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• Propaganda: Greenwald on Obama's paid informant and Cass Sunstein's hilariously ironic infiltration plan — 'In the midst of my lengthy discussion yesterday of Cass Sunstein's proposal to "cognitively infiltrate extremist groups" by employing covert agents and secretly paying so-called "independent" analysts to tout the government line, I noted the recent controversy surrounding MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber. Specifically, Gruber was receiving large, undisclosed payments from the Obama administration at exactly the time when the Obama White House (and Gruber himself) were holding him out as an "objective" expert endorsing various parts of the President's health care plan...
  
  'I noted that many Democrats who strenuously objected to non-disclosure scandals during the Bush years have been minimizing the conduct at issue in the Gruber matter...
  
  'Minimizing or excusing unethical behavior when done by Your Side is exactly what normalizes the behavior, and turns ethical failures into nothing more than a partisan tool cynically used by each side, which in turn trivializes these issues.'
  
  (salon.com)
  
  Why do I get the feeling that Obama apologists (and I must sadly include Krugman in that list now) seem to be becoming just as relativistic as Bush apologists were during the last administration?
  2010-01-20 16:46:12
• Probation over for single-payer advocates that Sen. Max Baucus had arrested — '"Despite the outpouring of requests," said Katie Robbins of Healthcare-Now.org, "we were clearly told that [single-payer advocates] would be excluded. This cemented our growing impression that the healthcare debate was at best, political theater, and that we would have to try a different tactic in order that the only really affordable health reform solution, that addresses the real health care needs of 100% of our nation be heard."
  
  'Kevin Zeese of ProsperityAgenda.US called the committee "pay to play" because, as he said, "Every seat at the Roundtable was bought by the lobbyists. Senator Baucus received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the health industry in 2008 and the entire Senate Finance Committee received over $13 million in 2008...”
  
  'In addition to probation, the prosecutor insisted that the three defendants who lived in the Washington, DC area also perform 40 hours of community service. "I spend every day serving my community," said Adam Schneider who is employed by Health Care for the Homeless. "I'm proud of the stand we took and had no problem doing an extra 40 hours of service to my community. But if there was any justice in the world, Senator Baucus and his corporate sponsors would have also been required to spend 40 hours with my clients to understand their desperate need for access to healthcare before they give a $500 billion bailout to the private health insurance industry."
  
  (from thepeoplesvoice.org)
  2010-01-11 16:48:35
• (old): spokesman for Stand for Marriage Maine, Bob Emrich, praises Uganda's death-to-gays legislation — 'Bob Emrich is the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Bible Church in Plymouth, Maine. He was also a campaign leader and spokesman for Stand for Marriage Maine, the organization primarily responsible for the passage of Question 1 which reversed the Maine Legislature’s law enacting marriage equality. Emrich was, in many ways, the voice and face of the anti-gay marriage movement in Maine...'
  
  Emrich sent out an email:
  
  'I have just recently returned from two weeks in Uganda, ministering the Word among village pastors and Churches... But as I work my way back into ministry here at Emmanuel Bible Baptist Church (Plymouth) and with the Maine Jeremiah Project, I wanted to share the following article I found in Uganda’s largest daily newspaper. I had tucked it into my journal and found it yesterday as I reviewed some of my scribbling. I think it speaks for itself, but I hope you will wonder, as I do, where our own culture lost its way.'
  
  The article he cites includes such examples of Christian philosophy as this:
  
  'No wonder when a brilliant MP comes up with a Bill against homosexuality, the human rights activists baptise him an enemy of the people.'
  
  (from boxturtlebulletin.com)
  
  As Kincaid concludes at BTB, it is indeed very difficult not to believe that Mr Emrich is praising the Ugandan bill, and wishing that "The West" could be more like Uganda in terms of how it treats gay people.
  
  Putting the lie to the notion that, just because they don't want us to be married, doesn't mean they hate us or wish us harm. These guys are neck deep in the effort to impose state-sanctioned murder on gays in Uganda -- and neck-deep in the effort to repeal equal marriage rights at the state level. I have trouble seeing the part of their philosophy Christ would have liked.
  2010-01-11 15:25:27
• Matt Taibbi on Geithner lifting the cap on aid to Fannie and Freddie -- and on the conspiracy of the banking industry, the Fed, and the media to loot the treasury — 'For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.
  
  'That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game...
  
  'Everyone had a hand in the bubble, from the congressmen who killed regulatory initiatives to the regulators who snoozed at the wheel to the GSEs to the Fed to the banks to the ratings agencies to the lenders. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that, but it does seem like there’s an argument brewing about what that across-the-board complicity means...
  
  'This GSE story is a big one, but if it gets used as a path back to a "The Market Reacted Rationally" version of history, we’re screwed. It has to be looked at as an important part of a diabolical whole, a symbiotic scheme in which the banks and the state were irreversibly intertwined in an enterprise that on both sides was never about market economics, but crime. Because otherwise… the diversionary notion that one side or the other is wholly to blame is part of what makes the whole scam possible.'
  
  Taibbi's been writing very lucid analyses of big industry evil and corruption lately, both in the insurance and banking markets.
  2010-01-11 15:14:20
• Coverage of the Olson/Boies Federal court challenge to Proposition 8 — Comments thread is entertaining:
  
  'The high court on Monday said it will not allow video of the trial to be posted on YouTube.com, even with a delay, until the justices have more time to consider the issue. It said that Monday's order will be in place at least until Wednesday...'
  
  'Judge Walker just said [that of the public comments he solicited regarding whether the trial should be broadcast, there were] 138,542 in favor and 32 opposed. Number of comments were [sic] received by 5:00PM Friday...'
  
  'The same people who are advocating that prop 8 remain the law of the land because of its popularity with the people of California (52% is hardly all of the people), want total anonymity at trial while "the people" vote to see it on Youtube at over 4,000 to one! LOL'
  
  The blatant hypocrisy of the defense is entertaining, but the idea that bigotry proponents are subject to violence if they make their views public is a dangerous meme, particularly when reinforced by the SCOTUS. An obviously absurd claim, its reiteration erases the violence and bigotry, the increased incidence of hate crimes, done to gay people in the wake of Proposition 8 -- not to mention the fundamental violence of stripping millions of Californians of their rights, which Proposition 8 itself did.
  2010-01-11 15:06:04
• Reuters reports that Uganda's death-penalty-for-homosexuality bill is likely to pass; Sweden cutting Uganda aid — '"Activists and political observers expect the private members' bill, which proscribes the death penalty for 'serial offenders' and is still in the committee stage, to pass with little opposition and some minor changes. Likely changes may include modifying the death penalty to life imprisonment, altering clauses nullifying international treaties, conventions and protocols that contradict the act, and removing a section about extradition. 'It's catastrophic,' said Frank Mugisha, chairman of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a local activist group. 'People are being arrested, intimidated already. What's going to happen if it's passed?'"
  
  'Sweden has announced it's cutting aid to Uganda over the bill.'
  
  (towleroad.com)
  
  Good for Sweden. And it's a shame our "fierce advocate" in the White House can't bring himself to so much as censure the Ugandan government for its intended genocide against gay people.
  
  It's worth noting that evil politicians and religious figures like Obama's BFF Rick Warren and Mr. marital-sanctity Mark Sanford are helping to fund this shit via The Family, among other ties. (Follow the links at towleroad for documentation.) The fundies repeatedly claim they've got nothing against gays, they just want to prevent us getting equal rights like marriage -- but, like Marx always said, "Follow the money, dumbass." By funding a literal holocaust against gays, they demonstrate not only their duplicity (and their almost definitive lack of Christian morals), but the deep, oozing, black, putrid, stinking evil at the core of their beings.
  2009-12-03 13:56:13
• Bernie Sanders trying to block Bernanke's Fed chairmanship — 'Bernie Sanders, as he did earlier in the year with the nomination of Gary Gensler of the CFTC, is placing a hold on the re-nomination of Ben Bernanke to the chairmanship of the Fed. I wonder sometimes if Bernie is the only Senator who is actually worrying about who is running our key financial institutions.
  
  'The problem with the Fed is that almost nobody outside the financial community understands how it works, and as a result the popular outrage over its behavior is not nearly at the level it should be. The Greenspan legacy of providing a sort of permanent, built-in backstop for Wall Street by continually loosening the money supply every time the financial services sector blows itself up in this or that idiotic speculative craze is something that should make every citizen muy enojado. Now it’s even worse — direct bailouts of companies and billions in discount window lending coupled with zero transparency, zero taxpayer access to the Fed’s books...
  
  'The Sanders release summed up Bernanke’s record:
  
  '"As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.
  
  '"He could have insisted that large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards, but he did not.
  
  '"He could have broken up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance, but he did not.
  
  '"He could have revealed which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans, but he did not."'
  
  (trueslant.com)
  
  I'm starting to think Sanders may be my favorite post-Teddy Kennedy Senator.
  2009-12-03 13:46:29
• Box Turtle Bulletin has a warning about the political future of anti-equality Senators in NY — 'On February 11, 2004, Massachusetts State Representative Vincent Ciampa, Democrat, voted to define marriage as "one man one woman".
  
  'Ciampa feared no one – he could do what he wanted. He served in a Democratic safe seat and had done so for 16 years. Republicans didn’t even run candidates against him.
  
  But in Ciampa’s lived a young man named Carl Sciortino... [who] was furious that his representative had voted to define him as a second class citizen. So Carl did the unthinkable; though only 26 and having no political machine or public service experience, he ran against Ciampa.
  
  'But Sciortino had something that Ciampa was missing. He had a moral cause – to advance equality – and a community that was outraged by elected officials that endorsed discrimination. So he fought the system.
  
  'And won.'
  
  (boxturtlebulletin.com)
  
  One thing the corporate media don't focus on is the electability of pro-gay politicians in the US these days, particularly in the Northeast -- and the electoral damage anti-gay politicians cause themselves. It's illustrative to look at the reelection campaigns in MA since the legislature voted down a ballot initiative that could have (unconstitutionally) stripped equal rights from our gay and lesbian citizens: many old-time anti-civil-rights Democratic legislators have been booted; yet, despite the hysterical claims from the press and the religious right, pro-gay legislators have a fantastic track record of reelection.
  
  Clearly, New York isn't as progressive as either Vermont or Massachusetts (or, apparently, New Hampshire. New Hampshire!!). Yet the electorate isn't getting older. Gays are a big financial donor demographic to the Democratics. Politicians who squander our good will, whether at the local, state, or Federal level, are truly inept strategists.
  
  2009-12-03 10:53:18
• Trans protections pass unanimously in... Cleveland?! — Surprising, but it's nice to see LGBT civil rights progress in parts of America that aren't New England.
  2009-12-03 10:42:46
• Breaking News: NY Senate more regressive than NH, ME. — NY Senate just voted down equal marriage rights by 38 to 24. Sen. Fuckwit Diaz, D-Bigotville, said approving gay marriage would be "treason."
  
  Assholes.
  2009-12-02 15:24:02
• More...

Latest articles:

• Christian Tetzlaff at NEC Jordan Hall, January 31, 2010 — A great program and a human performance full of musicianship and drama...
  2010-02-02 09:33:48
• Coakley vs Brown, and the inexorable rightward trend of the Democratic Party — I was reading a post on Pamshouseblend about a "secret" LGBT strategy meeting from last week, and related rumors that, in the wake of Coakley's defeat, the administration and congressional Democrats will shy away from their recent fierce advocacy (har har har) of progressive social issues. I'm left wondering, once again, whether the Democrats are actively aiming for ineptitude and further defeat.
  2010-01-20 17:08:36
• Setting the client IP address in a Ruby on Rails integration test — This is here because either my google-fu is even worse than I thought, or there's no clear explanation of this on the web. Maybe next time I search for it I'll come across my own solution here!
  2009-12-15 15:01:38
• Proposition 8: The End of Liberty in California — It sounds increasingly as though the California Supreme Court will rule to let Proposition 8 stand. If this happens, it will mark the end of civil rights in the state. What this potential ruling means is that privileges of any group are not protected by a framework of rights -- for there are no longer any inalienable rights in California. Privileges like marriage, liberty, and freedom of speech are simply at the whim of a bare majority.
  2009-03-27 11:06:48
• Rails session_store/file_store bug — If you set the session_store in your environment file to use :file_store, and attempt to stick any non-string values in your session, you'll get an error. Either don't store non-string objects in session, or don't use file store.
  2009-01-30 12:16:08
• More...

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