Rocker Needles

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

Lady Bunny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-effected Officer Latrice Royale

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

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

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

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

*insert evil laugh here*

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

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

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

Related articles

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

This is to request that you investigate Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic Church, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Knights of Columbus for apparent violations of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations, which by law may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of their activities and may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.

We have read the Special Rules Limiting IRS Authority to Audit a Church and believe that the Catholic Church and its associated theocratic entities violate statutes in a way constistent with IRS protocol for initiating an investigation.

The Catholic Church and Cardinal Dolan have declared war against the candidacy of President Barack Obama.

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago sent two threatening letters to the president, protesting his support for the rights of LGBT Americans, before Dolan on September 20, 2011 sent Obama a threatening letter, in which he said that if Obama continued to support LGBT Americans’ rights, he would “precipitate a national conflict between Church and State of enormous proportions.” Dolan’s threatening letter was publicly posted on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website and linked to Dolan’s blog.

They note that:

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

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

538 also notes that:

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

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

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

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

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders

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

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

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

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

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

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

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

On June 1, For Greater Glory is being released in the theaters. Since no one, except maybe a few privileged critics, have seen the film so far, it is impossible to tell how closely it follows the facts of the Mexican Cristero War of 1926 to 1929. But, it’s about a popular uprising to protect the Mother Church from a viciously anti-church government, so it must be wonderful and the Church must praise it and recommend it and make fools of themselves.

Yes, full-blown, certified fools of themselves. If this movie, which stars Andy Garcia, is in any way accurate, it is about the personal ambitions of one man, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, an anti-clerical Mason who was offered a great deal of money (twice the normal army general’s salary) by a pro-church group to put together an army and who saw that army as a ticket to the Presidency.

A little background here. Mexico’s had a few too many revolutions to keep them all straight, especially since the United States’ history curriculums pretend we occupy this continent alone….

The Mexican Constitution is neither ambiguous nor namby-pamby about separation of church and state. It is absolute for a reason. The Catholic Church has a long and dishonorable history of running nations. In the twentieth century, they have been less obvious about it, but the Church still inserts its influence into secular legislatures and change has been slow in most of the so-called Catholic countries. Mexico was the first Catholic country to tell them to butt out.

Article 24 states that: “Every man shall be free to choose and profess any religious belief as long as it is lawful and it cannot be punished under criminal law. The Congress shall not be authorized to enact laws either establishing or prohibiting a particular religion. Religious ceremonies of public nature shall be ordinarily performed at the temples. Those performed outdoors shall be regulated under the law

Article 3 state: “I. According to the religious liberties established under article 24, educational services shall be secular and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. II. The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorance’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism and prejudice.” Article 27 states: “All religious associations organized according to article 130 and its derived legislation, shall be authorized to acquire, possess or manage just the necessary assets to achieve their objectives.” Article 130 state: The rules established at this article are guided by the historical principle according to which the State and the churches are separated entities from each other. Churches and religious congregations shall be organized under the law.” Churches must be registered and there are restrictions on priests and ministers holding office, participating in political campaigns or engaging in political activity. There are several specific regulations governing the actions of churches and clergy.

From the time the Constitution was adopted in 1917, through today, the strictness with which the state enforces the restrictions on the church have fluctuated. In 1926, the Church was very upset because the former President, Plutarco Elias Calles (who is being played in the movie by Ruben Blades) was an atheist and very anti-clerical.

General Enrique Gorostieta

Some, particularly the Church, call the Cristero War, or the Cristiado as it is also called, a war for religious freedom. Others call it a war to reassert the Church’s power over the state. American Catholic leadership is touting the movie as a glorious story of the battle for religious liberty. Gorostieta saw the Cristiado as a ticket to wealth and power. Gorostieta did not share the view of the leaders of the Cristiado who sought domination of the country by the Church, but wanted the Constitution restored to its 1837 Juarezian roots in which the government exercised a policy of non-interference and toleration for all religions, with a complementary policy of non-interference in the state by religions. He believed he could turn his militia of Jalisco farmers into a professional fighting force equal to the regular army. His dreams ended with a negotiated settlement and an ambush in which he was killed at the age of forty.

The American Catholic hierarchy is advocating a movie about a revolution to establish a state religion, to force one church’s doctrine on an entire nation. My grandmother came here to escape a Catholic nation that would not permit her to divorce the husband that abandoned her. My mother’s German Catholic ancestors came here in 1780 to escape a Lutheran government. The Catholic Church is recommending a movie that remind us just what our First Amendment means – the freedom from the union of church and state that brought so many of our ancestors here.

In Latin America the Catholic Church is losing ground fast. Upwards of 30% of the inhabitants of South and Central America have left the Church, either espousing no religion or joining evangelical Protestant churches. One of the big political and religious issues is birth control, which modern, educated people see not just as a right, but as a necessity for transitioning out of poverty and into a middle-class-driven economy.

I think it will probably be a very good movie. Instead of a Welsh man and woman playing a Spanish father and daughter as Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones did in Zorro, this movie stars Hispanics. Ruben Blades is Panamanian, but that’s getting nick-picky compared to how Hollywood usually casts films. He’s a hell of an actor, as is Garcia. But, I’m not betting on its historical accuracy. It’s a two-hour movie covering a three-year war and the stills are pretty heavy on the romance of Gorostieta and his wife. Movies about wars tend to go very light on the boring politics behind the wars, and the Cristiado was driven by politics not just by religious fervor. That’s the part no movie wants to explain – that religion is used and abused by politicians to recruit cannon fodder. That’s the downside of movies like this. If Lawrence of Arabia had spent more time on the politics and less time on Peter O’Toole’s handsome face, we might have understood the Middle East better. If Michael Collins had explored the reasons Collins negotiated away Ulster, we might have been less eager to send money to the IRA. Movies are very powerful tools for propaganda, and For Greater Glory could as easily backfire against the Catholic Church as it could support the outrageous claim that the Obama administration is “waging war on religion” by requiring health insurance to cover prescription drugs that prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Throwing kudos at a film before you know what’s in it or how people will react to it is incredibly foolish.

Related articles

• Cardinal Dolan Accuses Obama Of “Strangling” Catholic Church (lezgetreal.com)
• Viva Cristo Rey! (patheos.com)
• Cristero War film gets a release date (orthosphere.org)

Barry toking a Joint

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

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

Roof Hits w/ Cheech & Chong

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

He also was unafraid to go against proper smoking protocol:

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

Barry giving a speech

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

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

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

*Choom is Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana.

Related articles

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

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

And

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

Oh, and my favorite:

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

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

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

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

According to the Catholic News Agency:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back about fifty years ago, this was said:

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

And this:

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

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

President Obama

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

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

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

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

According to MetroWeekly:

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

Emblem of the Papacy

Elsewhere on this site you can read the case of the nine-year-old rape victim whose mother and doctors made the decision to abort her twin fetuses. This isn’t about her. It is about Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho who excommunicated the doctors, the girl, and her mother, but not the stepfather who raped her.

This is about the Archbishop’s explanation of why he excommunicated them….”They took the life of an innocent. Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored.”

The mother was not an adult, you fool. She was an innocent child, who should have been learning long division and playing with dolls.

The Archbishop needs a refresher course in Catholic theology.

Skipping over the ways someone can be baptized, let’s get to the meat of it. According to the website Te Deum Laudamus!, an aborted fetus is not considered to have been intended to be baptized, so it is not assumed to be “baptized by intent,” as a stillborn or miscarried child is. Aborted fetuses are not in Purgatory. They are in the ether. They are nowhere. The Church has no place for them in the afterlife. So, no prayers are offered by the Church for their transition from Purgatory to Heaven. Prayers are offered for God’s mercy on the fetus’ soul. The remains of an aborted fetus are not accorded a Catholic funeral mass. It has only been since 1983 that an unbaptized child may be buried in a Catholic cemetery. They used to throw them over the walls.

People are baptized in the Catholic Church to remove the stain of Original Sin. Until baptized, an infant is in a state of sin. Like to explain, Archbishop how these twin fetuses are more innocent than that tortured, abused, raped nine-year-old child who was going to die if she carried that pregnancy to term. And where did you get your medical degree? You must have one if you could explain with such certainty that she could have carried the pregnancy and been delivered by caesarean section. When did you examine her? The authorities found out about the pregnancy because she was in a medical crisis, not because she was seeking routine pre-natal care.

This is why we fought for the right to legally get an abortion. We didn’t do it for emergency birth control. We did it because women and girls DIED carrying bad pregnancies to term, and their babies usually died with them. We did it because women died getting illegal abortions, or were so maimed they could never have another child. We did it to save the lives of those already walking God’s earth.

We fought for legal abortion to save the lives of those Archbishop Sobrinho has said were not innocent enough to save, those the Vatican considered too unclean to save.

We took the risk that women would choose an abortion because they were careless, or because they didn’t think through the consequences of unprotected sex, or because they were suddenly abandoned by the father of the child, or because they were too uneducated to prevent a pregnancy. We knew that we could be enabling abortion as birth control. It was a necessary risk to achieve the goal of saving women’s lives.

But as we fought for the right to a legal abortion, we also fought to better sex education and access to birth control. The pill was already available, making it easier, we thought, to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Years ago, I met a woman who worked for the Georgia public health department. She said her worst enemy was the jackass legislators who wrote opt-out clauses into sex education laws. It never failed that the kids who had been excused from sex ed ended up in her clinic with unwanted, unexpected pregnancies because some uneducated parent had taught them a girl could only get pregnant during her period.

In America, we are facing laws that will criminalize abortion or make it so difficult to get that a pregnancy passes the acceptable threshold before the woman has passed through all the hoops. We have a law in Arizona that says a woman is pregnant before having sex, and amendments and laws have been proposed to declare a fertilized egg a person. Twenty percent of Americans would deny abortion to raped girls and women, or to save the life of the mother. The majority of Americans want to restrict the circumstances under which a woman or girl can receive an abortion. And just to compound their reckless disregard for lives of women and girls, state legislatures and Congress have voted to de-fund the most important providers of education and family planning and birth control in America. In the minds of these fanatics, the only people worthy of drawing breath are those who are virgins until marriage and who belong to their religions. Everyone else should just curl up and die.

Because one Pope thought he knew better than 1580 years of Popes before him, because he thought he knew better than all the scholars in Rome, the Catholic Church condemned this nine-year-old Brazilian girl to death, but her loving mother and caring doctors intervened. Now, they have condemned her to hell.

God, please protect us from your faithful.

Related articles

• Brazil Court OKs Abortions for Brainless Fetuses (abcnews.go.com)
• Hayley Rose Horzepa: The Importance of Choice (huffingtonpost.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

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

Elton John

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

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

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

We hope he recovers quickly.

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Dylan in 2011

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

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

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

Dylan age 19

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

Dylan with guitar

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

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

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

Related articles

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

President and Vice-President touring Namaste Solar Electric in Denver with CEO Blake Jones

In spite of the debacle of Solyndra, the President is continuing to press for the development of green energy, which hits at one of the greater divides among Americans. There are those who believe that we can and should keep extracting fossil fuels and using them the way we have for almost a century, and those who believe we need to develop new sources of energy for the future.

We have a couple of major problems with energy in this country. One is infrastructure, the other is inevitability. First the infrastructure.

Every year, tens of thousands, if not millions of Americans suffer power loss because of ice storms, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, you name it. There are two causes, besides the weather. The first is our power lines being above-ground and the second is the age of our energy grid.

The United States did some very stupid things during the 1950′s economic boom years. We allowed our rail system to start shrinking, to be replaced with cars and trucks, and we kept putting electricity and telephone lines above ground as we built hundreds of thousands of new towns, suburban developments that rippled out around our cities. Some later developments buried the electric lines, but it was too little too late. Most of our country has above-ground utilities.

Today, the utility companies, states and cities say it’s too expensive to put them underground. That’s a very short view of the situation. Yes, it would be an expensive proposition. It’s much easier to put these things underground during initial construction, but we are also facing collapsing, aging water and sewer systems across America, so doing the two in tandem makes economic sense. It also makes sense to look at how much it costs us each year when power lines are downed by weather events. My city is facing a thirty-year project of replacing our entire water and sewer system. So far, except for a few downtown streets, no one has suggested going underground with our utilities at the same time. My state had massive power line damage with Tropical Storm Irene. No one suggested using this opportunity, while we are rebuilding roads, to bury the lines. It’s not just electricity we lose when power lines go down. Most of us have heating systems that depend on electricity, so we also lose our heat or air conditioning, which is far more dangerous to our survival than losing the ability to watch TV for a few days.

Our current power grid is not efficient. We literally leak power across the transmission lines. It is not capable of carrying the loads we will need in the near future, as more of our lives are wired and powered. Those of us who haven’t gone completely cellular for our telephones are just as likely to have wireless phones which don’t work in a power outage. My family went completely cellular because the city we lived in had such old power and telephone lines that we were constantly losing one or both. I don’t mind losing power, but being cut off from being able to contact emergency services because a squirrel hit a bare patch on the wires scares me.

The term “power grid” refers to the nation-wide system that moves electricity from generation facilities to homes and businesses, often across state lines. The power for my home crosses an international border. Vermont buys most of its power from HydroQuébec. Which segues nicely into the inevitability aspect of our energy future.

Fossil fuels built this nation. They have powered our electric generation plants, run our cars, heated our homes and commercial buildings and they are running out. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. There is only so much oil, coal and natural gas under the surface of the earth, and we are now extracting it from the sources that were considered too marginal to bother with just a decade ago. Gas prices will never go down below $3.00 a gallon again. They can’t, not when we are extracting oil from the deep ocean and from oilsands formations, places where oil does not just gush up easily or inexpensively. And to get that 100 years of natural gas that those gas company ads keep talking about, we are forcing chemicals into shale formation, fracking the shale, to extract the gas.

When people talk about green energy generation, they think big, really big. They talk about acres of solar panels in the deserts of the Southwest and huge wind turbines dotting farmland in the Midwest. We even have that mentality where wind is concerned in Vermont, with plans for ridgeline installations setting off big battles between people who want alternative energy and those who want to preserve our views. But big isn’t necessary.

Drive through Vermont, not the interstate but the state highways, and you will see wind towers in farm yards. Not many of them, but they are around. Windmills used to be a routine part of farms. These are just an updated version, not a tall or as visually offensive as commercial installations. The problem with wind turbines on farms is the cost. The turbines are very expensive and it takes years for them to create enough savings in electricity to pay for themselves. Which leads us to a much better solution, compliments of a brilliant state legislature and some pretty smart entrepreneurs.

We have just applied for solar panels which will be leased from a company here in Vermont. The lease payments will be lower than our current electric bills, there will be no up-front costs and the installation is free. The application included this neat little feature where I had to verify that they had the right address from the satellite picture of my house. The company will use the satellite picture to determine how best to install panels on my house. I included the information that the picture doesn’t show well. Our house is built into a hillside. The front, at street level, faces north. At the back is a two-car garage at basement level. It has a triple-pitched roof that faces east, west and south. The only tree near the garage is on the south side, but is leafless in winter when the sun’s rays come from the south. It’s the perfect roof for solar panels.

Now, for the brilliant legislature part: In Vermont, a homeowner can elect to hook their solar panels up to their electric meter and the electric company must buy the power generated by the panels. The meter runs backwards when the sun shines, the company issues credit against the customers electric bills. For about six months, the credits are building up to be used the other six months when the sky is more overcast. A typical customer either ends up with smaller electric bills or gets a check from the electric company. The savings over the cost of a year, even with the cost of the lease, can be significant.

Small scale, personal, no initial cost, low operating cost, crafted in co-operation with the power company and not in competition with it, and one more part of the green-ness of the Green Mountain State. We only seem fanatically environmental in Vermont. We have learned over the years that easing into new ideas works better than hitting people over the head with them. Eventually, the ideas catch on, usually with a lot of grumbling and grousing along the way, but like civil unions and same sex marriage, once the ideas are in place and people see that they don’t harm anyone, they gain better acceptance.

There is a house in the next block that has a bank of older solar panels covering most of the front of the house. Our installation will show that solar installations don’t need to be unsightly or intrusive and that other houses on our block which share our directionality could also benefit.

Related articles

• The Guardian reports on the Feed-in Tariff(evoenergy.co.uk)

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• El Nido Resorts as a case study for how going green means saving gold and doing good(elnidoenvironment.wordpress.com)

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• “Not In My Backyard”: The Green Energy Paradox (doubledippolitics.com)
• Solar prevents rising energy costs (evoenergy.co.uk)
• Solar power to generate majority of electricity by 2060 (evoenergy.co.uk)
• Union Cab installs solar panels to help power fleet (channel3000.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

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

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

Polls about abortion rights ask people to identify themselves using the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Those are the choices – are you for or against life, are you for or against choice. Nowhere does anyone ask, are you both?

I am. I don’t like abortion. I would rather see a woman choose another option if it is medically or emotionally possible. But it is not my choice, it is hers. I would prefer abortions be prevented by preventing unwanted pregnancies through good, factual sex education and easy access to birth control. I would prefer to see boys taught greater responsibility instead of their culture teaching them that manhood is defined by how many girls they screw and impregnate. I would rather see abortion be, as Bill Clinton so eloquently put it “safe, available and rare.”

The latest Gallup polls show 50% of Americans are “pro-life,” and only 41% are “pro-choice.” With only two ways to identify themselves, the words matter. The poll then brought down the responders by political affiliation. Democrats are pro-choice, Republicans pro-life, and there’s nothing new to see here, folks. Then, the ultimately loaded question: is abortion morally acceptable or morally wrong? The wrongs won out, 51% to 38%. But the right to choose an abortion is a civil right. The fact that it and gay marriage are being judged by moral or religious standards is unconstitutional.

There is only one part of this poll that anyone should pay attention to: do you think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, legal under certain circumstances or illegal in all circumstances? There was no follow-up question about the types of circumstances, which makes the results, 52% of American adults favor abortion under certain circumstances, highly ambiguous. Legal under certain circumstances garnered 25% and illegal in all circumstances got only 20%. So, 77% of us agree that legal abortion should be available. We’re just not exactly agreed on what circumstances are acceptable.

How about life of the mother? How about extreme defect in the fetus? How about rape and incest? How about during the first 12 weeks? How about during the first 20 weeks?

The pro-life groups are just thrilled with the poll. It allegedly proves that they are making progress at making abortion illegal again. And the pro-choice forces are putzing around failing to make the case that criminalizing abortion is a really, truly stupid thing to do. It not only does not eliminate abortion, it kills and maims women.

How is it that the right wing has managed to hire all the best public relations people? They can craft messages that hit every button, push every fear, play to every ignorance, while the left can’t get its act together to distribute facts to counter the propaganda.

Related articles

• Gallup poll finds record-low numbers of respondents identify as ‘pro-choice’(thehill.com)

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• Preserving Abortion Rights – Part I(abortion.ws)

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• Pro-nothing.(ambivalentlyopinionated.wordpress.com)

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From Creative Commons

I just found a fabulous website. It is run by a lady who only identifies herself as Middle Molly. She resides in Chicago, and she has posted less personal information about herself than I have, and I refuse to post a profile. Molly has the most concise, precise analysis about unemployment in America that I have ever seen. You can find her at mollysmiddleamerica.blogspot.com.

Quick summary, so visit Molly for the detailed analysis –

When Barack Obama took office, we had already lost 4,462,000 jobs, a million more than the Bush administration had admitted to.

In the next few months, we lost 4,317,000 additional jobs, all before a single Obama policy could take effect.

During the recession, we lost a total of 8,779,000 jobs.

We have gained 4,248,000 private sector jobs since February, 2010.

However, we have lost 503,000 public sector jobs – school teachers, road maintenance, police and fire fighters, library workers – almost all at the state and local level.

The net job gain for the Obama administration is 3,745,000.

We still need 5,034,000 jobs just to break even with what we have lost. That number does not take into consideration the new jobs needed for people who have graduated high school and college or immigrated to this country legally since 2006 when the recession began.

So, the question facing Americans is really very simple – do we want to return to the policies that cost us 8,779,000 jobs or continue with the guy who has helped to restore 3,745,000 of them?

Visit Molly monthly to track the jobs numbers and get that most elusive of things in this election year – real, honest, unbiased facts.

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• Quick! Guess How Many Jobs Were Created Per Month During The Bush Administration… (jhaines6.wordpress.com)

The two live in Dummerston, Vermont and have been together more than a decade, and legally married in Vermont last year. They were informed of the decision by the Vermont Congressional delegation.

The Supreme Court. Back: Justices Sotomayor, Breyer, Alito and Kagan. Front: Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy and Bader Ginsberg

There are five weeks remaining in the Supreme Court’s term and over 20 cases still undecided. On Monday, they released decisions on three minor cases.

The basic theme of yesterday’s decisions was the courts should not read into laws more than what is actually there.

The U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and the Pacific territories, had ruled that non-citizens how had committed deportable offenses, could apply the residency of their parents to the requirement that if they had been lawful residents for at least five years, residing in the United States continually for seven years and have not been found guilty of any aggravated felony could seek cancellation of their deportation orders. In an unanimous decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the Court ruled that people could not apply the residency of their parents because that is not what the law says.

In the second case, the Court ruled that a Japanese baseball player did not have to pay translation fees because lost his lawsuit against a Northern Mariana Islands resort. The law says that the loser of a case pays for an interpreter for the documents involved. The Court ruled that the law calls for losers paying for “interpreters” not for written translations, therefore, the law does not cover document translation. The ruling was written by Justice Samuel Alito, with five justices concurring, including Justice Kagan. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

In the third case, Justice Ginsberg wrote for the whole Court that children born from frozen sperm after the death of the sperm donor do not qualify for survivors’ benefits under Social Security. The ruling was in response to and supported state laws that limit inheritance to children born or conceived during the deceased’s lifetime, not those conceived after death. The only way that these laws can be overruled is if the deceased had made provisions for possible posthumous births in his will.

The Court accepted for next term a lawsuit brought by attorneys, journalists and human rights organizations including Amnesty International over a Federal wiretapping law allowing warrantless tapping of non-citizens or resident outside the United States for purpose of collecting foreign intelligence. The Court is being asked to consider if the plaintiffs have a right to challenge the law based on a fear of being wiretapped and not evidence that they have been wiretapped. Presumably, the wiretapping involves calls or internet communications to persons inside the United States, since tapping phones and computers in foreign countries is so not legal.

Three down and the biggies yet to go. We are still waiting for a ruling on the Affordable Care Act.

Related articles

• Supreme Court Decides On Deportation, Takes Up Wiretapping(huffingtonpost.com)

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• Approval of Supreme Court Falls for Republicans and Democrats(wnyc.org)

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Yesterday, President Obama attended the graduation ceremony for the Joplin High School Class of 2012. Their school was leveled by the tornado. They lost friends, teachers, classmates and their school that day. But they persevered. They survived. They rebuilt their lives and are moving forward. The President was there to honor them and the spirit of the city.

Their principal, Dr. Kerry Sachetta, was on Andrea Mitchell’s MSNBC show this afternoon telling her how honored the students were by the President’s presence. When people bother to listen to him, Barack Obama is a great speaker and can hit the right notes in a time of tragedy or triumph like few presidents before him.

His speech stayed away from politics, and spoke of the “power of community” and the community’s response to the tragedy without “greed and selfishness; ignorance and cruelty.” Not for Joplin the kind the of price gouging we have seen in the aftermath of hurricanes or the exclusion of certain people from assistance, no new zoning laws were passed to prevent the less acceptable from reclaiming their lives. All was good in Joplin last night.

President Obama told the class that what they have done in the past year is “…the same spirit we need right now to help rebuild America. And you, class of 2012, you’re going to help lead this effort. You’re the ones who will help build an economy where every child can count on a good education; you’re the ones who are going to make sure everyone who is willing to put in the effort can find a job that supports a family; you’re the ones who will make sure we’re a country that can control our own energy future and we lead the world in science and technology and innovation. No matter how tough times get, you’ll always be tougher. No matter what life throws at you, you will be ready. You will not be defined by the difficulties you face, but by how you respond – with grace, and strenght and a commitment to others.”

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• Obama Speaks At Joplin High School’s Graduation One Year After Devastating Tornado(huffingtonpost.com)

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• Joplin: Remember, Rejoice, Rebuild(whitehouse.gov)

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• Obama: “You Are From Joplin And You Are From America.”(duanegraham.wordpress.com)

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• Joplin remembers deadly tornado, one year later (wtvm.com)
• Joplin hospital honors 2011 tornado survivors (miamiherald.com)

A majority of Americans- 52%- feel that lesbian and gay relationships are just fine. All together, it is an interesting snapshot of what Americans find morally acceptable:

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rome, February 15, 2012, with his dream Vespa

Cardinal Timothy Dolan is apparently still livid that he is not allowed to rule over the United States government in an ideologically pure manner. He took to CBS to accuse the Obama Administration of strangling the Church over the matter of contraception policies. Dolan stated that the compromise that he, himself, agreed to before it went public was not sufficient because he believes it is too restrictive.

Dolan stated that“They tell us if you’re really going be considered a church, if you’re going to be really exempt from these demands of the government, well, you have to propagate your Catholic faith and everything you do, you can serve only Catholics and employ only Catholics. We’re like, wait a minute, when did the government get in the business of defining for us the extent of our ministry.”

Apparently, and not surprisingly, Dolan has ignored much of the debate. While the contraceptive medications are used for contraception, they are also used to treat a wide variety of medical conditions that are exclusive to women. Part of the problem, of course, is that these Catholic institutions also cover medicines like Viagra, which is used only by men, and are used to treat a disorder that is not life threatening nor particularly painful.

Dolan also ignores that the First Amendment is a two way street. Government intrusion into religious doctrine, but is also suppose to protect the government from religious intrusion. It has also become clear that Dolan does not believe that his flock are trustworthy enough to decide on the issue of contraception on their own even if health insurance from those institutions would cover it.

Dolan simply wants to impose a Catholic theocracy in this nation, as has been evident in his actions attacking LGBT Rights on “religious” grounds.

Now, in their “cost cutting” zeal, Congressional Republicans want to deep-six this “between the census” program, which has been around in varying forms since the 1850s. The survey helps define the best ways for the government to spend over $400 billion in funds for so-called “social programs” from heating assistance to job training.

Last week, the Republicans in the House voted to eliminate the survey. Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican from Florida, said “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators. We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective, especially since in the end, this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” Let’s just ignore the fact that statisticians say random surveys are the most scientific of all.

Every year, about three million households participate. The survey gathers information about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, health care and insurance, housing situation, ages, disabilities, education levels, income, a whole range of factors that impact and shape our lives. The survey does not ask about political affiliation or opinions on political subjects. It is just the nuts-and-bolts of living and surviving, thriving or barely getting by. And, I’m sorry to disagree with Mr. Webster, but the woman who was taking the survey sure wasn’t being paid $420 an hour for her time with my family. So, who wrote to their Congresspersons and objected to the survey? Technically, participation is mandatory. But it was not presented to us that way. The woman who took the survey did not mention penalties or fines for not participating, she just explained what the survey was for and how it helped the community.

The Repubs like to cite the question about flush toilets as offensively intrusive. It is used to assess groundwater contamination in areas where there are no sewer systems (and no laws like Vermont’s that specify where septic systems can be placed.) It helps assess the possible need for a sewer system to be extended beyond its present limits to include newer development.

And in the most egregious aspect of the stupidity of the Repubs, most of the questions on the survey were generated because of laws passed by Congress, including the newest ones about computers and internet access, which was specifically requested by Congress in 2008. Mr. Webster himself cites the survey in posting to his constituents on his Congressional webpage.

It seems that Speaker Boehner, who used to hand out lobbyist checks on the floor of the House in his early days, forgot to instruct his caucus as to who they actually represent.

McDonalds does not count steeples to determine where they will site a new store. They use the American Community Survey. Retail chains use it. The United States Chamber of Commerce uses it. In fact, anyone with half a brain, in both business and government, uses it. You can probably cite instances in your own community where someone did something totally stupid…like my city deciding it wanted to put a methadone clinic up at the hospital, when most of the need is on the other side of the city. Those are the people who didn’t use the survey, the ones with less than half a brain.

In addition to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Home Builders are screaming over this ridiculous idea to end a survey that so many of their members depend upon. So are economic development organizations, state education departments that determine where to site community colleges and what programs to offer, factory owners who want to locate where there are available employees with the needed educations and skills.

But, in typical Tea Party blindness, Rep. Webster insists that “What really promotes business in this country is liberty, not demand for information.”

Really?

Businesses need information. Without knowing where the customers are, they don’t know where to locate their businesses. Without knowing where the customers are, they don’t know how to target their advertising. Without knowing where the workers are, they don’t know where to locate their factories.

Governments and community assistance groups need information. Without knowing where the people with no health insurance are concentrated, they don’t know where to locate free or assisted clinics. Without knowing where the uninsulated houses are, they don’t know where to target their information about weatherization projects and loans. Without knowing where the children are, they don’t know where to locate a day care facility. Everything from bus routes to zoning to border crossings to the development of broadband capability and placement of cell phone towers depends on information generated by the American Community Survey.

Webster and his anti-government allies are even claiming that the survey is unconstitutional. The actual census is called for in the Constitution, and the courts have ruled that the ACS is also constitutional. It might be nice if some of these tea party folks learned to read and how to research the law and court rulings.

The fact is, Webster is part of the right wing anti-government faction that joined government to dismantle it, and the people who oppose this survey are the same kind that killed a census taker in 2010 – people who believe the whole extreme end of the right wing that preaches how the government under any Democrat is going to take away your guns and your rights, even though it was a Republican administration that crafted and forced the Patriot Act which really did take away our rights, and it has been every Republican president since Nixon who has authorized the domestic spying capabilities of intelligence agencies, after the Democratic presidents voided them. The problem isn’t the intrusiveness of the survey, it’s the culture of fear of the government that the right wing nurtures and Republicans take advantage of to get votes.

Some people are suggesting that the survey be made purely voluntary, but a voluntary survey would generate bad data and probably result in whole swaths of the country never being surveyed. Whether or not there is a compromise on the House bill is entirely up to the Senate and Majority Leader Harry Reid. There would be worse things in the world than Reid deciding to shelve this bill. Just think about it….with most of the business community supporting the survey, it certainly wouldn’t hurt the Democratic Party to show who really supports business in this country.

Related articles

• Congressional Threat to Every Investor, Business Owner and Citizen(ritholtz.com)

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• Republicans Declare War On Accurate Economic Data from Calculated Risk(jhaines6.wordpress.com)

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• The GOP’s anti-research agenda (maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com)
• News Analysis: The Debate Over the American Community Survey (nytimes.com)
• Republicans Declare War On Accurate Economic Data (businessinsider.com)
• Operating in the Dark (nytimes.com)
• Government by Paranoiacs: The U.S. Census Edition (mikethemadbiologist.com)
• House attack on survey is nonsensical (mysanantonio.com)
• Census savings would put us on track for big waste (kansascity.com)

The picture gets worse when factoring in the groups’ total cash on hand. Priorities USA finished April with $4.7 million available. Restore Our Future had $8.2 million and American Crossroads a whopping $25.5 million. In addition, a nonprofit spinoff of American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, which does not disclose donors, recently announced a $25 million ad campaign.

Obama still has the advantage, though. He has $115 million in his war chest while Romney has $61 million. Obama also outraised Romney last month. Still, the RNC and Romney nearly raised as much as the DNC and Obama did; however, it should be noted that Obama tends to rely heavily upon small donations while Romney is reliant upon large ones, and people will begin to donate more as time goes along. Romney may also face bigger problems with fundraising as there are many Social Conservatives who are still not sure about supporting him.

Still, this is going to be a difficult and expensive election complicated by the Supreme Court and Citizens United.

Rep. Joe Walsh

Tyrant. . .the word that many Tea Party Republicans are looking for is Tyrant. Unfortunately, they seem to be missing the words Tyrant and Tyranny in their lexicon. Instead, they substitute the words socialism, communism and Naziism for those. During a town hall, Representative Joe Walsh was confronted by a woman who stated that she believes that Americans are losing their freedoms because of “elected officials who were falsifying their ideologies to get elected.”

She stated “It is sedition. I mean, they did it underground. If they are honest brokers and they believe in what they’re saying and where they want this country to go, like Obama, then you’re right. He should have said it before he was elected, and said ‘I’m a socialist, I believe in socialism, in communism, Nazism,’ whatever, and say ‘this is where I want to lead the country’ — not do it underhandedly.”

Actually, sedition is making statements that leads to insurrection or rebellion among the populous. In fact, the people who are acting in a seditious manner would be. . .well, the Tea Party and the Republicans. The word she is looking for is ‘treason’.

Walsh, of course, doesn’t bother with refuting her claim. After all, he is of the same seditious ilk as she is. He goes on to state “However you want to label or define it, don’t you think after three and a half years as a country now we have a really good idea where this president wants to go? There are people in this audience — it’s fine — who believe in this America we’re living under right now. That’s fine, that’s a legitimate viewpoint. I will fight to my last breath against it, but I wish politicians on the other side would be honest about how they feel.”

Apparently, both believe that freedom involves being allowed to die horribly in poverty while others are forced to make up the money it takes to care for you through higher prices at the hospital.

Freedom. . .it’s just another scam to get free funny hats to the Republicans, and only for the select few. Everyone else doesn’t get freedom, right?

“Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out…and you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out…do you know why? They can’t reproduce! . . .I’m not going to vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover!. . .It makes me pukin’ sick to think about — I don’t even whether or not to say this in the pulpit — can you imagine kissing some man?”

First of all, according to estimates, between ten and thirteen percent of the American population is lesbian or gay. So, that would be between 30,000,000 and 40,000,000 lesbians and gays in this country. So, yeah, that big a fence isn’t going to work. Secondly, more lesbians and gays will be born since they are- typically- the children of straight people. Finally, apparently this guy doesn’t get that there are many lesbian and gay families with children. You would have to emasculate every single gay man in there in order to pull this one off.

Of course, for some reason, I am reminded that there was someone who did try something like this back in the 1930′s and 1940′s.

I’m just not going to bother posting his name here.

Coat of Arms of Vatican City

It is not surprising that the University of Notre Dame is suing the Obama Administration and its officials over the mandate requiring that almost all employers in the United States cover birth control. The school is claiming that the mandate violates religious freedom by requiring many religiously affiliated schools, hospitals and charities to provide this medication that can be used for non-contraceptive reasons. It is the latest in a long line of schools doing this.

The university is considered to be the most prominent Roman Catholic school in the nation, and the Vatican has been doing everything it can to force President Barack Obama, who is not a Catholic, to enforce their doctrinal beliefs. Since taking office, Pope Benedict has pushed the Catholic Church deeply into American politics- a move that is starting to cause severe unrest among Catholics.

President Obama offered to alter the rules regarding the mandate, but the US Conference of Catholic Bishops refused the offer. This is part of a wider war on women that Pope Benedict and the Catholic Hierarchy are engaged in.

Camp David in the 1970s

I love G8s, our annual exercise in the nations that think they still rule the world pretending to make globally important decisions.

This G8 is unique in one regard. It is being held at the President retreat, Camp David in Maryland, a cozy little pseudo-rustic spot built under the WPA between 1935 and 1938 as a camp for Federal employees and taken over for the personal use of the POTUS by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942. Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David in honor of his father and grandson. It is the mountains of northern Maryland, just shy of the Pennsylvania border.

But the best things about Camp David are its isolation, its standing security and its lack of accommodations for hordes of aides and armies of reporters. It is a shirt-sleeves environment with Presidential comforts and little ostentation. The Canadians held one G8 at a very isolated ski resort. Except for having to truck in the security, it was a similar situation.

Unlike…..

In 2004, the G8 was held on at the Sea Island Resort on Sea Island, Georgia. Sea Island is one of Georgia’s barrier islands, accessible only by causeway from another barrier island that is home to over 10,000, which in turn is accessible only by causeway from the mainland. I lived on the mainland, which happens to be the port city of Brunswick. And therein lies the tale.

Brunswick is the third busiest port in the armpit of America (turn the US map upside-down) – Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, being the other two. On St. Simons Island, the entryway to Sea Island, there are two very large shrimp processing companies – SeaPak and King and Prince. Most of their employees live on the mainland. St. Simons Island is the high rent district, so a lot of doctors, lawyers, bankers, professional types live over there.

To achieve the necessary level of security for the G8, U.S. military ships patrolled the coast and the Intercoastal Waterway that separates the barrier islands from the mainland. The port, which receives auto imports, was shut down. It was the height of shrimping season, so the shrimpers went elsewhere, and the packing plants shut down, leaving hundreds of employees without pay for that week. The port employees also went without pay. The causeway to St. Simons was disrupted by security checks, so most professionals just stayed home that week, meaning legal matters went undone. If one of my cats had become ill, I would have had to go through a process similar to crossing the Canadian border to reach my vet. The city of Brunswick ground to a halt.

There were a few protesters, but nothing to rival the mess in Seattle, Genoa and London at other economic summits. The aides and entourages booked every hotel room on St. Simons, so the press swarmed on Savannah. On the mainland, we joked that the Sea Island Resort must have used every ounce of insecticide in Georgia to keep those eight world leaders from meeting some of Georgia’s more interesting inhabitants – cockroaches the size of mice and wolf spiders five inches across, to say nothing of the mosquitos. I forget if they also shut down the chemical plant and paper mill on the mainland to keep the attendees from catching a whiff of Coastal Georgia’s favorite perfume – industrial pollution. (Ben Affleck bought an island off the coast north of Brunswick while engaged to Jennifer Lopez and we used to swear that she broke it off after being caught downwind of the chemical plant.)

My daughter and I played a game of “what if terrorists….” during the G8, mostly because no on involved in the security for the G8 gave any thought to the city. There were huge fuel tanks on the docks. A single runaway truck could have easily breached the chain link fence and ignited them. The city’s water is in above-ground towers, whose legs could be easily bombed just by pitching a gym bag over the fences. The primary home construction material is wood, and the area around downtown contained hundreds of small houses, many abandoned, that could easily be set on fire. The phone and electrical lines were particularly vulnerable. It reached a point with our landline phones that BellSouth’s repairmen would just come to my door and say “dead squirrel” or “tree trimmer” to explain why I had no phone service. We were able to imagine dozens of scenarios where terror could be wrecked in the shadow of the summit while the attendees were perfectly safe.

Allegedly, a few of the attendees at Camp David are under-impressed by the setting. Tough tiddies, folks. I’d rather see you have to cope with a little rusticism than see any other city go through what was done to Brunswick, or Seattle where the rioters caused millions of dollars in damages.

Besides, there’s something really cool about the idea of the leaders of the supposedly eight economically strongest nations on earth – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, along with representatives of international organizations – sitting around a round table. Legend has it that King Arthur commissioned the Round Table so that no knight held precedence over another.

This year’s agenda included discussions about Syria and Iran, with the eight agreeing to be ready to release their strategic oil reserves if further sanctions in the region cause a reduction in the flow of oil. A unified vision of reaction to the civil war in Syria and the threat of Iranian nuclear development were announced, specifically, keep doing what we’re doing for the time being. There were discussions about the economic problems in Europe and the fate of Greece with the Europeans promising to keep Greece afloat if not recovering.

Presumably, President Obama is too much of a gentleman to say “I told you so” to the Europeans. At previous summits he has urged them to reverse course and embrace the Keynesian solutions to recession and depression and not keep doing the things that caused this global economic crisis. Of the eight, only Japan and the United States have expanding economies, meaning their gross domestic product has risen over the last year. Germany is almost flat-lined and the other five are shrinking.

In short, it’s just another G8, a couple of days of discussions at which nothing really earth-shattering happens. It’s all very civilized and diplomatic and formulaic.

Now, on to Chicago for the NATO summit, where the protests have already started. Hopefully, Rahm Emanuel will not regret hosting it.

Related articles

• G-8 leaders agree to boost growth, protect oil supplies – USA TODAY(usatoday.com)

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• Two small planes intercepted near Camp David(wjla.com)

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The California Statehouse, Sacramento

The Constitution of the State of California, in Section 1, contains the following, “The legislative power of this State is vested in the California Legislature which consists of the Senate and Assembly, but the people reserve to themselves the powers of initiative and referendum.”

Nice, innocuous sentence, right? The people retained for themselves the power to suggest new laws and to hold referendums on important issues. Nothing harmful there. Except in the state of California. That little sentence has created the chaos and failure that is the state of California.

In 1978, Proposition 13 limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value of the property and limited reassessments to inflation or 2% whichever was lower. That was the beginning of the end for responsible governance and budgetary sensibility in California. The motive for the law was to protect the elderly from losing their homes because a rapidly inflating housing market would tax them out of houses they had lived in for decades. It was a valid concern, but one that could have been better handled with any number of alternative laws, starting with the homestead exemptions that some states have used, or grandfathering of persons who had owned their homes over a specific period of time. Instead, it crippled the ability of California to garner sufficient tax revenue for the government.

Prop 13 was just the first of California’s idiotic referendums. Over the next twenty to thirty years, it reached the point where California’s assembly couldn’t adjourn for lunch without someone demanding a referendum. Jerry Brown, California’s current governor and a Democrat, was governor at the time of Prop 13. He left office in 1983. From 1983 to 1999, there were two Republican governors, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. They were followed by Democrat Gray Davis until 2003, and then Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger until last year. California’s economic problems are not partisan. Neither party is more responsible than the other. The state’s problem is its citizens.

Left to a referendum system, a state’s citizens will naturally vote for things that benefit them without giving much thought to what the consequences might be in the long term. From an extraordinary education system to sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants to a far-reaching welfare system, Californians just kept piling on the things the state had to pay for, all the time limiting what they were going to pay with.

The state knew some exceptional economic booms, the movie and television industry and the tech industry brought great fortunes to the state. But they contracted over time. Laws passed during the booms became unsustainable, but the state didn’t referendum reforms that adequately contracted state obligations to match revenues.

In 2006, just as everywhere else in America, the perfect storm of economic catastrophes hit California. Unlike everywhere else, California could not respond. It couldn’t even screw up the way other states did in 2009 when they received the stimulus money and used to keep their budgets going instead using it to stimulate their economies. As it had been for too many years, California was paralyzed by a budget and management system run by citizen referendum.

There are only about a dozen nations in the world that have a larger GDP than California, which is why California’s budget deficit is bigger than the deficits of most nations, and there is only one way out…they need to amend their constitution to limit the use of referendums. Then, they need to let their elected officials do what needs to be done.

Related articles

• If You Live In California Things Just Got A Whole Lot Worse(ConservativeActionAlerts.com)

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• The Golden State Gone Broke – Huffington Post (blog) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Steven Greenhut on Jerry Brown’s Broken Budget (reason.com)
• Brown’s Plan for California: 4-Day Workweek (newser.com)

Let’s the get obvious out of the way. Apparently, the GOP does not understand the meaning of the word “unconstitutional.” Yesterday, Judge Katharine Forrest of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the indefinite detention clause in last year’s defense spending bill was unconstitutional. Today, the House not only passed identical language in the new bill, it rejected an amendment to remove the language from the bill. For a party that keeps insisting the President Obama (who renounced this clause in his signing statement in December) is the one with no respect for the Constitution, the passage of this clause again is the height of hypocrisy. UNCONSTITUTIONAL guys. Simple word. It means no-no, violates our rights, is unlawful, is bloody fascist. Last time, the GOP’s paid media – Fox News and talk radio – ignored the signing statement and portrayed the clause as the President’s fault and showed that he had no regard for constitutional rights, was trying to turn us into a communist nation. This time they don’t get away with it because the opposition to the clause was from Tea Partiers as well as Democrats.

Then, there’s the equally unconstitutionally, but not ruled upon – yet – clauses that limit the executive branches ability to negotiate treaties. Such treaties cannot be limited before they are negotiated. The Senate and only the Senate has the power to refuse to ratify a treaty. But that didn’t stop the House GOP from including a couple of clauses in the bill designed to usurp executive branch powers in international matters.

First, they included a clause prohibiting the President from making any “unilateral reductions” in America’s nuclear forces. This is in opposition to the letter and intent of the nuclear treaties this nation has been signing since Ronald Reagan negotiated the first START treaty. The “justification” for this clause was expressed by Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio who fussed and fumed over “the secret deal the president has with the Russians to weaken our missile defense,” a reference to a comment made to former Russian President Dimitri Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” to discuss nuclear issues after the election. The White House had even written to Turner on April 13 to assure him that “We have been clear that we will not agree to any constraints limiting the development or deployment of United States missile defenses,” but, hey, saying that the Prez is secretly colluding with the Russkies is good politics in the right wing.

Second, they rejected an amendment backed by the United States Chamber of Commerce and the whole business community to back the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty. The Chamber supports the treaty, which the Senate’s Democrats are prepared to ratify, “because it would provide clear legal rights and protections to American businesses to transit, lay undersea cables, and take advantage of the vast natural resources in and under the oceans off the U. S. coasts and around the world.” The treaty is also backed by the Defense Department. But some in the GOP believe it would infringe on U. S. sovereignty.

Finally, there’s the money…..

Last year, the House Republicans agreed to a program of deficit reduction including across-the-board spending cuts. The lack of a further deal will trigger even greater spread-the-pain cuts. But the Republican Party is determined to go down in history for breaking its word. Instead of going with the even cuts, they have decided to cut $80 billion from social programs and give it to the Defense Department and then increase defense spending even more. The defense spending bill totally ignores the spending requests from the Defense Department, breaks the deal reached last year and restores funding for things the Defense Department doesn’t want or need. It’s a total f-you to the executive branch. To keep their facetious “spending cuts to match spending” pledge, they proposed eliminating funding for Meals on Wheels for house-bound seniors and health care programs for women. Can we hear again how they are not waging war on women, or on the poor and elderly?

The Republicans know that this will not get past the Senate and that the President has promised to veto it outright this time. An appropriations bill for the Defense Department needs to be passed by mid-September, or we will see battles over continuing resolutions to extend current levels of spending indefinitely. These clauses, and the unpassed amendments are deal breakers with the White House and Senate Democrats and set the battle lines for any attempt at reconciliation with the Senate.

But the Republicans must feel they have something to gain from them in the election, though I can’t see it. They have passed a clause that is already ruled unconstitutional, broken the pledge of reducing government spending, defied the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and risked the millions the Chamber is willing to spend on ads for Republicans, and shown themselves to have no respect for the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution. They have handed the Democrats some powerful talking points in the election. Now, the question is whether or not the Democrats will take advantage of them.

Related articles

• House OKs indefinite definition of terror suspects(wtvm.com)

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• House OKs East Coast missile shield site in $643B defense bill(thehill.com)

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• NDAA Provisions Found Unconstitutional By Court (lezgetreal.com)

Way back in the golden age of stay-at-home motherhood, the years of my childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, America was shocked to learn the level of alcoholism and addiction to Valium among suburban mothers. I remember one of my mother’s friends who fixed herself a Bloody Mary mid-morning because it looked like ordinary tomato juice. Learning to hide the addictions was a sad sport. I also remember the backyard fence discussions, the rolling horror, when Mary in the corner house went out and got a job, just because she was fed up with the sham of trying to be happy just being a homemaker. You would have thought the Russians had invaded, the news shook the block so badly. Mary had four children in elementary school. Worse than her getting a job was the realization that waved across the neighborhood that her kids were happier and her husband was happier with her out working. The house didn’t fall down and her kids weren’t wearing filthy rags. Gee whiz, a happy working mom made for a happier family. My mother was next. She dusted off her nursing certification and went back to work part-time.

Gallup polled 60,000 women and learned that stay-at-home moms were more likely to have been diagnosed with clinical depression, reported more feelings of sadness and anger than working mothers, while women in the lower income levels reported the highest levels of depression and stress.

One thing the survey didn’t address is a phenomenon that inflicts stay-at-home mothers.  They develop a belief that they must be “Martha Stewarts” — super cleaners, gourmet chefs, seamstresses, crafters, decorators, community volunteers.   Whether this pressure is self-imposed or complements of a super-critical mother or mother-in-law, it adds to the depression. 

There are no real surprises in this survey. Women with monetary problems, whether they are stay-at-home moms or working moms or have no children are struggling emotionally. They are stressed out and sad. And there is no surprise that women are happiest when they choose the role they will play in society. Staying at home with children just because it is socially preferred makes for stress, unhappy women. Some of us enjoy the role. I’m one of them. I’d have given almost anything to have done nothing for the past forty years but keep my house and raise my children. I’d give anything now to have a whole bunch of grandchildren to bake cookies for, but that’s not going to happen. One daughter cannot have children and the other chooses not to. That is her decision and I do not pressure her in any way. But having to work is just as stressful and staying home if neither is really one’s own choice. And that goes for fathers as well as mothers. Some men are just as happy staying at home as pursuing a career or holding a job.

All of us need the opportunity to choose. Happy parents make for happier children. That’s a lesson I learned from Mary’s kids fifty years ago. But we can only make that choice if we can attain the financial security of the middle class. Without a secure income from a single source, one parent cannot choose to stay home while the other works. Conversely, without a solid partnership of parents, both parents working does not benefit children except financially, and new game consoles do not replace good parenting.

We’re still having this conversation? Really? The better question for pollsters might be, why are we still trying to figure this out?

Related articles

• Murphy Brown Didn’t Lie To Us; Working Moms Have The Healthiest, Happiest Lives(blisstree.com)

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• Stay-At-Home Moms Develop More Depression, Study Finds(inquisitr.com)

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• Poll: Stay-at-home moms less happy(politico.com)

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Mariela Castro at a conference in Montreal

Mariela Castro is the 50-year-old director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education and an internationally recognized gay rights advocate who has been invited to chair a panel on sexual diversity at a conference organized by the Latin American Studies Association being held in San Francisco and New York. The United States government has granted her a visitor’s visa for the conference and the usual bombasts in Miami are protesting her visit.

Prominent Cuban academics, scientists and economists now routinely visit the United States for conferences and seminars, but Ms. Castro is the daughter of Cuba’s President Raul Castro and Fidel’s niece. In the view of the most adamant Castro-haters in the Cuban community in America, she is the enemy and must be kept from American soil because she can only be here to spread communist doctrine and undermine our nation’s sovereignty. Yeah, right, that’s why her Daddy is converting hundreds of state-owned businesses to private ownership in a measured transition to capitalism.

The protest against Ms. Castro is a knee-jerk from that part of the Cuban community in America that has never truly been assimilated into American society, who dream of the day when they can triumphantly return to Cuba and be hailed as heroes of democracy. They are people who refuse to understand that Cuba today is not the Cuba that was in the earliest years of Fidel’s rule. Yes, some dissidents are in prison, but they have not been lined up in front of their homes and executed. Yes, communism is still the principle economic system and there are not multi-party elections, but the experiences in Russia have shown the remaining communist countries like Cuba and China that it is essential to change the economy before changing the politics. Unless the economy has transitioned to private ownership, when a communist government falls, there is no structure to pay wages or keep products flowing.

Ms. Castro is an advocate for gay rights. Wow. That one is a mind-blower. Sorry if I offend, but it think it’s pretty funny that Cuba has a medical system so advanced that American medical students go there for a top-notch, affordable education and the country’s first daughter openly supports gays while John McCain’s wife and daughter had to defy Daddy to support anti-bullying campaigns.

The Obama administration has loosened some travel restrictions to Cuba. They have refused to cave in to the very small portion of the Cuban community that wants the United States to choke Cuba to death while the rest of the world trades with it. They understand that the Cuban community has cost the United States some important opportunities with Cuba. Right now, Spain is partnered with Cuba for Gulf oil exploration off their coast.

This is 2012, and the ideas and fears of the last century need to give way to rational decisions and evaluations. Ms. Castro’s participation in the conference might help spread more acceptance of gays in the Catholic-church dominated Latin American nations. That must be seen as more important than supporting the culture of hate advocated in parts of the Cuban community.

Related articles

• U.S. visa to Mariela Castro sparks angry complaints(miamiherald.com)

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• Daughter of Cuban leader Raul Castro to visit U.S.(vancouverdesi.com)

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• Mariela Castro Leads Gay Rights Parade Through Streets Of Havana (towleroad.com)
• Mariela Castro Gets Visa To Come To U.S. And Share How Great Cuba Is For Gays (queerty.com)
• US defends visa granted to Raul Castro’s daughter (newsinfo.inquirer.net)

Freedom to Work was joined this week by friends and colleagues at other LGBT organizations to lobby for ENDA and the federal contractor executive order. LGBT Americans need both. — with Josh Seefried, Dana Beyer, Tico Almeida, Gary Segura and Gary Rudgers.

Republicans want us to believe that there is no such thing as anti-LGBT workplace bias. In fact, several Republicans have claimed that there are no cases of people being fired for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual or downright queer. But it still happens, and Freedom to Work was there on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress. They explained:

Shari Hutchinson – a Cleveland, OH resident who joined Freedom to Work’s Speakers Bureau in 2011 after she secured a successful six-figure settlement from her sexual orientation bias case based on the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – joined Freedom to Work in the nation’s capital this week to share her story with lawmakers and senior policy makers at the same time Congress is considering federal legislation and the Obama Administration is considering an executive order to ban workplace discrimination against LGBT Americans. Ohio laws currently do not protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) employees, and Hutchinson would not have been able to bring any lawsuit for workplace discrimination if she had worked for a private sector employer in Ohio.

As Hutchinson joined Freedom to Work president, Tico Almeida, in DC this week as part of the organization’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign, hundreds of her fellow Ohioans lobbied for state-level anti-LGBT discrimination laws as part of Equality Ohio’s Lobby Day yesterday.

“We were thrilled to help Shari meet with senior policy makers in Washington DC this week as part of our ongoing “We Can’t Wait” campaign,” said Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work. “In both the nation’s and Ohio’s capital yesterday, hundreds of LGBT grassroots advocates, like Shari, were putting a human face to the issue of workplace discrimination and harassment. They are our best advocates for LGBT workplace fairness in America and it is their real-life, courageous struggles to win the freedom to work without harassment or discrimination that will change hearts and minds. We look forward to flying in many more LGBT Americans from around the country in the weeks and months to come as part of our ‘We Can’t Wait’ campaign.”

“I traveled from Cleveland to our nation’s capital to let our senators know that anti-gay workplace discrimination hurts real people and our family members in places like Ohio,” said Hutchinson. “That’s why we need both a state law and a federal law to give LGBT Americans the freedom to work without harassment or discrimination on the job. I met with staff for Senator Sherrod Brown and thanked him for co-sponsoring ENDA. I also met with staff for Senator Rob Portman, and urged him to join with other Republican Senators who already support this commonsense proposal for LGBT workplace fairness.”

Lawyer Elizabeth Rothenberg, an attorney at Avery Friedman & Associates in Cleveland, Ohio who represented Hutchinson in her 2011 lawsuit, said, “As the facts of Shari’s case were unearthed through depositions, it became clear that the high cost of anti-LGBT discrimination extended beyond Shari to the taxpayers. Not only did the County waste an incredible amount of money defending the lawsuit only to settle on the eve of trial, but less qualified and often unskilled employees were promoted year after year in a continued effort to keep Shari from advancing.”

“Complementary and collaborative efforts to pass non-discrimination laws on the local, state and federal level are critical,” says Ed Mullen, Executive Director of Equality Ohio, which is hosting its 7th Annual Lobby Day on May 16 in the Ohio Statehouse. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people should not be fired or denied promotions because of who they are, and protection from discrimination should not be based on where someone lives.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has announced that he will hold a Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing on ENDA next month, and Freedom to Work continues to advocate for President Obama to sign an executive order banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity at the companies that profit from taxpayer-funded government contracts.

Well, he ought to know. He and his party are responsible for the inaction.

He then went on to say, “I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limmit increase.” Principle? I’m amazed the man doesn’t choke on the word. We are talking here about a man who had to be admonished by the House leadership years ago that it was truly bad form to walk around the chamber handing out lobbyist checks to his colleagues and who lived for years in an apartment subsidized by lobbyists.

In 2011, the debt ceiling showdown got the Republicans $900 billion in immediate cuts and $1.2 trillion in triggered cuts, and they have reneged on the deal. Instead of the across-the-board cuts they agreed to, they have decided to shift all the cuts to social programs (eliminating Meals-on-Wheels and health care for women) and increase spending for the military, restoring things and adding things the Pentagon doesn’t want or need.

But the debt ceiling battle drove down President Obama’s approval ratings because the Republicans are so good at controlling the message through their media partners at Fox News and talk radio. Those who believe in the Republican message are fairly ignorant about the realities of economics or taxation or our national credit rating.

Our credit rating was downgraded because of the last debt ceiling battle. Or was it? I looked up the meaning of those ratings and guess what? Being downgraded from a AAA to a AAA- or a AA+ is not a downgrade. A downgrade is being dropped into the Bs, not staying in the As.

I started school when grades were letters, not numbers. Getting an A+, an A or an A- was all of a kind. The difference was negligible. That’s why we switched to number grades. There are three credit ratings agencies, Moody’s, Standard’s and Poors, and Fitch. They use different letter designations to say the same thing. Everything above a AA- or an Aa3 is a nation with a strong to extremely strong ability to pay interest on its bonds. We were downgraded from “extremely strong” to “very strong” by one agency. The rating didn’t increase the interest we pay on our bonds or make investors back away from buying American bonds. It just made good press for the Republicans who never bother to explain facts to their faithful bobbleheads.

And don’t ever try to explain national debt to a conservative. The right wing media and the Republican Party are talking dollar amounts to deflect understanding of the facts. They are screaming “The Sky Is Falling! Our National Debt Is $16 TRILLION!” National debts are never measured in dollars or euros or yen. They are measured as a ratio to gross domestic product, meaning they are measured against the total value of goods and services produced in a country which is a pretty good indicator of a nation’s ability to repay the debt or at least make the interest payments on it.

Here’s a few national debt ratios, for comparison — Luxembourg, 3443% of GDP; Ireland, 1165% of GDP; the United Kingdom, 400% of GDP; and the United States? Well, we’re floating around 99% to 100% and actually decreasing as our GDP rises with the recovery. If we were a European Union nation, we would rank 19^th of 26 nations. In 1946, our national debt was 130% of GDP.

But Boehner will put up a fight over the debt ceiling, not because it is good fiscal policy or because our national debt situation is a crisis, but because the Republican Party has invented this crisis to win power, not to aid the nation in any way. The Republicans didn’t give a shit about deficits or the national debt when Reagan doubled the national debt or when Bush doubled it again. They didn’t demand spending cuts to offset spending when Bush took two wars and a drug benefit off the books and pretended we weren’t paying for them.

Sometime in the past few days I wasn’t completely paying attention when someone on MSNBC said that Americans are prone to collective amnesia. I’m not sure Americans are, but Republicans definitely are. Maybe it goes with all that “low effort thinking” they do.

Related articles

• Ezra Klein on the Re-Bone (seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com)
• Debt Ceiling Debate Is Revived In Washington (npr.org)
• Because They Can (baselinescenario.com)
• Pity The Republicans, The Deficit Is Shrinking (lezgetreal.com)
• GOP Preps Debt-Ceiling Replay (thedailybeast.com)

President Obama presented the Congressional Medal of Honor today to the widow and brother of a Vietnam War infantryman who sacrificed his life to save the men of his platoon. It is the greatest sacrifice a human being makes, to give up one’s life for another. But watching the ceremony I was struck by something about the right wing hatred of President Obama — in hating him so vehemently, in denying his legitimacy as our President, in labeling him most of things Americans hate from his race to his political position –- the right wing has diminished the honors being bestowed on Americans during his term of office. They are saying to our first responders, our soldiers and sailors, our artistic achievers, our outstanding students and teachers, our innovators, the families of our fallen, that their accomplishments and losses are not special because they are being honored by a man the right wing refuses to acknowledge is our President.

Leslie Sabo, a naturalized citizen born in Hungary, died in Cambodia in 1970. He was 22 years old and a newlywed.  His Medal of Honor is long overdue. Not enough of these medals were bestowed on Vietnam War soldiers, sailors and airmen. Our nation was so traumatized by the war, and our Presidents since then so eager to distance themselves from it, that we have failed to recognized the heroism and sacrifices of those men and women.

When a sports team member refuses to attend an honor ceremony at the White House because he denies the legitimacy of the President, he insults and demeans his teammates. When the right wing attacks the President’s speeches and meetings with our heroes and fallen, they insult and diminish those being honored. And these people call themselves patriots and tell themselves they are better than those who respect the office of the Presidency and the man who occupies that office. They say our President and all liberals hate our soldiers, but it is the right wing who dishonors them.

Liberals hated George W. Bush. There’s no denying that fact. But we were appalled that he refused to meet the fallen as they returned from his personal war in Iraq. We criticized him for the way he wanted to ignore the sacrifice. We wanted him to face the price of his actions, and we wanted him to honor those who fell. Catholics of all political bends were furious when Pope John Paul II refused to receive the firefighter’s helmet of a gay priest who died shielding an injured man on 9-11. It didn’t matter if Father Mike was gay. What mattered was that he removed that helmet to properly administer to a dying man. It is possible to hate the man while respecting the office and understanding the importance of the honors that office pays to our heroes, our achievers and our fallen.

Today, President Obama told a group of Vietnam veterans gathered for the Medal of Honor ceremony, “You did your job, you served with honor, you made us proud.” My friends, my school mates, my relatives, my generation have waited too long for those words to be spoken by a President of the United States of America on behalf of the American people. Leslie Sabo was one of the forgotten, a file in a box in an archive warehouse. His widow Rosemary and his family deserved this respect and this honor, this acknowledgment of their loss and their sacrifice forty years ago. His parents should not have gone to their graves not knowing how bravely their son died. Rosemary should have had that one little thing to cherish as a memory of a husband taken from her so young, so newly married before they had an opportunity to have children and build a life together. Leslie Sabo was one of 58,220 American men and women who died in the Vietnam War, 11% of the Americans who served. They all deserved the respect of a grateful nation, even those who came home and protested it.

The right wing haters should be ashamed of themselves for the way their hatred dishonors others Americans, but they won’t be. They have been so indoctrinated in that hate they can’t see the harm they do, how unpatriotically they are behaving, how inhumane they have become.

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• President Obama Awards Posthumous Medal of Honor to Specialist Leslie H. Sabo, Jr (whitehouse.gov)

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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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

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.

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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!

Related articles

• 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)