Kill Baby Kill! (Birds Can’t Vote, After All)

From the Houston Chronk:

Where are those imaginary human-animal hybrids when we need them (to go after St. Sarah of Stupidity)?

Reality

From AmericaBlog:

State Representative Deb Mell announced her engagement on the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives yesterday. But, Mell can’t get married in her home state. She’s not equal

Factually speaking, that is true.

But if she wants to balance thngs out she can bop up to Wisconsin where she still can’t get married but where she is legally superior to transsexuals.

Of course, it looks as though she’ll be going to Iowa – which did things right by never in the first instance enacting a diseased monstrosity like the transphobic piece of garbage enacted in Wisconsin in 1982, enacting a legitimate civil rights law in 2007 and, only then, legalizing gay marriage.

Attention Non-Whites

FYI:

From a May 13, 1971, conversation among President Richard Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. Haldeman. On October 5, 1999, the National Archives made available to the public 445 hours of previously unreleased Oval Office tapes. The following dialogue was transcribed by Chicago Tribune reporter James Warren.RICHARD NIXON: We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family–let people like Pat Moynihan and [special consultant] Leonard Garment and others believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work–throw ’em off the rolls. That’s the key.

JOHN D. EHRLICHMAN: The key is Reagan’s neutrality. If Reagan blasts this thing and says it’s not strong enough on the work-requirement end, that will be very bad.

NIXON: I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.

EHRLICHMAN: The Mexican American is not as good as the Mexican. You go down to Mexico–they’re clean, they’re honest, they’re moral.

Think about this when you hear Pat Buchanan (still) defending Nixon and his henchmen.

And – think about this when you hear the Pat Buchanans of today calling Obama racist.

Moving the Goalposts Yet Again

From Herbert West’s newest project, the re-animated Queer Channel Media:

If passed, ENDA would ban job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in most employment situations. It does not apply to businesses with fewer than 15 employees, religious organizations and the military.

The Human Rights Campaign, which is coordinating formal lobbying efforts for the bill, has said at least 53 senators were expected to vote for ENDA. But the group’s deputy legislative director, David Stacey, said it’s uncertain whether 60 senators can be lined up to defeat a filibuster, which Republican opponents were expected invoke to kill the bill.

As of two weeks ago, HRC and ENDA supporters in the House of Representatives predicted the bill would reach the House floor this spring. But last week, gay U.S. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), a strong ENDA supporter, told LGBT activists he was uncertain when the bill would come up for a House vote.

Polis made his comments to protesters with the group GetEqual, who on April 15 interrupted a hearing held by the House Committee on Education & Labor, which has jurisdiction over ENDA.

The protesters boisterously called on Rep. George Miller, the committee’s chair, to hold an “immediate” committee vote to send ENDA to the House floor. Polis, a member of the committee, motioned for the protesters to follow him outside the hearing room, where he said he would talk to them about ENDA.

According to Polis, whose remarks were recorded on GetEqual cameras, ENDA supporters in the House want to ensure there are enough votes to kill any Republican-sponsored motion to recommit ENDA to committee. The video’s audio quality of the video is poor, and not all of Polis’s remarks to the protesters could be heard.

“The congressman was saying that [House Democratic] leadership needs to make sure they have the votes lined up to fight off any motion to recommit, not that they don’t have the votes to pass the bill,” said Lara Cottingham, Polis’s press spokesperson. “He is confident that we will get to a floor vote, but wants to make sure it is done in the right way.”

First it was passing a disgustingly transphobic, gay-greed-consecrating, non-trans-inclusive ENDA.

Then it was St. Barney saying that getting 15-20 more Dems was necessary.

Then it was actually getting the 15-20 more Dems.

Then it was a year-and-a-half of bullshit.

Now, its not simply needing a majority or needing a majority that will be for trans-inclusion, but needing enough to dodge a motion to re-commit.

Then it will be ‘Whoops! The 2010 session is over.  Our bad!’

One possible motion to recommit the bill to committee could force the House to hold a recorded up-or-down vote on whether the transgender provision should stay in the bill, a vote that some House members fear could hurt them at the polls in the upcoming congressional elections, according to some Capitol Hill observers.

Thanks for drawing up plays for the christianist party folks!

Okay, to be fair, they probably didn’t need the help of those ‘Capitol Hill observers’ (read: HRC-oids who would rather die than live in a world where trans people are legally equal to them). 

After all, they’ve aready gotten decades of help from St. Barney and HRC-oids who would rather die than live in a world where trans people are legally equal to them – all of whom have given the christianist party and their DINO collaborators full and complete permission (often implicitly, but sometimes explicitly) that we are expendable and, if we’re expunged, no one will pay any price whatsoever.

In fact, there’s nice precedent that those who help create third-class status for trans people will be rewarded with a promotion.

I won’t mention Matt Foreman by name.

I really won’t.

And I certainly won’t mention SONDA – now eight years old with no signs whatsoever that the special right of New York gays and lesbians to discriminate against trans people is in danger of being eliminated.

Equal Time (Of Sorts)

Just to show that I can tolerate those on the right…

No, I can’t say that I enjoy most of what comes out of Dennis Miller‘s mouth these days.  In fact, I really think its sad that he’s by and large gone over to the FOX dark side. 

He was showing hints of where he was headed even a decade ago when he was on Monday Night Football.  Still, I actually liked his presence there – and, I will say that, on occasion when I’m out and about and am spinning the AM dial at a time when I am apt to come across his radio show, there are times when he will go for a few minutes without forcing my hand back to the ‘seek’ button.

And…

During one week of the 2000 football season – a week that the Vikings played a Monday night game at home – Miller did a show at the Mystic Lake Casino just outside the Twin Cities.

I remembered going to the show, but, strangely, I actually did not remember that I’d managed to sneak my camera in to it – until I recently developed a couple of rolls of B&W film that I’d had lying around for, well, a decade or so (don’t ask why) and found a dozen shots from the Miller show on one of them.

Now if I can just find the roll that has the shots on it that I took at the Smothers Brothers show there earlier that year.

Once Again, Pee Wee Skates

Metro Weekly currently has an item by Chris Geidner about discontent with the Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool.

And, while worth a read, take a look at the article’s subtitle:

A question as old as Stonewall returns in the months since Californians passed Proposition 8

Sorry, but that by itself skews the article into HRC’s corner.

Returns?

In the months since Prop 8?

Does Geidner really believe that – at least as to The Cesspool – it had ever gone away?

Asked if HRC would support a May 2 rally urging the White House to include DADT repeal in its Defense Department budget bill that it submits to Congress, Solmonese – stuck in London because of the volcanic ash that disrupted European air travel and participating in the town hall courtesy of the BBC – said that was the first he’d heard of the rally. Even if true, Solmonese’s tepid response only encouraged the growing disdain that his organization has engendered in Get Equal’s activist base.

That liberal activists are not thrilled with HRC is nothing new. Having interned at HRC in 1998 and attended New York City Pride when HRC had endorsed then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) over then-Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), I have seen far worse than the reactions people had to Solmonese’s responses this past week. 

If he wasn’t with HRC in 2007, then he wasn’t (that’s called a fact, TVC), but why the reluctance to mention the fraud that Pee Wee committed in 2007 with respect to lying to trans people about ENDA and (presumably) raking in cash based on the lie while having already decided to act contrary to the claim Pee Wee made to Southern Comfort (an all trans people)?

I’m just askin’.

Mississippi, Find Yourself Another Country To Be Part Of

No need for apologies to Phil Ochs; methinks that if he were still alive, despite his “Dykes of the American Revolution” quip during the intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” he’d have the same reaction to this item at Gawker that I did.

First the state was pulling the ol’ Fake Prom grift on Constance McMillen, and now it’s removing a butch-ish lesbian from her high school yearbook, entirely. That’s what happened to Ceara Sturgis of Hazlehurst, MS, anyway.Ceara is a graduating senior at the Wesson Attendance Center (“attendance center” being the most depressingly — and, for Mississippi, aptly — reductive and simplistic description of a high school we’ve ever heard) and by all accounts a good student. At the top of her class! And yet the school banned her photo from the yearbook because she was sporting both a tuxedo and Justin Bieber hair in her senior picture. After that became an issue, the dang school just completely removed any mention of her, from the entire book.

Oh yeah, but its Obama and the Dems that are leading us into social-, Stalin- and every other form of -ism.

Glenn Beck belches it, so it must be true, eh?

Erasing someone from the official record? 

I didn’t think I’d have cause to quote Seth Myers again this soon – and the same quote at that – but what choice do I have?

If “there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers,'” (and, again, Myers the scholar is on the mark there) then is there nothing more Soviet/Communist than declaring someone to be a non-person and subsequently ‘cleansing’ the the official societal record of the person’s existence?

Ceara?  Say hi to Trotsky for me – and ask him if he can scare up a Frida Kahlo autograph for me.

Meanwhile…

Mississippi?  Its time for you to listen to Phil Ochs.

Find yourself another country to be part of.

And might I suggest Arizona?

Doth Protest Too Much 101

Meet Eugene Delgaudio:

 

What might you presume about this character based solely on this photo? 

That he’s an over-the-hill gay porn star whose Rogaine failed his cheesy mustache even worse than it did the hair on his head?

That he’s a pedophile who couldn’t keep his dick out of children long enough to learn enough latin to be allowed to be a legalized pedophlie via membership in Joe the Rat’s Juvenile-Jumping Jamboree?

Well, based on that photo, I think one could come up with any number of disgusting things that he could be other than what he holds himself out to be – namely, a  District Supervisor in Sterling, Virginia who feels that he is such a superior specimen of All-American American that he has the moral authority to spew the folllowing (reproduced at Pam’s House Blend):

Our children…

They’ve been the Radical Homosexuals’ target all along.

Now they’re finally going after what they’ve always wanted.

Just a few weeks ago, radicals in Congress led by openly homosexual Representative Jared Polis introduced H.R. 4530.

It is a bill to turn America’s schools into indoctrination centers … its classrooms into social laboratories … its playgrounds into homosexual breeding grounds.

Of course, they’ve disguised the bill’s wicked nature behind the innocent name “The Student Non-Discrimination Act.”

Sound harmless, right? Well, that’s key to their scheme.

Honestly, I can hardly imagine a law more harmful.

More appropriately, this bill should be called “The Homosexual Classrooms Act.”

. . .You see, the Homosexual Classrooms Act contains a laundry list of anti-family provisions that will:

* Require schools to teach sodomy and other appalling homosexual acts so homosexual students don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes;

* Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, recruiting and even pressuring vulnerable teens and pre-teens into the homosexual “lifestyle”;

* Effectively outlaw voluntary prayer in schools, and expose students who pray privately to lawsuits and even criminal prosecution for “religious intimidation”;

* Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to “freedom of self-expression”;

* Force parochial schools to secularize and purge any reference to religion because radicals claim it creates a “hostile learning environment” for homosexual students.

Simply put, The Homosexual Classrooms Act will use schools as weapons to eradicate traditional values in the next generation of American students.

First, let me reiterate what I said in the comment threat over at PHB:

I wouldn’t let that character anywhere near any child of mine.

Yep – that’s a judgment call alright, and I’m making it.

But lets get back to what Delgaudio had to say.

I think it needs a bit of annotation:

Our children…

Yeh?  What about em?

They’ve been the Radical Homosexuals’ target all along.

Oh, and I guess I’ve just imagined that christians target children with aggressive pushing of myths and fear – often against the wishes of those children’s parents?

Now they’re finally going after what they’ve always wanted.

What? Just yanking infant non-white and noin-rich boys out of the crib and dropping them on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan?  Oh…sorry. I misread.  That’s what you and your ilk have always wanted.

Just a few weeks ago, radicals in Congress led by openly homosexual Representative Jared Polis introduced H.R. 4530.

Holy shit! An actual fact!

It is a bill to turn America’s schools into indoctrination centers … its classrooms into social laboratories … its playgrounds into homosexual breeding grounds.

Well, I guess one fact in a row is a start, eh?  And, yeh, if you’re going to go back to making shit up you should, as Bill Hicks opined regarding goldfish and Lincoln Logs, go hog wild.

Dude, you’ve got a big-ass hog there!

Of course, they’ve disguised the bill’s wicked nature behind the innocent name “The Student Non-Discrimination Act.”

Damn! You almost had a second actual fact there – if not for that “wicked nature” christianist talking point shit.

Sound harmless, right? Well, that’s key to their scheme.

“Defense of Marriage Act,” anyone?

Honestly, I can hardly imagine a law more harmful.

Really?

You’re sure about that?

Ever heard of The Enabling Act of 1933?  Okay, okay – perhaps that’s a Godwin’s Law violation.

Or, perhaps it would have been prior to last week.  But still, lets not talk about Nazi laws from the 1930s; how about Nazi laws from 2010?

As analyzed by that eminent legal scholar Seth Myers:

This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying “Show me your papers?” There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line “show me your papers.” It’s their catchphrase. Every time someone says “show me your papers,” Hitler’s family gets a residual check. So heads up, Arizona; that’s fascism. I know, I know, it’s a dry fascism, but it’s still fascism.

And, Eugene, you think that preventing LGBT students from being beaten up and killed is worse than the necessary precursor to the formal establishment of Wannseezona?

More appropriately, this bill should be called “The Homosexual Classrooms Act.”

. . .You see, the Homosexual Classrooms Act contains a laundry list of anti-family provisions that will:

Uhhhh…define “family”?

* Require schools to teach sodomy and other appalling homosexual acts so homosexual students don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes;

Citation please?

* Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, recruiting and even pressuring vulnerable teens and pre-teens into the homosexual “lifestyle”;

Citation please?

* Effectively outlaw voluntary prayer in schools, and expose students who pray privately to lawsuits and even criminal prosecution for “religious intimidation”;

Citation please?

* Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to “freedom of self-expression”;

Citation please?

* Force parochial schools to secularize and purge any reference to religion because radicals claim it creates a “hostile learning environment” for homosexual students.

Citation please?

Simply put, The Homosexual Classrooms Act will use schools as weapons to eradicate traditional values in the next generation of American students.

Simply put, Delgaudio believes that the same schtick that Rush Limaugh has ridden to millionaireist glory on – namely, convincing people that they don’t need to think  or fact-check for themselves and should just let the well-professed, self-identified ‘revealed’ leaders think for them – will work for him.

Dear Eugene: 

There’s not much good I can say about Rush Limbaugh, but I can say this: Even at his heaviest, he had far more style sense than you.  And, while nothing that may ultimately be revealed (and proven) regarding his illegal drug addictions and sexual encounters will surprise me, he doesn’t look like a child molester (a child devourer maybe, but that’s a different matter.)

Even my mom – who, sadly, gets far too much of her information about life in the 21st Century from Sean Hannity – would, if presented with a copy of the bill that you’re lying about, be able to tell that you’re a lying sack of christianist shit.

Maybe your constituents are stupid enough not to check things out for themselves.

The rise of St. Sarah of Stupidity tells me that, even though you’re a lying sack of christianist shit, you may well have the odds on your side.

And that says more – and nothing good – about 2010 America than I ever could.

Language, Please? Hearing, Anyone?

I’m in the Central Time Zone.

By my count, there just a few minutes under 86 hours left in the month of April.

ENDA is…………………………………………………………?

Why America is Dead – Pt. 31: The Sanctification of Ignorance

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber succinctly distills what I and many others (including, doubtlessly, the ghost of Bill Hicks) have been seeing in America:

[C]onsidered in intellectual terms, there is very little remaining on the political right (particularly in the US, but this point applies to most of the English-speaking countries, and to a large extent elsewhere) that is worth engaging with in terms other than the derision employed here. It’s not that, as rightwing pundits go, people like Douthat, Goldberg, Krauthammer and McArdle are soft targets. Compared to, say, Powerline or the cast of Fox News, they are paragons of reasoned and reasonable discourse.The same goes for the thinktanks and quasi-academic institutions that are supposed to provide some kind of rigorous basis for thinking about policy. AEI, Heritage, Heartland and the rest offer little more than partisan hackery. Increasingly, the same is true of Republican-aligned academics. There is simply no room for independent thought.

Overall, as I said on my blog a while back, the scene is one of complete ideological incoherence. Market liberalism has run out of steam, libertarianism has failed to produce a coherent response to the Iraq war or the Bush assault on civil liberties (to be fair, Obama has also failed here) , and the various other elements that have emerged or re-emerged as forces on the right – Christianism, aggressive nationalism, anti-feminism and so on – amount to little more than a tribalist set of hatreds of various others.

The unifying feature of the right in the 21st century is not so much ideology as an embrace of ignorance, represented most obviously by the leading figures on the right in the US, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Rather than reflecting an even partially coherent world view and political program, rightwing politics now consists of the restatement of talking points in favor of a set of policy positions that represent affirmations of tribal identity, rather than elements of a coherent program.

The best way to understand this can be summed in the term ‘agnotology’ (h/t commenter Fran Barlow), coined by Robert Proctor to describe study of the manufacture of ignorance. Proctor was referring primarily to the efforts of the tobacco lobby to cast doubt on research demonstrating the link between smoking and cancer. But the veterans of that campaign have moved on to a whole range of new issues, from climate change to health policy, and their techniques have been so widely imitated that the entire political right now looks like Big Tobacco writ even bigger.

The waffle house waitress who, two decades ago, quizzed Hicks, “What you readin’ for?” was but an advance scout.  Sarah Palin and her drones are the neo-Gengis non-Mongol Horde of Morons, who see reason and rationality each as greater threats to their way of delusion life than all of Cold War Soviet Union’s nukes combined – threats that must be destroyed, and are poised to be destroyed by the wink-addled unemployed who have been convinced that the destruction of America’s economic central nervous system – jugular-pierced by the Wolverine-talons of Reaganomics and subsequently decapitated by Bush-Cheney treasonism – is somehow all the fault of Barack Obama.