rd in reading. We rank 17^th for taxation as a percentage of GDP (which kind of puts the lie to us being #1 in taxation). Our personal income tax rate is ranked 22^nd in the world, but our corporate tax rate is ranked 2^nd. That does not reflect what our corporations actually pay, just what our rate is.

The latest blow to myth of being #1 is the Save the Children State of the World’s Mothers Report. The United States is ranked 25^th best place in the world to raise a family. The rankings are based on parental leave policies, preschool enrollment rates, breast feeding support, teen pregnancy rates, female education rates, maternal death rates, infant mortality rates, support systems for parents including safety nets like welfare and food subsidies, the whole panoply of ways that a nation or culture supports women and families.

Twenty-fifth, huh?

Who beat us on this critical listing of the manner in which nations care for their mothers and children? Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Slovenia, France, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, Switzerland, Canada, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, and Belarus. The top thirty were finished off by the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Croatia, and Japan.

The list is broken into three sections: most developed nations, less developed nations and least developed nations. The countries in the “most developed nations” list comprise the top 43 ranked nations on all criteria and are almost entirely European and first-level British Empire nations, plus Japan. The middle designation is made up of 80 nations ranging in development from Israel to Zimbabwe. The bottom 42 are primarily African, marginal Asian nations like Cambodia, and war zones like Yemen and Afghanistan.

We can probably take solace from the fact that the United States rose from #31 in 2011 to #25 in 2012. Still, 25^th? That’s one more way in which the United States has slipped over the past thirty years, since, oh, the shift in the Republican Party from the Northeast to the Deep South, since the rise of the conservative movement, since the beginning of the death slide of unions and the middle class…..

United States Ranks Last on Breast-Feeding Support(parenting.blogs.nytimes.com)
The Best Country for Raising Kids? Report Says It’s Not the United States(undisputedlegal.wordpress.com)
Mother rankings: Norway 1, U.S. 25(cnn.com)
Niger: Worst Place To Be A Mom, Study Says(inquisitr.com)
Welcome to Motherhood: You’re on Your Own(crooksandliars.com)

Whoops! Gas Price Predictions Were Wrong

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:18:29 +0000

From Creative Commons

Originally published May 9, 2012

All during the Republican Primary circus, the candidates kept promising us lower gas prices. The Republican Party insists that we need to jeopardize the drinking water of Nebraska and Oklahoma to build the Keystone pipeline so that gas prices will come down, even though the oil that will flow to it belongs to TransCanada and is heading for Texas refineries to be prepared for sale on the international market. Gas prices are a rallying cry for the Republicans, who are deeply in denial over George W. Bush’s statement that presidents have no control over gas prices.

So, guess what? All the predictions of $5 gas were wrong. A year ago, we were paying an average of $3.96 per gallon. Last month, the average was $3.76. Okay, twenty cents isn’t a lot, but it is proof of a trend.

According to the people who know about such things, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil has dropped by 10% in the past ten days and the drop is just a beginning. The speculators in oil misread the situation, and badly.

Saudi Arabia vowed to increase production to compensate for any disruption in oil supply because of the Arab Spring, and they have been good to their word. The United States has increased production and we are now exporting more oil than we import. The two have created a surplus of oil on the international market, the exact opposite of what the speculators were betting on. The laws of supply-and-demand have kicked in and the prices for crude have dropped, and when the crude price drops, so do prices for the finished products.

The big question right now is not what we are paying for gas at the pump. Those prices always reflect the price shifts in the market. The issue is the price increases that have occurred because of high gas and diesel prices.

In 2008, when gas prices did top $4 a gallon, the price of retail goods increased, and especially food prices. It cost more for your local supermarket to receive its goods, the entire distribution network was hurt by higher prices, and so, the price you paid for a can of peas went up, maybe just a penny, but those pennies added up in the total you paid for a cartload of food. When gas prices fell, we did not see a comparable lowering of food prices, or clothing prices or any other retail prices. In 2008, consumers in my landlocked state with its dearth of large scale manufacturers, believed that they would never see prices fall in response to lower gas prices. They were right.

Corporations live by their profit margins, which are measured in ratios to cost more than in dollar amounts. Everything in economics is actually measured that way. So, if a supermarket chain is showing a 5% profit margin when gas prices are high, and then show a 6% profit margin when gas prices go down, they have no incentive to lower wholesale or retail prices. They would rather retain the higher prices and keep that higher profit margin, pay out larger dividends to their shareholders and larger bonuses to their executives. They figure that consumers are so accepting and accustomed to paying the higher prices that it doesn’t matter.

We might be able to put off buying a new pair of shoes, but we have to eat, so those corporations are right. We will endure the higher prices because we have to.

Well, at least it will cost us less to drive to the poor house.

The Student Loan Problem

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:13:10 +0000

Senator Robert T. Stafford, Republican, Vermont

Originally published May 9, 2012

Okay, we don’t get it. How is it necessary to “fund” an interest rate? Economics give me a headache anyway, but this one is pushing for ulcer time.

We have and have had since 1965, a system for student loans call the Stafford program. It was renamed the Stafford Loan program in 1988 for my late senator, Robert T. Stafford, a Vermont Republican. Now, this is where things get hairy. In 2010, Congress eliminated the middle man, shifting Stafford from a government guaranteed program run by banks to a government program. It drastically cut the costs of student loans. But it was in 2007 that Congress passed a law cutting the interest rate for Stafford loans from 6.8% to 3.4%, a move that saves the students around $1,000 a year while they pay off those loans. The interest rate has to be extended because it runs out in July. So, why is it being held up over how it will be funded?

Here’s why – some jerk added an amendment to the bill that has nothing to do with student loan interest rates. According to the official summary, written by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, the bill also “Amends the Internal Revenue Code and title II (Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance) of the Social Security Act to require certain shareholders of a subchapter S corporation engaged as a partner in a professional service business to include income or loss attributable to such business in their net earnings from self-employment for employment tax purposes. Restricts such tax treatment to shareholders whose modified adjusted gross income exceeds a specified amount that varies based on their tax filing status. Defines a “professional service business” as any trade or business providing services in the fields of health, law, lobbying, engineering, architecture, accounting, actuarial science, performing arts, consulting, athletics, investment advice or management, or brokerage services.”

That’s the part that has to be funded and that’s the part that caused the Republicans in the Senate to pull out the old filibuster and dump the bill in the hold bin. Student loan interest rates will go up unless the Democrats agree to fund this totally unrelated provision by cutting safety net funding.

I can think of a lot of words for the jerk who tacked this on the student loan bill and a lot more for those who filibustered it. None of them are printable on this site.

Here’s the bad news. Currently, student loan debt is at $867 billion, credit card debt is $704 billion and auto loan debt is $734 billion. In 2007, student loan default was at 6.7%. In 2009 it had grown to 8.9%. In 2007, credit card default was 3.8% and in 2009 it was 7%. Student loan default grew at a slower rate than credit card default over that period. For a bachelor’s degree, total student debt will range between $20,000 (public university) to $40,000 (private university.) For a master’s degree, add $22,000 to $36,000. For a law degree, figure a total of $135,000 in debt. A medical degree averages $270,000 on top of a bachelor’s degree. For contrast, the median income in America fell to $26,364 per year in 2011 and the median cost of a house is $212,000.

Our student loan system is in jeopardy because of a totally unrelated change to the tax code. If you want to save your student loans, write to your Democratic Congressperson, if you are fortunate enough to have one, and request the student loan interest rate bill be re-introduced without amendments. Only then can we see if the Republicans really believe that the interest rate extension should be passed.

Originally published May 9, 2012

Okay, we don’t get it. How is it necessary to “fund” an interest rate? Economics give me a headache anyway, but this one is pushing for ulcer time.

I can think of a lot of words for the jerk who tacked this on the student loan bill and a lot more for those who filibustered it. None of them are printable on this site.

Collection agency cashes in on student loan defaults(bottomline.msnbc.msn.com)
Pete Hoekstra Makes Surprising Claim About Student Loans (VIDEO)(huffingtonpost.com)
New Data Says Student Loan Default Higher Than Thought(loans.org)

Ivy Leagues Require Less Student Loans than Public Colleges (loans.org)

The Job-Skills Gap

Linda Carbonell — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:07:47 +0000

From Creative Commons

Originally published May 9, 2012

In March, there were 3.74 million job openings in America. But only 120,000 jobs were filled that month. So, what’s the problem? The explanation given by the job creators is they can’t find people with the right skills. The explanation given by job searchers is that companies are only hiring people who did the identical job in another company, not someone who has the basic skills and only needs to be oriented into the new job or learn a handful of small, new skills.

The job creators are whining about not being able to fill those openings. The job seekers are screaming that their resumes are being circular filed without interviews or a chance to prove their talents. Personally, I’m on the side of the job seekers.

I have a very remarkable daughter named Jessica. Her college degree is in English with a concentration on creative writing. Only once has she used that degree on a job. For a short time, on her third post-college job, she was a technical writer for a software company. When asked how she wrote such successful manuals, she replied, “I write them with my mother in mind. I think of what she would need to understand the program.” Not the best compliment to my coputer skills, but a great concept for manual writers of all kinds.

Since then, she has worked in two mortgage companies, rising from file clerk to assistant to the president of the second one, two construction companies, again rising in the ranks, and now in a metal fabricator where she is fast tracking through new areas. Jessica has two skills that they didn’t teach in college. She learns very quickly and she has a great work ethic. She also puts herself ahead of the need. In one construction company, she went out and took the OSHA course on her own, then presented her certification to her boss. She has an insatiable intellect. I think she’s trying to set a record for how many Nooks she can max out before getting a new one.

Headhunters and recruiters go nuts over Jessica, but not so much the people she interviews with. It takes a special kind of employer to see past her resume to the potential in her. And her last layoff proved what job seekers are saying. She was unemployed longer than she had ever been. She was constantly interviewing, submitting dozens of resumes. She repainted her whole house.

The Republicans tell us that if we just agree to drastically cut business taxes and cut regulations, the “job creators” will rush out and hire. American businesses are showing record-setting profits, and according to those trying to find work, they are putting up ridiculous barriers to hiring.

There are 12.5 million unemployed Americans and 7.9 million persons working part-time who want full-time jobs. That would include persons who graduated college in the past few years who are still working in the supermarkets they worked in while in school. It is very hard to believe that in those 20.4 million Americans, companies cannot find 3.74 million qualified people.

Just hiring those 3.74 million people would lower our unemployment rate to 5.68%. Maybe that’s the reason those companies won’t hire. A 5.68% unemployment rate would practically guarantee President Obama’s re-election and deny them those lower tax rates and few regulations. Or maybe I’m just a bit down on companies that can’t find qualified employers in this employment market.

Mega Job Board Giving Away $1 Million to Job Seekers (prweb.com)

Rush Babes For America

Linda Carbonell — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:58:52 +0000

From The Associated Press

Originally published May 9, 2012

I’ll get out of the way and let Rush Limbaugh explain this in his own inimitable way…..

From Tuesday’s broadcast: “I’ve been tired for a long time of these faux female groups, which are really nothing but groups of liberals. The National Organization for Women is not a female organization. It’s a liberal organization disguised as a group that’s interested in the rights of women. These groups, they happen to have ‘woman’ or ‘women’ in their names, and they’re claiming to represent all women. And in reality, they represent a tiny number of highly-agitated activist types. They’re basically miserable and unhappy women, for whatever reason.”

Wow, where to begin….NOW was founded in 1966 when Rush was a 15-year-old a year away from his first radio job and the dim academic bulb of a family of lawyers and judges. It currently has a membership of a half-million women. The membership roughly equals 0.3% of all females in America. It is also ten times the reported membership of One Million Moms

Rush has announced the formation of a Facebook page called Rush Babes for America. So far, it has around 25,000 “likes” He launched it “as a means of contrast” to “NAGS” the “National Organization of Gals”.

Yeah, he also refers to liberal women as “feminazis.”

Rush calls the site a “forum for issues related to conservative women” including what he whines is the media double standard for condemning the language of entertainers. “Bill Maher can go out and he can attack conservative women all day and he can call them the most disgusting names and the National Organization for Women will not condemn him.” Apparently, Maher just tweeted something about our favorite poster girl for conservative “family values” Bristol Palin. “They will not condemn President Obama for accepting a million dollar donation from Bill Maher.”

Well, maybe because Maher didn’t hand the check to President Obama, but to the super-pac that supports him. As for not condemning Maher, well, there’s no much point is there? Maher is a self-defined foul-mouthed, know-it-all comedian who has a show that airs for roughly half the year on a pay-access cable channel. He has 4.1 million viewers per episode. That’s 1.3% of the American population. Wow, I didn’t realize he had so many viewers. Maher does not have sponsors. His show is supported by viewer enrollment in HBO, so the only way to protest his statements is to stop watching his show. Limbaugh claims he has 20 million listeners and his ratings have soared “10% to 60% depending on the station.” But a year ago, his viewership had slipped by 33% from 2010.

Limbaugh has been bullshit over the women’s protests to his remarks about Sandra Fluke, so let’s dissect what was so repulsive about those remarks. It wasn’t just that he called Ms. Fluke a “slut” – that could have been put aside as a statement of personal opinion. It was the fact that he misrepresented her testimony to Congress as a request for the Catholic law school she attends to pay the full cost of her contraceptives and was therefore a “prostitute” who expected the taxpayer to pay her to have sex. She was asking for other students to have the privilege of paying for health insurance that contained prescription coverage for contraceptives through her law school’s health insurance plan for students. That was what was so obnoxious about Limbaugh’s remarks – the outright lie about what Ms. Fluke was testifying to. He claimed that the taxpayer would be carrying the burden of this coverage, not the person purchasing the health insurance.

In conclusion, Rush stated: “I happen to know the women in this audience in total number dwarf the membership of the National Organization for Women, and yet there they are, teaming up with Media Matters, a combined program designed to convince everybody I should be taken off the air. Well, what about the women who listen to this program? What about the women who like this program? What about the women who believe in this program? What about the women who agree with the political concepts, the values, the objectives as stated by your host on this program? What of them, what of all you women who seemingly don’t exist to the media, to the National Organization for Women. There are many, many more of you than there are of them. And Rush Babes for America at Facebook is where you go to be officially counted and tabulated and to make a difference.”

So, if you believe that women do not deserve equal pay for equal work, if you do not believe that you have a right to determine when or if you will have children, if you do not believe that you deserve equal access to education and jobs, if you do not believe that you are an intelligent human being but just a sex object, sign on the Rush’s new site. If you think you are a second-class citizen, just a “babe,” a “doll,” a “broad,” or a “tootsie,” sign on to Rush’s site. But if you believe that you are more than 50% of the human race and deserve to be treated as an equal in all areas, and should have total control over your own life and your own body, it you believe that it is demeaning to refer to a grown woman by a diminutive that compares her to a diaper-wearing infant, if you are a Republican woman in public office who is obviously violating Rush’s view of your acceptable home-bound position in the world, then ignore this bloviating pathological liar who lives by twisting facts and misrepresenting the nature of all those who oppose his opinions.

I haven’t been a “babe” for 61 years, since I was toilet trained and weaned from the formula bottle.

“Rush Babes For America”: Rush Limbaugh Launches Facebook Campaign(inquisitr.com)
Comparing Limbaugh And Maher Like Comparing Godzilla And Geico Gecko(lezgetreal.com)
UPDATED Women voters: ‘Rush Babes’ (US)(psawomenpolitics.wordpress.com)
Rush Babes Rule America – NAGS Fail(bellalu0.wordpress.com)

Rush Limbaugh’s Comments Cost Cumulus Millions (mediabistro.com)
That Didn’t Take Long… ‘Rush Babes For America’ Already Has More Followers Than NOW (thegatewaypundit.com)

The Catholic Inquisition’s Next Target: The Girl Scouts

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:57:52 +0000

Welcome to the Inquisition. I would put up a clip from Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part One, but it’s rather NSFW. Pope Benedict want to push doctrinal purity for not just the Catholic Church, but all that the Catholic Church comes in contact with even if it is not a Catholic organization. After all, the Catholic Church use to make sure that everyone was as ignorant as possible so that they could not question the Church’s authority.

Thus, it is not surprising that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, after having started a war on the nuns, is now taking their war on women to the next step by going after the Girl Scouts of America. The Scouts are being attacked by the USCCB for their “offensive” materials and supposed associations with group that the Catholic Bishops hate.

ThinkProgress quotes:

The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts’ “possible problematic relationships with other organizations’’ and various “problematic’’ program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops. [...]

Girl Scout leaders hope the bishops’ apprehensions will be eased once they gather information. But there’s frustration within the iconic youth organization — known for its inclusiveness and cookie sales — that it has become such an ideological target, with the girls sometimes caught in the political crossfire.

The USCCB is also going after the Scouts for their supposed connection to Planned Parenthood, which the Scouts have denied. This has never been proven true, in fact. The Scouts did have a workshop at a 2010 United Nations event where an International Planned Parenthood brochure was made available to the girls attending. That brochure was aimed at youths with HIV, “and contained pertinent information on how to safely lead active sex lives. Spokespersons for the Scouts maintain that the organization possessed no advance knowledge of the brochure, and thus played no role in distributing it.”

The smears are all created by the Right Wing attack machine. Gladys Padro-Soler, the Girl Scouts’ director of inclusive membership strategies, stated “It’s been hard to get the message out there as to what is true when distortions get repeated over and over.” Almost all of the concerns of the Bishops have been addressed on the Scouts’ website.

ThinkProgress also noted that:

The Scouts also maintain that they do not take a position or develop materials on issues in relation to human sexuality, birth control, abortion, and that “parents or guardians make all decisions regarding program participation that may be of a sensitive nature.”

At least one quarter of the organization’s 2.3. million members are reported to be Catholic, so officials worry that an attack from the Catholic church could further drive down participation in the organization. “For us, there’s an overarching sadness to it,’’ said Girl Scouts’ spokeswoman, Michelle Tompkins. “We’re just trying to further girls’ leadership.’’

The thing is, the Girl Scouts conflict with the core beliefs of the Catholic Bishops. Girls are suppose to grow up meek, ready to marry for life in an economic slavery situation, are suppose to submit to their husband’s will no matter what, or go become nuns and live in seclusion the rest of their lives. By teaching girls self worth, they are in violation of everything that the Bishops want women to be.

The Inquisition not only targeted heretics and Jews. . .it targeted quite a number of women too.

MSNBC’s Tamron Hall Shuts Down Interview Over Romney’s Bullying

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:55:06 +0000

Originally posted 12 May 2012

Tamron Hall on MSNBC has definitely gotten a bit stronger of voice lately. Washington Examiner reporter Tim Carney appeared on her show yesterday, but did so under what can only really be called false pretenses. Hall asked Carney about the response from the Romney campaign to allegations that he bullied his fellow classmates in high school. Carney, though, refused to even accept that the major incident that has come out even occurred- despite the fact that one of the people involved in it actually verified that it occurred.

Carney stated that Hall was just trying to justify the allegations and dismissed them as bogus. Hall, though, had actually wanted to discuss with Carney what he had agreed to come on the show to discuss- which was the way that the Romney Campaign had handled the allegations. Hall slapped Carney down and shut down the discussion.

Carney’s claims that the incident never happened stem from statements made by the victim’s family that the incident did not occur. Never mind that the individual who Romney bullied is not alive, and his sister has stated that the incident is not something that the man would have informed his parents about.

Two individuals- one of whom was involved in the hair cutting incident and one who was a witness to it- have come forward to state that it did happen.

Post Office Has Plan To Save Rural Offices

Linda Carbonell — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:53:21 +0000

Originally published May 9, 2012

The original plan called for the closure of 3,700 small post offices to help cut costs in the United States Postal Service. Now, after months of protest from the customers of those post offices, the Postmaster General has chosen another way.

The sick part is that none of this is really necessary. Congress passed a law in 2006 that required the Postal Service to pre-fund health care benefits for retirees, to the tune of $5.5 billion a year in the beginning and $11 billion this year. They now have more than enough money to fund retirees’ benefits for a couple of decades. But they are stuck with this payment every year and it has eliminated the Postal Service’s profits since 2007, spiraling it deeper and deeper in debt. If Congress would simply end this odious requirement, the Postal Service could bring itself out of the hole. The Postal Service will have a $13 billion deficit this year. Two billion of that is accumulation from those five years when the payments to the retirement health insurance fund sapped them dry.

To satisfy the needs of rural customers, the Post Office will down-size the staffs at smaller locations and cut hours, while maintaining access to post boxes. There have also been suggestions to shift the locations to inside stores or other easily accessed sites and eliminate the costs of separate building maintenance. That would be a step back in time to when the local general store had a corner set up with postal boxes and a brass framed window and the store employees sold stamps and handed out mail. More than 13,000 rural mail facilities will have their hours cut by between two and six hours. Upon approval by Congress, the plan would be slowly implemented over two years to reduce impact, allowing early retirement buy-outs to up to 21,000 rural postmasters, and eventually saving the Postal Service an estimated half billion a year.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said, “We’ve listened to our customers in rural America and we’ve heard them loud and clear. They want to keep their post office open. We believe today’s announcement will serve our customers’ needs and allow us to achieve real savings to help the Postal Service to long-term financial stability.” Communities would decide how to deal with their postal needs, by closing one office while expanding service at a near-by one, by inserting their post office in a store, library or other government office building or even in large retailers like Wal-Mart or Walgreens. These changes will be in addition to ending Saturday service.

This is a fairly radical idea for government – letting those people being served to outline how they need to be served and what the best way is for them to be served. There are two groups of people who know best how any operation should be run, be it a post office, a hospital or a retail store – the people who worked there on the bottom rung and the people who use the service. Letting the people who use these post office decide the best way to save them is a wonderful idea, one that should be expanded to other services in our governments.

Post Office Hour Reductions Are Called a Win-Win but Seem More like a Lose-Lose(moneyland.time.com)
U.S. Postal Service to keep rural post offices open(bizjournals.com)

Postal Service: Will keep rural post offices open (newsok.com)

Maggie Gallagher Talks Millennials’ Support For Marriage

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:50:35 +0000

Originally posted 12 May 2012
Listening to Maggie Gallagher answer a question regarding whether or not Millennials are going to always support same-sex marriage, it becomes obvious just how out of touch she is with the way that things are changing, and what drives change. Gallagher cites a bunch of rather extreme ideas from the Feminist movement of her youth. What I have found in my study of history is that change happens either very slowly or very quickly.

First of all, most people embrace moderate change while opposing radical change. The idea that women would no longer be raising children by this point in history is too radical. It goes outside the way that the world is structured too far.

Same-sex marriage is not as radical as it might sound. For all the complaints about how it will destroy traditional marriage- all it will do is destroy the idea that heterosexuals are better than homosexuals. It actually goes pretty far towards preserving marriage within society as there are growing pressures that are destroying marriage in our society including things like people living very long lives and the lack of a living wage in the United States.

In truth, Gallagher is far more on the side of destroying marriage than strengthening it. When you tell people that marriage is not important enough to be given to everyone, then you destroy the position it has within the society.

What this is about is not marriage, but rather hatred for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people.

Laugh-In Creator Digby Wolfe Has Died

Linda Carbonell — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:50:24 +0000

Originally published May 9, 2012

With co-producers George Schlatter and Ed Friendly, creator/writer Digby Wolfe gave us a bikini-clad Goldie Hawn, covered in psychidelic body paint gyrating on a bare stage, and diminutive Judy Carne being hit with bucketsful of water. He gave us a German-helmeted Arte Johnson, cigarette held European-style, sinisterly intoning “Ver-r-r-y interesting” and a former vice-president popping his head through a hole in a wall to ask “Sock it to me?” just before he became President Richard M. Nixon. (His opponent in that election, Hubert Humphrey was later to comment that refusing to appear on Laugh-In probably cost him the election. That’s how far back “being cool” mattered.)

It was a television show for its time. Originally airing as a special on September 9, 1967, it was picked up as a series on January 22, 1968 and ran 140 episodes until May 14, 1973. It was a historic arc, going as it did from the end of the Summer of Love to four months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accord ending the Vietnam War, from the height of the hippie culture to the beginning of a cycle of spiraling confrontations between conservatives and liberals that still resonates today in Fox News President Roger Ailes’ personal vendetta against Democrats.

Laugh-In took its name from the “sit-ins” of the anti-war and anti-establishment demonstrations of the late 1960s. Far more political than comedy shows had ever been, without the edge of the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In was political and social satire so well done it didn’t get the same kind of protests that Tom and Dick Smothers got. In so many ways, Laugh-In was the grandfather of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, without Goldie Hawn’s nubile young bod.

The show’s cast was famous – Joanne Worley and her insane laugh, Gary Owens’ deadpan radio announcer, Ruth Buzzi who did pinched-faced old ladies so well, Henry Gibson with his oversized flower reciting wacky poetry, Alan Sues who seemed to have only a tenuous grip on sanity, the very dapper, urbane

Lily Tomlin as Ernestine

Dan Rowan and slightly off-center Dick Martin playing ringmaster of this barely controlled circus….and the great, the incomparable Lily Tomlin. Her most famous characters were born on Laugh-In – Ernestine the telephone operator and Edith-Anne the precocious child in the oversized rocker. And last but not least, one of the strangest stars television ever created – Tiny Tim, a rotund, stringy-haired, beak-nosed gentle giant who sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a nails-on-blackboard screeching falsetto.

And there was the wall. Ah, the wall. Doors in this wall would open and just about anyone could pop out and deliver a one-liner – Vice President Nixon, John Wayne, Jack Benny and Zsa Zsa Gabor, Wilt Chamberlain, Ringo Starr, the list is huge and covered the full range of entertainment, politics and sports.

The "Laugh In" wall

In an industry infamous for copying and recycling ideas, for constantly taking a good concept and making variant shows until the airwaves are saturated with one type of program, Laugh-In has never been remade, recycled, copied or attempted. It was that unique, that totally tied to its time. In 2002, TV Guide, which for most of its nearly 60 years was the arbiter of all things television, named it #42 on its list of the 50 greatest television shows of all time.

If Digby Wolfe had done nothing else in his life, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In would have been enough. In addition to his career as a comedy writer and producer, Wolfe was also a teacher. His 37 years at the head of the class included 12 years teaching writing at the University of New Mexico, where his memorial service will be held on June 10. Wolfe retired in 2004. He inspired and mentored hundreds of young writers.

Digby Wolfe, mid-career

Wolfe was born in London in 1929, and began his career as an actor and occasional writer in the 1950s. He moved to Australia in 1959 before finally settling in the United States in 1964. His acting credits were in episodic television in the U. S. He died in Albuquerque on May 3, after a short battle with lung cancer. Digby Wolfe is survived by his wife Patricia Mannion and his students, spiritual children of his intellect. In 2011, with Jim Linnel, he wrote Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama, published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Digby Wolfe, ‘Laugh-In’ creator, dies(variety.com)

Actor Digby Wolfe dead at 82 (hollywood.com)
‘Laugh-In’ TV comic Alan Sues dies at 85 (miamiherald.typepad.com)

Rep Allen West: Gays Not Facing Workplace Discrimination

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:48:46 +0000

Originally posted 12 May 2012

Allen West By Gage Skidmore

Representative Allen West of Florida is an angry man who is upset because he was pushed out of the military for the mental torture of a prisoner. Of course, given the crazy things he has said, it is not surprising that he would pick up the talking point of how LGBT Americans are never discriminated against and denied jobs because of their sexual orientation.

In an interview with Think Progress, this exchange occurred:

KEYES: What about something like a law that say that it’s illegal to hire or fire people because they’re gay?

WEST: That don’t happen out here in the United States of America.

KEYES: You don’t think people get fired because they’re gay?

WEST: Well, I don’t see that as being a big issue with small businesses. I sit on the Small Business Committee. You know what they’re concerned about? They’re concerned about onerous tax policy, regulatory policy, and lack of access to capital because Dodd-Frank is absolutely decimating small community banks.

Actually, the weakening of Dodd-Frank by the Republicans just caused JP Morgan to loose about $2 billion, and hasn’t decimated any small community banks. The Daily Show noted not long ago that hundreds of thousands of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans people have experienced workshop discrimination. Think Progress notes that “In 29 states, it is perfectly legal to fire you for being gay. (In 34 states you can be fired for being transgender.) This is not a mere prospect. Between eight and 17 percent of gay and transgender workers have been fired or not hired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity; that rate more than doubles for gay and transgender people who have experienced workplace discrimination.”

It Takes A Day For Romney To Flip-Flop On Same-Sex Adoption Rights

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:45:42 +0000

Mitt and Ann Romney

What is the sound of one mind flipping? That would be…anything that Mitt Romney says. For instance, one day he supports same-sex couples adopting and the next day he opposes it. So, the sound of one mind flipping and flopping like a fish on the deck of a boat just after it’s been caught would be “Actually, I think all states but one allow gay adoption. So that’s a position which has been decided by most of the state legislatures, including the one in my state some time ago. So I simply acknowledge the fact that gay adoption is legal in all states but one.”

Of course, fifteen years ago, he supported pretty much all LGBT rights, but that was before he had to run for President. Still, it is alright for someone to change their mind over a decade and a half, but these days, deciding to flip-flop on an issue in such a short period of time just doesn’t seem quite so kosher. Yesterday, Romney said he was fine with same-sex couples adopting children and stated “that’s something that people have a right to do.”

There are some two million children being raised by LGBT parents. Of course, Romney’s idiocy on the issue know few bounds. ThinkProgress notes that “Adoption laws vary widely from state to state with little consistency between them. In only 18 states and the District of Columbia can same-sex parents can petition for joint adoption. There are 12 (some of which overlap with the 18) that allow for second-parent adoption. And if same-sex couples wish to serve as foster parents, there are only seven states that guarantee their right to do so. Because of the disparity of laws and the absence of any written policy in many states, judges often make their own decisions and families can never be sure in which states their adoption will be recognized.”

Romney constantly flipping and flopping on this issue. In 2007, he said that it was the right of same-sex couples to adopt, but last year said that such adoptions “should be assessed on a state-by-state basis.”

Sister Wives Stars ‘Everyone Should Be Able’ To Define Their Marriage

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:42:50 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012
It is a common refrain…if you legalize same-sex marriage polygamy is not far behind! There are many people who actually do believe that multiple partner marriages should be legal, but only so long as they are done by willing individuals. In fact, so long as there is no actual harm to future children such as in an incestuous relationship or harm to the wife such as in child marriages, there are people who believe that consenting adults should be allowed to get married no matter the combination or number.

So, it is not surprising that the stars of TLC’s Sister Wives have an open mind about same-sex marriage. Kody Brown, who has four wives- Meri, Janelle, Robyn and Christine- talked about the issue with Billy Bush and Lisa Rinna of Hollywood Live. Kody stated “I have been able to choose and define my marriage and I think everybody should be able to do that. Choose and define who you marry, choose and define who you love.”

Gay May Sues Former Employer Over Discrimination Against Straight Men

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:41:03 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012

There are some of us (myself for instance) who would probably make really horrible bosses because, well, I would rather not hire any men to work for me. Still, I’m hardly in a position to do that kind of hiring or firing, and, well, despite my dislike of men, I have brought a few men to work on LGR in the past. Still, the boss of Jamie Ardigo of Hoboken, NJ got a surprise when he went to work for J. Christopher Burch of New York.

Ardigo is suing Burch, the head of J. Christopher Capital, for sex-discrimination and wrongful termination. Ardigo, who is gay, alleges that Burch is anti-straight. Well, anti-straight male.

Ardigo told ABC that he did not know he was being hired by a biased company. He stated “Did I have any inkling what I was getting into? No, I did not. I went there with the expectation that, as I’d been told, there was a family environment where employees and managers supported one another, and there was an open-door policy.”

Less than a month later, he was in a meeting where Burch allegedly announced that he only hired gay men because they were supposedly more productive and because he trusted them. Ardigo also stated that there were other times when he would witness “it in meetings with the executive management team, where he’d blatantly state the fact that he only likes to hire gay men and beautiful women.”

ABC reports that “Ardigo found this troubling on two levels, he says: As a gay man, he personally was offended. And as an HR professional ‘keenly aware’ of the need to maintain a non-discriminatory atmosphere in the workplace, he knew that both the attitude expressed and any hiring that bore it out was contrary to federal and New York City law.”

Ardigo stated that “I was highly concerned for the organization and uncomfortable myself working there. I had never worked for an organization that made decisions based on that or that made comments like that.”

Brian Cousin, Burch’s lawyer, refutes Ardigo’s story and said that he was fired for performance-related issues. He also told ABC that “The company has reviewed the allegations and denies any wrongdoing. It denies there was discrimination or retaliation.” Bias laws do not usually cover Whites or males.

ABC also reported that:

Ardigo, for his part, says he was fired because he called management’s attention to instances of discriminatory and inappropriate behavior, including one in which a female employee, when being introduced for the first time to Ardigo, said to the person making the introduction, “Oh, are you going to introduce me to another gay guy?!”

In another alleged instance, a male employee insinuated that a female employee had a vibrating dildo in her purse.

When Ardigo reported this last incident to management and sought to have the male employee reprimanded, his says his report was ignored and no reprimand was given. “The investigation ended in absolutely nothing. The recommendation I had made was not followed through on.”

According to several sources in the company, Ardigo’s performance was never an issue. According to Ardigo, his supervisor pressured him to reveal information about himself. He stated that “He stated that he needed to trust me, and in order to do that he needed to know more about me.” Ardigo was not comfortable with that saying “Knowing the culture of the organization, hearing about their hiring only gay men, I felt there was an expectation that I had to reveal that information in order to be successful at work.”

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Trial Of Kenneth Miller Delayed Slightly

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:38:32 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012

We have been informed that the case of Kenneth L. Miller has been rescheduled to 21 June 2012 when pretrial conference or a change of plea hearings will be heard. The case is set to go before the Honorable William K. Sessions III. This moves back the selection of a jury to 10 July 2012.

Miller has been charged as an accessory to the kidnapping and removal from the country of Isabella Miller, the daughter of Janet Jenkins and Lisa Miller during their civil union. Judge William Cohen of Vermont gave numerous opportunities to Lisa Miller to comply with the court’s order that Jenkins have visitation with Isabella, but ultimately, Miller absconded with the child only to end up in Central America.

Bristol Palin On Obama’s Marriage Support: Kids Need Mom, Dad

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:35:10 +0000

It should not be surprising that Bristol Palin would actually weigh in on the issue of same-sex marriage and President Barack Obama’s statements in support of it. Of course, doing so simply means that she is living as a hypocrite and believes that others should do as she says, but not as she does. Palin wrote on Facebook that:

“While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads. In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home.”

We would all like now to know why she did not marry Levi Johnston if she truly believed that. This is, after all, a young woman who had a child out of wedlock, unintentionally, with a boy that she has not married, and she has not married anyone subsequently. To simply state that a child needs a mother and a father and then not provide her own child with that shows that she is not willing to actually live up to her beliefs.

Alright, that was the nice way to put it. Or we could go with Jersey Shore star Jenni “Jwoww” Farley’s take on this. She just tweeted “Bristol should keep her uneducated ignorant mouth shut. If Ur living in the past u wouldn’t have a kid w/out marriage #hypocrite. It’s 2012!”

Now, now, it is not nice to attack someone for having their education interrupted because they got pregnant due to the fact that they could not keep their knees together or were unwilling to engage in alternative sexual acts so that they would not get pregnant.

Samantha Ronson, who is openly lesbian, also took on Palin tweeting “‘We know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home.’ really bristol palin? how’s your kid doing?” o

The much touted study that children need a mother and a father that the Republicans and the anti-LGBT groups love to use is actually a study that shows that children do better in a two parent household rather than a one parent household. Subsequent studies have shown that it does not matter if the two parents are of the same sex or of opposite sexes. What matters is that they have two parents.

In other words, Bristol Palin is a far worse parent than Neil Patrick Harris.

Kathy Griffin On Obama’s Support For Same-Sex Marriage

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:33:14 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012
Kathy Griffin had some fun with the President’s recent statements in support of same-sex marriage. Griffin is rather blunt when she talks about the fact that Conservatives love to fall back on the whole “it’s about the children” argument.

Bill Donohue Furious Over Obama’s Marriage Support, Continues To Lie

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:31:29 +0000

President Obama

New York University may want to ask Bill Donohue for their doctorate back. Now, I’m a lowly interdisciplinary scholar with a Masters under her belt and a second under way, but even I know how to read the studies that are out there and what they say about same-sex couples and parenting. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, went on Piers Morgan’s CNN show to discuss President Barack Obama’s recent announcement about same-sex marriage. He faced off against Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign.

Griffin started out by explaining why Obama’s statement was important to the LGBT Community. He said “What the President of the United States said today – the first President of the United States said today – is that he cares for them (LGBT people). He is their president, he is standing up for them and he believes that they too are equal under the law. And that is incredibly significant.”

Donohue countered by stating “Obama has always liked the idea of two men getting married. He had to change, because he wanted to become president and he said he invoked his Christian moorings. Now today he had to wiggle with that.”

Now, 250 years ago in the United States, a Papist like Donohue would have been in serious trouble in the United States, and 200 years prior to that, he could have been executed by the Crown of England for being a Catholic. Donohue, of course, decided to compare same-sex marriage to incest. This is a normal tactic, and one that has long since grown tired and long in the tooth. When Morgan confronted Donohue about his personal problem with gays, Donohue went on to say:

Oh, it’s very simple. It’s absolutely very simple. I have a doctorate in sociology from NYU, and I know what the literature says. The literature is definitive. There is one gold standard, one gold standard for children. That is: there is no substitute for a marriage between a man and a woman. I want the law to discriminate against straight people who live together — I used to call it “shacking up,” but now it’s called cohabitation. I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions. I want to promote and to put in a privileged position that institution of marriage between a man and a woman, which has been shown over and over to be the gold standard.

Think Progress noted that:

Donohue might want to revisit sociology before he makes such grandiose claims. Not a single study has compared married opposite-sex couples to married same-sex couples and found a difference in their parenting ability. Any claim otherwise is a distortion of the research, not a “gold standard.”

. . .

With his brutally honest admission that he wants to discriminate, Donohue serves as a unique surrogate for the leadership of the Catholic Church. Though his organization “does not speak authoritatively for the Church,” he seems to say what the bishops are thinking. An open will to discriminate has little do with protecting Catholics from defamation — the actual mission of the Catholic League — just as same-sex couples marrying poses no threat to the religious liberty of practicing Catholics, who largely support marriage equality.

Now, here is the thing. There are studies out there that have been misused in order to try and portray same-sex marriage as harmful to children. Donohue shows his lack of academic ethics by embracing the studies that show that same-sex marriage is harmful to children because those studies are actually showing that two-parent households are better than one-parent households. An ethical and unbiased sociologist would then look at that study, dismiss it as irrelevant, and note that all studies that compare like to like- that is straight two-parent households to gay/lesbian two-parent households- show little or no difference between the two.

Donohue, basically, violates his own religion’s teachings on truthfulness and bearing false witness in order to maintain his hatred of lesbians and gays. In the end, if you have to surround a “truth” with a bodyguard of lies, then you should be reexamining whether or not what you believe is a truth is actually true.

Here’s the segment:

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/05/10/481651/donohue-wants-to-discriminate/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/bill-donohue-sounds-off-o_n_1509206.html

Romney Senior Advisor Outed Trans Woman Politician ‘With Glee’

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:29:44 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012
That Mitt Romney bullied a classmate many years ago is under some scruitiny, but mostly because the man in question’s family was not told by him, and apparently they do not want to be involved in a political spat. What is not important is the bullying itself, but rather Romney’s response to the event, which has been verified by two people- one who was a witness and one who was part of it. Romney has largely dismissed the bullying of his childhood as “pranks”.

Thus, it is not surprising to learn that as Governor of Massachusetts, he abolished a commission looking into bullying in that state’s schools. The commission was looking especially at anti-LGBT bullying.

Of course, the anti-LGBT nature of Romney’s campaign is hardly limited to just Romney himself, but it also includes the likes of Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior advisor. Think Progress reprinted:

Fehrnstrom saved his cheap shots for smaller-time Massachusetts pols. When a political activist and gadfly named Althea Garrison was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the fact that she was transgender was an open secret in Boston political circles. But Fehrnstrom was the first one to put that information into print—”I can remember his glee when he found the birth certificate,” says former Herald reporter Robert Connolly—thus bringing a swift end to Garrison’s future on Beacon Hill.

These days, that may not be such a problem, but the fact that the Romney Campaign is so anti-LGBT should really give pause to the likes of GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans, but it won’t. After all, if you’re willing to support Rick Santorum. . .

Rush Limbaugh Attacks Shep Smith On Marriage, Demeans His Own Audience

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:27:04 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012

Rush Limbaugh, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

FOX News’ Shepard Smith is the only one on FOX who seemed to actually have praise for Obama’s decision to vocally support same-sex marriage. Of course, that means that there are those who are going to attack him as soon as they can. . .like Rush Limbaugh.

Smith said of Obama’s announcement that the President was now on the “right side of the 21st Century.” He then asked Bret Baier if the GOP would still be campaigning against same-sex marriage all “while sitting very firmly, without much question, on the wrong side of history on it.”

So, of course, Rush Limbaugh had to say about the comments “Shep, where has the issue won? Where has the issue been victorious, Shep, outside your house? Where has the issue won an election? What state? Tell me where it’s happened.”

Baier’s remarks stating that same-sex marriage had always failed when it was put before a vote were played by Limbaugh who then stated “Exactly right. What do you want to look at, Shep? You want to look at the polls? Or do you want to look at the votes.” Even though Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, Limbaugh pressed, nothing has changed. “It’s still up to the hicks and the hay seeds in the state.”

Have you ever noticed that these guys like Limbaugh never seem to quite grasp that the bulk of those elections were held eight years ago. Additionally, they never quite get that whenever the rights of a minority are put to a popular vote, they are inevitably defeated. Had the First Amendment freedom of religion been put to a vote, the rights of Catholics and Jews would not have been allowed because both groups were hated. If the civil and political rights of Blacks had been put to a vote in the 1960′s, they would never have passed either. Had the right for women to vote been put to a popular vote, they would not have been allowed to vote.

Of course, given Limbaugh’s hatred of women, and nearly every other minority group, he undoubtably wishes that those votes had been taken.

FOX’s Problem With Gay Marriage Exposed On The Daily Show

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:24:05 +0000

President Obama

Originally posted 11 May 2012

Within 90 minutes of it becoming known that President Barack Obama now supports same-sex marriage, he raked in some $1 million. He then held a fundraiser with George Clooney that raised at least $15 million. In the same time, Mitt Romney has had no real spike in fundraising.

The rather ironic bit about all of this is that while the Republicans have pushed for bans on same-sex marriage, their money is getting kind of tight, and a lot of businesses are now supporting same-sex marriage. This was reflected in the coverage from FOX News in which all they could do to criticize Obama was to say that this was a cynical political move designed to garner votes.

Last night, on the Daily Show, they covered all of those:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Pentagon Report Finds DADT Repeal Implementation Going Well

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:22:07 +0000

Originally posted 11 May 2012

For the alarmists in the military as well as hate groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association the news out of the Defense Department is not good. A new report shows that the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is being successfully implemented in the military, and apparently there have been few incidents like the sergeant who berated his captain for dancing with her girlfriend.

According to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, repeal is going very well. He stated in a news conference today that “It’s not impacting on morale. It’s not impacting on unit cohesion. It is not impacting on readiness. . .Very frankly, my view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it. It’s become part and parcel of what they’ve accepted within the military.”

Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that he has not seen “any negative effect on good order and discipline” since the repeal. According to the Defense Department story on this:

In response to a reporter’s question of what the military had been afraid of in allowing open service, the chairman said, “We didn’t know.”

“We were given a year to make this assessment, to educate ourselves, to collaborate, to build a sense of trust on this issue,” he added. “And given that time to do it, I think it worked out well.”

Panetta did speak a bit about the Defense of Marriage Act noting that DOMA “obviously does have some impact with regards to the benefits that are provided to same-sex . And so we continue to review the benefits. But those have to be provided consistent with DOMA. And until DOMA is either rejected by the courts or changed by the Congress, that’s the law we abide by.”

He did note that same-sex marriages are allowed in some states and stated “Where state law provides for that, then obviously that kind of marriage can take place. If the law … prohibits that, then it cannot take place on a military [installation].”

Defense.gov noted that:

Dempsey said military partner benefits fall into three categories: self-declared benefits, such as service members’ naming of life insurance beneficiaries; benefits governed by policy, which the secretary determines and which are under review; and those set by law, such as marriage.

“Those three bins, if you will, are each rather clear in how we approach it,” he added.

The number of bases effected by same-sex marriage are relatively small, and most are in New York. Vermont has no regular military installations, but does have a few National Guard bases.

C is for Chocolate Chip Cookie Day

J. Wolffe — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:38:28 +0000

A chocolate-chip cookie.

Today is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. Did you know? Yeah, me neither. Let’s learn about it. Shall we?

A chocolate chip cookieis a drop cookie that originated in the United States and features chocolate chips as its distinguishing ingredient. The traditional recipe combines a dough composed of butter and both brown and white sugar with semi-sweet chocolate chips. Variations include recipes with other types of chocolate or additional ingredients, such as nuts or oatmeal.

Ruth Graves Wakefield

The chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1930. She owned the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Massachusetts, a very popular restaurant that featured home cooking in the 1930s. Her cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, was published in 1936 by M. Barrows & Company, New York. It included the recipe “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie”, which rapidly became a favorite to be baked in American homes.

Wakefield is said to have been making chocolate cookies and on running out of regular baker’s chocolate, substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé thinking that they would melt and mix into the batter. They did not and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips sold in North America has a variation (butter vs. margarine is now a stated option) of her original recipe printed on the back.

Home-made Chocolate Chip Cookies

During WWII, GIs from Massachusetts who were stationed overseas shared the cookies they received in care packages from back home with soldiers from other parts of the U.S. Soon, hundreds of GIs were writing home asking their families to send them some Toll House Cookies, and Wakefield was soon inundated with letters from around the world asking for her recipe. Thus began the nation-wide craze for the chocolate chip cookie

Although the Nestlé’sToll House recipe is widely known, every brand of chocolate chips, or “semi-sweet chocolate morsels” in Nestlé parlance, sold in the U.S. and Canada bears a variant of the chocolate chip cookie recipe on its packaging. Almost all baking-oriented cookbooks will contain at least one type of recipe

Raw chocolate chip cookie dough.

Practically all commercial bakeries offer their own version of the cookie in packaged baked or ready-to-bake forms. There are at least three national (U.S./North America) chains that sell freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in shopping malls and standalone retail locations. Several businesses—including Doubletree hotels, Citibank, Aloha, and Midwest Airlines—offer freshly baked cookies to their patrons to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Thanks to Sesame Street and the popular character of the Cookie Monster, generations have learned the wonderousness of the chocolate chip cookie. Ask any child or adult and they can sing to you the “C is for Cookie” song. If you don’t know it, here it is;

To honor the cookie’s creation in the state, on July 9, 1997, Massachusetts designated the chocolate chip cookie as the Official State Cookie, after it was proposed by a third-grade class from Somerset, Massachusetts.

So to celebrate, go have some chocolate Chip cookie inspired desserts. I’ll be munching some cookies with my partner while watching Glee. Enjoy!

NATIONAL CHOCOLATE CHIP DAY: This Exists (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
Celebrate National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day (abcnews.go.com)
National Food Day: Chocolate Chip Day (bakerunlive.com)

Swiss For A Month: Bachmann Gives Up Swiss Citizenship

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:24:47 +0000

Michele Bachmann apparently won’t be wearing both the Swiss and American flags while rallying for Mitt Romney. Apparently Bachmann finally realized that her husband’s decision to take up his Swiss citizenship was a problem not only for her political career, but also for her abject hatred of lesbians and gays. She did tell Swiss television that she did not plan to run in that nation because “As you can see, there is a lot of competition behind me that I would have to run against, and it would be very stiff, because they’re very good.”

When her citizenship issue broke, there were a lot of jokes, as the Washington Post noted:

“Swiss Family Bachmann” popped up frequently on Twitter, as did the question about how many Swiss bank accounts Bachmann will have. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz questioned what Bachmann would say if Obama had “sought dual citizenship with a socialist country.” Andrew Pavelyev, a Russian scientist who is now a naturalized American citizen, wrote that “American citizens should not have any other citizenship.”

Switzerland has same-sex partnerships and universal health coverage. Somehow it seems like Bachmann would not have been happy there. After all, she’s opposed to everything that Switzerland stands for.

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GLAAD: Not All Latino, Black Clergy Oppose Marriage Equality

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:23:07 +0000

Originally posted 10 May 2012
By now everyone likely knows that President Barack Obama has come out in support of same-sex marriage. While he has had some people on the Left less than happy with this announcement because they feel it does not go far enough, there are many others who are not. GLAAD today issued a press release in which they highlighed a variety of different Latino and Black clergy who support same-sex marriage. They wrote:

A 2010 Bendixen & Amandi International poll found 74 percent of Latinos support marriage equality or other forms of legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples. Similarly, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released in March 2012 showed support for marriage equality among African Americans at 50 percent. A Field Poll of California voters released in February 2012 found that 53 percent of Latino and 50 percent of African-American respondents approved of allowing same-sex couples to marry. A Public Religion Research Institute poll found that a majority of Latino Catholics and a third of Black protestants support marriage equality.

We ask that any journalist who is reporting on these stories consider including the following supportive voices:

Rev. William Barber, (North Carolina) President, North Carolina NAACP and pastor, Greenleaf Christian Church Disciples of Christ, Goldsboro, NC 120 year old congregation with over 400 members and 30 active ministries. He is an Adjunct Instructor at NCCU, Master of Public Administration and Duke Divinity Masters Program and author has written one book entitled “Preaching Through Unexpected Pain.”. Rev. Dr. Barber earned a Master of Divinity Degree, Duke University School of Divinity where he was a Dean Scholar, Benjamin Mays Fellow and his Ph.D from Drew University in Madison, NJ.

Rev. Roland Stringfellow, (Berkeley) Since 1990, Rev. Stringfellow has a been a licensed minister in the Baptist Church. Roland has also worked in education as a teacher, guidance counselor, college advisor and vice principal. Currently Rev. Stringfellow continues the dialogue on LGBT equality with church congregations and in religious institutions in his role as director of ministerial outreach with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Sexuality at the Pacific School of Religion. He has been consulted about the relationship between marriage equality and communities of faith at the local, state and national level. In June 2011, Rev. Stringfellow was elected with the most votes to become a grand marshal in the San Francisco Pride Parade. He jointly holds his BS in Education and a MS in Counseling from Indiana University and a MA in Ministry from Grace Theological Seminary.

Rev. Joseph Tolton, (New York) Pastor of Rehoboth Temple Christ Conscious Church, in New York. Elder Tolton also serves as Director of The REVIVAL Initiative, a spiritual forum purposed to advance the civil rights of gay and lesbian people in the African diaspora. Elder Tolton earned his BA in religion from Vassar College and his MBA in management from Columbia Business School.

Bishop Yvette Flunder, (San Francisco) founded the City of Refuge UCC in 1991 in order to unite a gospel ministry with a social ministry. A native San Franciscan, Bishop Flunder is a third generation preacher with roots in the Church of God in Christ. She was licensed in the COGIC and later ordained by the Bishop Walter Hawkins of Love Center Ministries where she served as Associate Pastor and administrator for the Oakland-based Love Center Church. Bishop Flunder is also an ordained Minister of the United Church of Christ and a graduate of the Ministry Studies and Master of Arts. Bishop Flunder is a Trustee and Adjunct Professor at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley California and has been a lecturer, Adjunct Professor and speaker at Lancaster, Duke, Drew, Eden, Yale and New York Theological. She is the author of “Where the Edge Gathers: A Theology and Homiletic of Radical Inclusion” Pilgrim Press. She is a board member of the National Sexuality Resource Center, an active voice for the Religion Council of the Human Rights Campaign and Co-Chair of the Religious Advisory Committee of the National Black Justice Coalition. She also serves on the UCC Unified Governance Working Group as representative of the United Church of Christ Seminaries.

Rev. Cedric Harmon, (Maryland) An ordained pastor affiliated with the National Baptist and Missionary Baptist Churches, Cedric served as religious organizer for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. For 13 years, he recruited and trained clergy from around the country to provide legislative testimony about issues of religion and government. He’s also known for his writing and television appearances—again on human rights and social justice—and serves on several boards having to do with sexuality and religion.

Rev. Candy Holmes, (Maryland) An African American Marylander who is a Lesbian, who has lived in the state of Maryland for nearly 35 years. She is a reverend with the Metropolitan Community Church.

Rev. Manny Santiago, (Washington) The Rev. Manny Santiago the first openly gay Hispanic minister is in the American Baptist Denomination and our own newly installed Minister at University Baptist Church in Seattle. Rev. Santiago is an international leader within the Baptist movement sitting on national boards of the Baptist Peace Fellowship and Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists which advocates for full inclusion of LGBT persons in every aspect of the church.

Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre, (Denver), Professor of Social Ethics and Latino/a Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. Additionally, he was elected as the 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Romney: Gays Not Good Enough For Marriage, Good Enough To Adopt Kids

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:21:04 +0000

Mitt Romney doesn’t believe that same-sex couples are good enough for marriage or even civil unions. Instead, what he wants is for lesbians and gays to have a couple of rights…oh, and the right to adopt and foster children. In other words, Romney believes that it is alright for lesbians and gays to adopt children, but they are not good enough for the stability that marriage offers in order to allow these children to grow up protected by the law. Normalizing same-sex marriage would be one means to help eliminate bullying in schools, but then again, Romney is a bully who doesn’t care whether or not people get bullied.

Romney’s Tone Deaf Bullying Response

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:16:42 +0000

Originally posted 10 May 2012

Bullying may never be something that the bully remembers, but the bullied will live with the scars of that bullying for the rest of their lives. This is something that Mitt Romney seems to exemplify. Romney’s tone deafness over the bullying incidents of his youth are not helped by his decisions to minimalize those incidents as “pranks”. One of these “pranks” included having his friends hold down a young man while he clipped off the boy’s hair.

Romney issued the standard non-apology apology for the incidents. What makes Romney’s stance so horrific is that it came less than a week after the funeral of Rachel Ehmke. The young woman died after hanging herself following years of intense bullying.

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Marriage Equality: Olson, Tony Perkins And Barney Frank On Hardball

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:13:57 +0000

Originally posted 10 May 2012
It was a battle royale between Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Representative Barney Frank on Hardball with Chris Matthews. What Perkins had to say is not surprising given that he is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and homosexuality even though he seems absolutely obsessed with what two men do in the bedroom. In fact, most of the time, Perkins appears to be more obsessed with gay sex than an openly gay man. Here is that segment:

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Theodore Olson appeared on Hardball as well to discuss not only marriage equality, but lesbian and gay parents. Olson is one of two leads on the suit seeking to take down California’s Prop 8. Olson has been a strong advocate of marriage equality for some time now. He believes that it is only right as a Conservative to support equality for all.

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Romney Campaign To Push Anti-Marriage Equality Amendment

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:12:07 +0000

Ed Gillespie (photo by Gage Skidmore)

Originally posted 10 May 2012

Ed Gillespie, the senior adviser for the Romney Campaign, had a little talk with Chuck Todd regarding President Barack Obama’s support for marriage equality. Gillespie is apparently not on the same page as his candidate. Gillespie told Todd “Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides. I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.”

He went on to state that Romney would be pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Gillespie was President George W. Bush’s Republican National Committee Chairman during the 2004 campaign when the Republicans pushed for various state constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage as a means to get out the Conservative vote. It should be noted that eight years ago was a long time ago.

Support for same-sex marriage is now at just over 50% nationally, and in many states, it is far beyond that. Six states now have same-sex marriage as well as Washington DC and two Native American reservations. ThinkProgress noted that Romney has been playing up his pro-hatred and pro-discrimination stand throughout the campaign. Romney even said before CPAC in February saying “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.”

House Speaker John Boehner also dodged the questions. A reporter asked “A Romney adviser said this morning that they plan to make gay marriage a campaign issue and that they’re also going to push for a constitutional amendment. Do you agree with that?” Boehner reported “I’m going to stay focused on jobs.” Boehner then left the stage.

Rush Limbaugh Accuses Obama Of Leading War On Marriage

Bridgette P. LaVictoire — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:09:29 +0000

Rush Limbaugh, by Donkey Hotey, Creative Commons

Originally posted 10 May 2012

It is not surprising that Rush Limbaugh is busy running amok over the fact that President Barack Obama would support same sex marriage even going as far as saying “We’ve Arrived At A Point Where The President Of The United States Is Going To Lead A War On Traditional Marriage”

Of course, Limbaugh knows something about traditional marriage. After all, he has been married how many times? In a traditional marriage, he would not have been allowed to get a divorce. But it is not surprising that those who constantly talk about so-called traditional marriage ignore the actual traditions that were part of marriage.

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