Irish marriage equality TV ad; rather clever.

…which was my minor in college.  It allows situations where you can write headlines like this:
Chihuahua With Earrings Stolen At Gay Bar
Police Seek Man With Britney Spears Tattoo

Heck, just go to Google News and google up “Chihuahua” news articles and see what you get…

Rush Limbaugh: Sanford was probably driven in desperation to cheat on his wife and get some small pleasure out of life by Barack Obama’s efforts to destroy America, as in what-the-heck-it’s-all-over-I’m-just-going-to-have-fun.

Full quotes at the link.   At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.

So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth.  Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing.    I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade  Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.

This has got to be the dumbest reason that I’ve heard yet about the horrors of gay marriage - wedding caterers and photographers will be forced to feed and photograph gay weddings against their will.    The horror, the horror.

Of course, no photographers or caterers and staff for either might be gay themselves.  Right?

(Update: I’m noting this story about Frankfort, KY schools and their handling of gay students, but I’m beginning to think it’s a crock.)

Stephen Fry:

• his blog (he’s a big techie)
• his letter to his 16 year old self.  About love, mostly.
• -on manic depression
• -on his new BBC series on the USA (which I’m about to dig into)
• -on hate and anti-semitism (he’s part Slovakian Jewish)
• his column from the Guardian on tech items (RSS)
• -comparing laptops to books (MP3)
• -on smartphones

• I will freely admit that I’m astonished at the about-face in the attitudes of the US public about gay marriage.   A couple of years ago, we had several states stomping on the idea via pumped-up public referenda; now we have far greater acceptance of the idea and state after state legalizing it.
• The greed of the big hedge funds for More Money From The Feds to cover Chrysler’s bonds apparently didn’t do them any good, as the company is going to bankruptcy, which will be giving their bondholders a bigger haircut.  I guess they bet on the feds to wimp out and hand them more on the dollar….
• Frightening the horses and forcing Japanese tourists to compare their videos after the fact,  a couple of tourists at Windsor Castle suddenly drop everything on a sunny day, jump into the grass, strip and…

A friend said on Facebook:

A Thought on Being Transgendered: So, when your body reacts in a good way to hormones from the other side of the gender binary, you should probably consider, that even thought you think you are male or female something is telling you otherwise. It’s not about what parts you have. It’s about what makes you happy and sane.

That’s my bottom line on the tranny situation; I will admit that I consider it way odd, but that I do so also from my own odd male perspective.   More below.

“Ivanhoe/Robin Hood slash fiction!”, I enthused. “Oh, Robin, I wish I knew how to quit thee.”

h/t to Becky Zoole.

Over the weekend, all of a sudden, Amazon changed its whats-hot-and-whats-not ranking system to exclude books that had anything to go with teh ghey, whether or not there was anything ‘adult’ in the material in the books.    Needless to say, there was  a colossal stink over this as being way stupid and hamhanded and there has been lively talk about boycotting Amazon.  (To which Jeff Bezos doubtless gives one of his weird heheheheh nervous-sounding laughs to.)

My guess comes from this, this and this analysis: that someone in the company decided to test out some kind of way of taking these books out of their ratings system as a reaction to anti-ghey reaction, and the test went live in a very clumsy way…either because some programmer slipped in turning it on live before it was ready, or because someone jumped the gun in middle management.    Stay tuned.

PS: If you want to dig into this deeper, check out this and this as well.   And on Twitter, this and this tag for sheer immediate-vent-levels.   And Amazon’s stock price quotes for the fun of it today.

• “The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“,
• the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK,
• Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI
• Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and
  
• Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous.  (h/t Deb Geisler)

I never knew I was so popular.

“I have close family members and friends who are a member of the gay and lesbian community. Those folks include my daughter Lisa, as well as members of my personal staff.

“I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones—for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life’s experiences.

“And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I couldn’t look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationship—their very lives—were any less meaningful than the marriage I share with my wife Rana.

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you’re in a heterosexual marriage, and you don’t want it “protected” by people who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

If you’re concerned that gay marriage sets a bad example for the rest of us, I’m more concerned about abusive relationships, ugly divorces, people who neglect, abandon, or abuse their kids and spouses, people who go through partners like kleenex, people who feel so little self-worth that they have to take whatever they can get in the way of relationships, dirtbags who father endless children without regret or support, and so on.  If you feel otherwise, I can’t agree.

I will point out for what it’s worth that an absurdly high percentage of my exes turned out to be bisexual after the fact.    Well, not while we were together, in any event.  But I don’t think that they decided to look at another woman and say ‘wow, I could have had a V-8′ or some such thing.   I think that people are what they are, and that I’d rather that they’re honest with themselves and the world as to how they’re wired in regard to sexual preference than live their lives uncomfortably in a closet.  And I don’t think that people ‘convert’ over to gay sexual preference by seeing a gay couple holding hands.  I think it’s wired into them when they’re born, one way or the other.   I’m wired into being Mr. Straight.

I will also mention for what it’s worth that my best friend is gay, and that he and his SO have been in a serious relationship for a heck of a lot longer than I’ve been married.   His SO is my daughter’s godfather, and that was a very deliberate choice.  I’m a very dedicated Christian, but I don’t accept that Christians have to reject gay people.

I respect people who feel otherwise, but Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders.

A sequel to THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT is in production for UK’s ITV in New York.  I loved the original, and with John Hurt reprising the role of Quentin Crisp, this should be pretty good.

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile,

Be yourself no matter what they say.

Gives Rachel Maddow her own show right after Keith Olbermann.  This should be good….yes, Virginia, out Lesbians can host a national news show on TV.

“You mean when I started working on AIDS in prisons, was this where I thought it would end up? Yeah. This is pretty much it. Phase forty-seven of my master plan.”

The real root of Don’t Ask Dont Tell and other anti-gay stuff seems to be an insistent idea, that, similarly to the idea my father tried to pass on to me, that all gay men and women are desperate and determined to infect us all with their orientation – that somehow, they will all be predators waiting for their chance to rape, humiliate and then convert us all to also become homosexuals.  Total nonsense, of course, but some people feel that they have to approach it that way.

Of course, my attitude is that I’ve seen more improper gay behavior in the Republicans in Congress than anyone I’ve known who happened to be gay in real life, but I guess that’s the difference between real life and Congressional Republicans. Pretty wide.

…the vacant lot down the street, in front of the neighbors? Three idiots decide to strip and go at it in a back yard of a local home (presently vacant), and the locals called the cops.  One of the three guys is the principal of a Catholic high school…

Guys, I understand many things, but doing it in a strange back yard for the hots of it all is way dumb.   And no, I was not the guy who arranged all this. As the cops said, “They didn’t use common sense.  That’s very, very unfortunate.”

( Read the rest of this entry » )

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.

Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.

The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.

Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.

Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.

It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.

When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)

Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.

To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.

Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.

Solving any problem becomes a  matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.

Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere.  Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?

But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.

Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?

But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.

Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.

This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.

And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-don’t-vote-for-us out of the airwaves and people’s heads, we may actually get a Congress and a President interested in straightening out this mess.  And since McCain is not interested in bucking the real Bushco system, his only way through is to  (as Charlie Black, his campaign manager said the other day and McCain himself has said in 2004 and the more recent past that) think that a real terrorist attack will be a huge boon to the campaign.

Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.

Some issues-oriented campaign.

Salt Lake City TV station runs a poll on support for same-sex marriage, and Dan Savage has a lot of fun with it.