Brian Williams gossips about what the people in his newsroom were saying about that NBC gossip story

I had heard a couple of people talking about this in our newsroom
today  and I also heard they felt validated by it but it would be so
like these people to say that.

Supreme Court to rule by June on US Defense of Marriage Act and reversal of CA Prop 8, which banned gay marriage; Boehner's GOP DOMA defense may not have standing; neither may Prop 8 defenders

Watch Supreme Court to Review Laws Banning Same-Sex Marriage on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

In the last two years, 10 courts with judges appointed by both GOP and Democratic presidents, including two federal appeals courts, have ruled that the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, signed by Bill Clinton in the dead of night, impermissibly treats legally-married gay couples unfairly in excluding them from tax breaks and other marriage benefits. As expected, the Supreme Court will rule on that. Unexpectedly, the court will also take up the reversal of California's Proposition 8, spearheaded by massive Mormon Church agitation, which banned gay marriage in the Golden State, and then was overturned on narrow grounds.



In her NPR report (above) Nina Totenberg notes:

     Typically, when a court says a federal statute is unconstitutional, the federal government appeals to the Supreme Court to change the outcome. But after initially defending DOMA in the courts, the Obama administration made a highly unusual U-turn, and instead urged the Supreme Court to strike down DOMA.
     At that point, the House Republican leadership hired its own lawyer to defend the law. So when the case is argued, probably in March, it will be that lawyer — former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement — who will be defending the statute, while the Obama administration will be urging the court to strike down DOMA.
     These twists and turns apparently have caused the justices some concern as to whether they have the jurisdiction to decide the case when the federal government is no longer defending the law as constitutional. So the court has ordered the lawyers to also present arguments as to whether the Republican congressional leadership has standing to defend DOMA in place of the Obama administration.
     If the court decides the GOP leadership does not have standing, there would be no controversy to resolve, and presumably DOMA would be invalidated.

The New Normal getting funnier, more polished, more subversive (and more popular) every week

They say (meaning we say) that adversity can be an excellent crucible.
     That whole "As God is my witness, I shall never be hungry/screwed over/poor/gay baited/humiliated/harassed/etc. again!" thing.
     If you buy into the logic, then Nebraska must be one of the most dangerous breeding grounds for get-even gay people in the country, as it has provided the hood ornament for the most effective current pop culture gay agenda Trojan Horse, in the person of Omaha's own Andrew Rannels.
     His show, "The New Normal," (now on NBC Tuesdays at 8:30, CST) started out as a broad-brushed satirical romp skewering everything within reach.
     But now the sitcom's scripts are targeting the heterosexual supremacist jugular even more relentlessly, in millions of living rooms across America.
     Right-wingers immediately recognized how dangerous a show like The New Normal is, which didn't surprise us. What did was the failure of even some admirably astute gay bloggers (like Joe Jervis at JoeMyGod, who spots a hundred things a day we don't) to recognize the potential in this show, which AKSARBENT likes a lot.

     The ringleader of the show's ensemble agitprop, Rannels, is a real pro at upending convention.
     The more you watch him make the donuts, the more layers of subtlety, intensity, off-the-cuff flipness and deep gravitas you unpeel.
     Like Sean Hayes (also a terrific actor) on Will and Grace, Rannels can do perfectly-executed barrel rolls en route from comedy to poignancy and back again as many times as the script asks him to.
     Unlike Hayes, Rannels has scripts which don't waste entertainment on mere diversion; they yoke it to effective sabotage of an indefensible status quo whose most salient characteristic appears to be inertia.
     Too bad for Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, isn't it? While they weren't looking, some of most talented people in Hollywood, the people who crew the train of popular culture, drew a bead on their decrepit ideology.
     (Now even civilians are getting into the act: a fresh, wickedly funny meme has sprung up to mock Brian Brown for making imaginary passes at men.)
     Geez, it's bad enough when your opponents start beating you in elections you never lost before, but it's worse when their followers collectively and spontaneous blind-side you by getting the world wide web to point at you and laugh.
     All this will inevitably invoke the swan-song of martyrdom that heterosexual supremacists always sing as they nail themselves to the cross: We're being crucified by the gay agenda!
     Actually, that marginalization is far more due to collateral damage by a country which moves on by stepping over and sometimes on, those who wear pointless recalcitrance masquerading as principal on their sleeve.
     About the invocation of the "gay agenda": The National Organization for Marriage most frequently paints it as the redefinition of marriage, which is turning out to be about as scary to heteros as extending 'employee pricing' to everybody.
     Gay people, of course, would differently define the agenda they never wanted to shoulder in the first place as something like: Getting the Dead Weight of Force-of-Law Prejudice Off Our Backs and Fronts.
     The determinant of which definition succeeds depends on the resources you have to persuade your audience that your version is right.
     Right now gay people have the best screenwriters in the entertainment firmament, the best actors, film editors and one of the biggest television networks on the planet to sell their point of view.
     Conversely, Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown have only an out-of-touch pope who looks like the resurrection of a Third Reich Dracula and their special victims unit which tortures facts and circumstance so much that even some of their manufactured martyrs have cried foul after seeing NOM's YouTube videos.
     We know which horse we'll bet on for the long haul.
     What set us off on all this was the poignant final scene of this weeks episode of The New Normal, in which the two male principals look at an unnecessarily baby-proofed Christmas tree that will be put away long before the blessed event, discarding the powerful emotional iconography of their respective families' ornaments, as the camera slowly zoomed in on a tiny sonogram of their en route little boy.
     Against expertly-crafted mass media emotional battering rams like this, AKSARBENT doesn't see much future growth in the hater's franchise.
     But hey, good riddance.

After gay parenting study debacle, another black eye to U of Texas academic integrity

A University of Texas review panel examining conflict-of-interest charges against UT professor Charles Groat released a scathing report on the study, which found no evidence that fracking polluted ground water. Groat has retired and the director of the UT Energy Institute, Raymond Orback, has resigned. The Panel noted that UT Professor Groat, who led the study, failed to discluse conflict of interest as a director and stockholder of Houston-based Plains Exploration and Productions Co., owning $1.58 million worth of shares
     The review panel said the study:

• wasn't fact based"
• included little scientific; conclusions were distorted in successive drafts
• included only one active scientist
• included white papers not subject to "serious peer review"
• "fell short of contemporary standards of peer review"

     Earlier this year, despite the University of Texas' conclusion that a controversial gay parenting study contained "no falsification of data, plagiarism or other serious ethical  breaches constituting scientific misconduct," a member of the editorial board of the journal which published it called the study "bullshit" and 200 PhDs and MDs questioned its scholarly merit.
     In respect of hydraulic fracturing, two other industry-manipulated studies have crashed and burned this year. At Penn State, the Marcellus Shale Coalition cancelled a fracking study after faculty snubbed the endeavor, which followed three previous studies written by a former Penn State professor, Tim Considine, now at the University of Wyoming, whose work has been characterized as advocacy for producers by groups like the nonprofit Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center in Harrisburg.
     In November, the State University of New York announced it would close its Shale Resources and Society Institute.

Professors, students, and several SUNY trustees had pressured the University to close its shale institute. The movement presented a petition with more than 10,500 signatures to support its cause.
     SUNY English professor Jim Holstun was one of those who challenged the credibility of the Shale Resources and Society Institute. The signatories strongly insisted that their public university should not turn into a corporate mouthpiece.
     The Shale Resources and Society Institute released a study that claiming that state regulation was making drilling for oil in Pennsylvania much safer. The study argued that the rules pending in New York would bring about the same benefits.
     Howver, the local government watchdog group Public Accountability Initiative challenged some of the data and conclusions published by the study. The PAI also pointed out that the study’s lead authors directly conducted research for the oil and gas industry, and that they did not release full disclosure.
     The PAI noted that John P. Martin, the study’s third author and the co-director of the Shale Resources and Society Institute, provided planning and public relations services for the oil and gas industry.

National Rural Electric Cooperative Association hires 'class A bigot', Jo Ann Emerson of MO, as its CEO

John Aravosis of AmericaBlog is not amused. He writes:

The NRECA is trying to sell Jo Ann Emerson to the public as some kind of moderate!  A moderate what?
... NRECA is incredibly influential.  They should be held to the highest standards.
     And their member utilities are just that – public utilities with public charters.  So there’s a quasi-governmental quality to the organization.  And its leader believes in discriminating against a large segment of American society, which also include some of her own employees...
     The NRECA claims that “[t]he respect [Emerson] has from both sides of the aisle and her proven ability to bridge political and policy divides and find common ground will serve NRECA well.”  Respect?  Bridge political divides and find common ground?  Yeah, she did a great job finding common ground with the worst legislative gay-bashers in the US House of Representatives.  And you sure have to respect the tenacity it takes to be a class-A bigot.

Former US Rep. (R-MO) Jo Ann Emerson, who
will now represent the interests of her largest
campaign contributer in Washington

Here's the compendium Aravosis created of Emerson's homophobic activism from her HRC scorecard and her votes from “On the Issues“:

• Opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
• Voted against ENDA, legislation to ban job discrimination against gay and trans people.
• Voted yes on amending the US Constitution to ban gay marriage.
• Voted to ban gay parents in DC from adopting children.
• Opposed adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the Hate Crimes bill.
• Supported the Foxx amendment to the 2012 Defense Appropriations Act that would require the military to continue discriminating against gay and lesbian service members.
• Supported the Huelskamp amendment to the 2012 Defense Appropriations Act to ban Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal training manuals.
• Supported yet another anti-gay, anti-DADT, pro-DOMA amendment to the 2013 DOD Appropriations Act by Rep. King.
• Supported a separate Huelskamp amendment to the FY2013 Commerce, Justice & Science Appropriations Act “to prohibit the Administration from using any federal funds to undermine or bring suit against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) or state constitutional amendments protecting traditional marriage.”
• Opposed legislation to “amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide same-sex partners of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the same immigration benefits that legal, different-sex spouses of U.S. permanent residents enjoy.”
• Opposed legislation “to provide spousal health-care, retirement, and other benefits to all federal civilian employees with qualifying same-sex domestic partners.”

Conan O'Brien sucks at drawing penises

New GPS substitute scavenges radio, TV, Wi-Fi, cell phone signals — even GPS jammer signals

Click on picture to enlarge. Photo: BAE systems

The US is set to launch a new generation of GPS satellites, and there are other functioning or planned networks — the Russian GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) was in use by only the Russian military, until it was made fully available to civilians in 2007. There are also the planned European Union Galileo positioning system, Chinese Compass navigation system, and Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System.

     But BAE systems has introduced a scheme, NAVSOP (Navigation via Signals of Opportunity), which employs common radio, TV, Wi-Fi and cell phone signals to triangulate location to within "several feet" — a degree of precision equal to or better than satellite systems.

It uses all sorts of other signals as well, from GPS satellite to air traffic control. The system can even learn and evolve by taking signals that were originally unidentified and using them to build increasingly reliable and more exact fixes on location.
     Shifting to the cheap and nimble NAVSOP would not require infrastructure investments in transmitter towers and the like, because it takes advantage of whatever is already in place. 
     Larger models are in development, but NAVSOP chips are approximately the size of a coin and work with a tiny radio receiver.
     ...Overreliance on GPS signals is rampant in day-to -day life from data networks, financial systems, health networks, rail, road, aviation and marine transport, to shipping and agriculture. And military platforms commonly use GPS to find their position, navigate and execute missions.     With different systems sharing GPS dependency, a loss of signal could cause the simultaneous failure of many things people rely on daily.
Last year, the European Commission estimated that six to seven percent of its countries' GDP, representing a whopping $1 trillion, is already dependent on satellite radio navigation in Europe alone.

Bush Judge William Shubb contradicts all medical, mental health groups, says new CA law protecting minors from antigay 'conversion therapy' is based on 'questionable and scientifically incomplete studies'

Judge Shubb in nonseersucker attire

Shubb was nominated by George Bush on August 3, 1990, to a seat vacated by Raul A. Ramirez and subsequently confirmed by the Senate. Two months ago, Shubb, saddened by the cancellation of the California Senate's annual Seesucker Thursday, organized a seersucker social Thursday at Sacremento ice cream parlor Vic's. A senate majority felt "it would be politically unwise to be seen doing something frivolous when there's so much conflict over major issues." "It's sad," said Shubb, "I fail to see their reasoning."
     In 2006, Shubb got annoyed at repeated interruptions by cell phones during a complicated tax case. Here's what happened next:

     “You have to imagine this little guy, all red in the face, his robes just flying in the wind,” one witness explained. Shubb reportedly stormed through the courtroom, repeating, “Whose cell phone is that? Whose cell phone is that?”
     “Then, she just sort of meekly raised her hand,” one attorney continued. The judge demanded the woman hand the phone over. She did. Then, according to witnesses, he flung open the courtroom doors and chucked the phone down the hall. “I didn’t throw it; I tossed it,” Shubb said in his defense. “I just wanted it gone.”
     When he returned to the bench, he ordered marshals to collect every cell phone in the courtroom.
     ...Judge Shubb has a reputation among attorneys for being a very intelligent but extremely short-tempered man. One attorney called Shubbs “a nutcase.” Another chalked up Shubb’s outburst to “federalitis,” noting that powerful federal judges like Shubb become “insulated from normal social interaction.”

Oh great. Now you can use a 3D printer to crank out your own guns at home

And apparently, it's not illegal to do so, only to distribute it/them, not that that would ever happen.

Photo: Defense Distributed

Creating a printable gun is the project of Defense Distributed, which is working on what it calls the WikiWeapon. But the effort isn't far enough along to create a working firearm, so Defense Distributed used a design created by another printed-gun creator who goes by the name HaveBlue.

Can a nonpilot land a jet? The Aviators tried it.

Piper Cubs, as far as you can see

The above photo was taken at a 75th anniversary gathering last summer, which commemorated the plane in which most WWII pilots learned to fly and which ceased to be manufactured in 1947. (In 1949 the Super Cub was introduced.) More than 19,000 Piper Cubs were manufactured or sold in kit form.
     The world's most popular plane, however, is a Cessna: the 172, now called a "Skyhawk." More than 43,000 of those have been produced since 1955. 172s/Skyhawks are exceptionally safe aircraft, probably due to their forgiving handling and unhawk-like slow speed.

CBS' CSI continues its abuse of the transgendered

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker

Nick Adams, GLAAD's Associate Director of Communications reports in The Advocate the latest smear of CSI against transgendered people.
     MO: lurid disinforma­tion basted with con­tempt. As of 12/1/2012, 703 original episodes of the three series in the CSI franchise have aired. Including syndication, CSI and its two spinoffs have earned $6 billion, making creater Anthony Zuiker a multimillionaire many times over.

Wednesday night's episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, entitled "Strip Maul," contained the latest in the show's long history of offensive and defamatory portrayals of transgender people.
     The episode begins with the police walking up and down the Fremont Street area of Las Vegas, arresting several people all of whom are intended to be seen by the show's viewers as freaks and weirdos.  In fact, one of the officers says, "That's why I'm here. You deal with the whack jobs [emphasis added] and I do the evidence collecting."  Another officer says while looking at the people arrested, "Full moon tonight."
     ...If this were a one-time occurrence on CSI, this episode would still be an exploitative, sensationalistic, defamatory portrayal of a transgender person. However, as GLAAD recently noted in its report about transgender characters on television over the past 10 years, CSI has repeatedly foisted these type of portrayals upon the American public.
     ...It's possible for police procedurals to tell transgender stories in a way that's fair, accurate and inclusive.  In fact, the CBS show Cold Case received six GLAAD Media Award nominations, two of them for episodes that included transgender characters, "Boy Crazy" and "Daniela."

Below: Brad Chapin, an Omaha PFLAG volunteer, explains (at the 11:29 mark) how he has had to try to repair the damage inflicted on transgendered kids; damage exacerbated by wealthy, cynical and exploitively pandering entertainment czars like Zuiker, who prefer to exhibit transgendered characters as twisted, dangerous perps rather than the victims they are far more likely to be in real life.

NYT's Frank 'Panchito' Bruni: Where’s your apology for signing the Defense of Marriage Act, Bill Clinton?

Photo: Yanina Manolova, AP

The New York Time's former food columnist (savaged here by the Center for American Progress) looks beyond the slick way Bill Clinton has finessed his record on DOMA and calls him to task. For the full piece go to the New York Times, here.

You fret about your legacy, as any president would. For turning a blind eye to the butchery in Rwanda, you struggled through a mea culpa of sorts, and after Barack Obama seemed to lavish higher praise on Ronald Reagan than on you, you seethed.
     Well, DOMA, which says that the federal government recognizes only marriages of a man and a woman, is one of the uglier blemishes on your record... you’ve never wholly owned up to that, never made adequate amends. It’s past time, and it’s almost time for Hillary... to catch up with other cabinet members and President Obama and make her presumed support for same-sex marriage explicit, which she has never done.
     DOMA is a nasty bit of business, in practical as well as symbolic terms. It denies federal pension, health care and medical leave benefits — among many other protections and considerations — to same-sex couples who have been legally married in the growing number of states that permit it...
     At the convention in Charlotte three months ago, in remarks that sprawled over 48 minutes, you seemed to find room for just about everything but same-sex marriage. President Obama mentioned the issue in his speech. So did Michelle Obama in hers. But nothing from you, and no particular advocacy or fund-raising for the marriage-equality referendums that were on the ballot on Nov. 6... You presented a mum, behind-the-curve contrast to the next generation of Democratic standard-bearers like Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, and Martin O’Malley, the Maryland governor, whose pleas for marriage equality underscore a new reality: no Democrat, not even Hillary, will be able to make a credible bid for the party’s presidential nomination without supporting it.
     ...You had a zest for politicking that the current president doesn’t, enormous powers of persuasion and an instinct for the center. Maybe DOMA was the center in 1996. It isn’t anymore.

Privacy: Worried about facebook? Try this

KQED Public Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area recently hosted an on-air Forum for which it gathered some very knowledgeable people, in respect of computer networks, data gathering, and privacy to analyze Facebook's latest policy changes: All Things D's Kara Swisher, NPR's Laura Sydell and the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Mark Rotenberg.
     The takeaway: Facebook's changes are much less alarming than Google, mobile and government data gathering.

Best gay books of 2013, according to 87 authors

The guiltiest pleasure is Full Service by Scotty Bowers, a sexual romp through the closeted sex lives of many gay and bisexual stars of Old Hollywood.
     Tour guide Bowers, an extremely well endowed ex-Marine, got started by cheerfully saying yes to an overture by Walter Pigeon, whose gas he had just pumped at a Union Oil gas station on Wilshire where he was filling in.
     The Richfield station where he worked nights in short order became the most notorious hookup site for moneyed clients and pliable women and ex-servicemen. Much of the breezy memoir sounds concocted, but when LA Weekly went to work verifying as many anecdotes as possible with those principals still alive, story after story checked out.
     On a higher literary plane is Christopher (Gods And Monsters) Bram's broad new nonfiction survey, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, with individual portraits of gay writers as well as chronicles of their complicated and changing interactions with each other. For the entire roundup, go to Band of Thebes.
     Below: CBS interviews Scotty Bowers:

While fishing, Tom Colicchio gets Andy Cohen to confess why Cybill Shepherd didn't get his shirt and pants off; (Hint: Cohen didn't refuse because he's gay)

The Top Chef is better at baiting the hook than you might think. So is fishing just outside New York City.


(Via Towleroad)

Powerball winner bet Kansas City Royals Baseball Hall of Fame members' jersey numbers

Screen capture: ABC

Mesa AZ high school punishes two boys for fighting by coercing them into faking the rainbow amidst jeers

Westwood HS principal
Dr. Timothy Richard

Mesa is an extremely right-wing, heavily Mormon community. This happened at Westwood High School, whose principal, Dr. Timothy Richard, 35, of Wolfeboro, N.H., came up with the punishment.
     Richard has an Ed.D. in educational leadership and an M.A. in educational leadership and administration from Jones International University [a for-profit, online-only institution] and spent four years in military intelligence in the U.S. Air Force. From Wikipedia:

In 1999, JIU became the first fully online university in the U.S. to be accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, and a member of the North Central Association. This decision caused outrage from the American Association of University Professors on the grounds that the teaching staff had no academic freedom, and that an institution that taught only one subject could not claim to be a university.JIU currently offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral degree programs in business and masters and doctoral degree programs in education according to its website.

Commenters on gay blogs had a lot to say about this story.

From Towleroad:
     Francis: Mesa, Arizona is one of the more Mormon cities in the United States, is extremely red, and most people in the city appear to agree with the "punishment" that they view two men holding hands as being.
     giovanni: "if these guys were cool and wanted to get the principal back, they would have hugged and done some open mouth kissing.

From JoeMyGod:
     penpal: The blatant homophobia and bullying are apparent enough, but beyond that is the basic premise that two men, even straight men, showing affection for each other is taboo and to be avoided at all costs is abominable. They're not raising boys there, they're raising damaged goods.

Israel retaliates against Palestine immediately after UN vote granting it nonmember state status

Steve Weizman of Agence-France reports that an Israeli official announced plans to build 3,000 settler homes.

Israeli media reports said that some new settlement construction would be in a highly contentious area of the West Bank known as E1, a corridor that runs between the easternmost edge of annexed east Jerusalem and the Maaleh Adumim settlement.
    Palestinians bitterly oppose the E1 project, as it effectively cuts the occupied West Bank in two, north to south, and makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state highly problematic.

     Lee Terry, Deb Fischer and Mike Johanns, who represent Omaha voters in Congress and the Senate, are staunch supporters of Israel, despite the country's continuing disregard of US admonitions about ever-escalating settlement activity that critics of Israel have called a decades-old land grab.
     Foreign aid to Israel now totals at least $100-$114 billion since 1973, but the total cost of US support to Israel in recent decades may be as high as 1.6 trillion dollars, according to Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. That's twice the cost of the US war in Vietnam, and counting.

     "We reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlements and east Jerusalem construction and announcements. We believe these actions are counterproductive and make it harder to resume direct negotiations or achieve a two-state solution," said National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
     State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that, despite past failures, Washington would keep trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table.

Historic UN Palestine vote: how every nation voted

UN vote by country. Click image to enlarge.

The vote to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state was 138 in favor and nine against, with 41 abstentions. Voting no: Israel, the United States, Canada, Czech Republic, Panama and several Pacific island nations which typically rubber-stamp positions aping US/Israel policy: the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau.
     Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vowed retaliation if the vote went against Israel, released a statement saying, in part:

The world watched a defamatory and venomous speech that was full of mendacious propaganda against the IDF (army) and the citizens of Israel, the statement said.

     AKSARBENT has located a twitter picture (above) identifying all the votes.


Here is how, according to Reuters, the US and Israel may retaliate against Palestine:

The United States and Israel oppose the Palestinian move, saying direct peace talks are the only way to achieve statehood.
     Israel has threatened the Palestinians with retaliation for seeking a U.N. status upgrade. It has suggested that it could withhold some taxes and customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.
     But in the wake of the latest Gaza conflict, Israel seems reluctant to reveal itself as diplomatically isolated. It has toned down threats of retaliation in the face of wide international support for the initiative, notably among its European allies.
     Israel may opt for harsh retaliation if the Palestinians file complaints against the Jewish state at the ICC, which U.N. diplomats say is Israel's main concern at the moment.
     The United States has also threatened to withhold financial aid to the Palestinians. If they join any specialized U.N. agencies, Congress will likely seek to cut off U.S. funding to those agencies in accordance with U.S. law.
     The United States, which pays 22 percent of the regular U.N. budget, is the biggest financial contributor to the world body.

Syria now completely cut off from Internet, says a second web monitoring company

Renesys, and now Akamai report that all Syria's IP blocks are offline. From the Washington Post:

Still, maybe one question here is why Syria didn’t do this sooner... One possible explanation is that Syria has been far more assertive online, using it as a tool for tracking dissidents and rebels, and sometimes even tricking them into handing the government personal data using phishing scams. President Bashar al-Assad has a background in computers, unlike the much older Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gaddafi, and once even directly mentioned his “electronic army.” Assad’s regime may have seen opportunity as well as risk on the Web, where perhaps the Egyptian and Libyan authorities saw primarily a tool of the uprising. Or, perhaps the Syrian simply feared the economic consequences of an Internet blackout, or lacked the means to conduct it.
     The Syrian government has not claimed responsibility for the blackout, so it remains possible that another group or actor is responsible, although it’s not clear who would have the capability to close down Internet access so widely and rapidly.

How to handle street preachers on campus: University of Central Florida edition

Via JoeMyGod

The YouTube description:

At the University of Central Florida free speech lawn, a Baptist preacher (Micah Armstrong) talks about the sins of sexuality. In response one student (Austin Cooper) strips in front of him.

This is how they accomplish the same thing at the University of Nebraska and at Yale University.

Gay Mobile Alabama woman beaten senseless by Travis Hawkins, brother of her girlfriend on Thanksgiving; 66,000 sign petition to escalate charges

Omahans will recognize WPMI 15's anchor, who introduced the story, as former KMTV anchor Greg Peterson who left Nebraska for Mobile, AL in 2007.



Prosecutors in Mobile chose to charge Travis Hawkins with second degree assault rather than attempted murder.
     They say they could not bring first degree assault charges because Hawkins did not use a deadly weapon.
     No hate crime charges were brought because Alabama is one of 26 states without hate crime statutes covering LGBT people.
     Second degree assault in Alabama is a class C felony. First degree assault is a class B felony. Attempted murder is a class A felony.
     Here are the penalties for those crimes, from the Alabama statutes:

(1) For a Class A felony, for life or not more than 99 years or less than 10 years.
(2) For a Class B felony, not more than 20 years or less than 2 years.
(3) For a Class C felony, not more than 10 years or less than 1 year and 1 day.

Here is Hawkins, in pictures on his facebook page:

Drag Dog

This Beagle also has issues with water jug hoarding, sneaker huffing, rolling with pickles and stealing pretzels from goats.

Yes, there IS such a thing as bad publicity — if you ran a coffee shop, would you want Bob Vander Plaats running around with your store's name on a foam cup?

We suppose that, if he has one, the dog of the Iowa Family Leader's Bob Vander Plaats, Fierce Defender of Marriage Against Imaginary Threats, ate the memo announcing that, since the Varnum v. Brien decision legalizing same-sex marriage in Iowa, divorces have declined to their lowest per capita level since 1968 — 7,286.
     Despite the fact that Iowas favor gay marriage by about seven percentage points, Vander Plaats evidently has no qualms about flogging the failed Starbucks boycott started by the National Organization for Marriage and taken up by the Family Research Council:

I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna take a look at other coffee shops and support those who support God's design for the family. Who support the freedoms that we have in this country and what makes this country so great and what we hold dear.

We're not so sure we would want our coffee advertised as the choice of dishonest heterosexual supremacists, but considering what ABC News said about Vanderplaats trying to shake down Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, maybe Vander Plaats has a secret plan to shake down coffee house owners by NOT endorsing their products! Far fetched, but we wouldn't put it past him.

Larry 'JR' Hagman, Dallas star, dies at 81 — in Dallas

Larry Hagman has died at 81 in Dallas, Texas of complications from cancer, surrounded by family and friends, including Linda Gray, who played his wife on television, and Dallas costar Patrick Duffy.
     He was filming a second season of TNT's sequel to the CBS prime time soap which ran from 1978 to 1991, garnering 355 million viewers worldwide at its apex — the 1980 third season opener's reveal of Who Shot JR.

USA Today

     In the US, that episode got a 53.3 rating because an astounding 76% share of the nation's TV viewers — 83 million — watched CBS that night to find out that Bing Crosby's daughter Mary did the dirty deed.
     Hagman was born in Ft. Worth in 1931, the son of Broadway legend Mary Martin.
     In 1984, Cinema Canada republished an interview with famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman who confessed his fascination with Dallas:

Cinema Canada: You can be harsh towards actors.
Ingmar Bergman: No! It's not like that! I only behave that way when they ask for it. When you're ill and the doctor says: 'We have to take it out,' you don't ask him to be nice, you ask him to use clean instruments, to be objective, not to be afraid, but to take it out, God, and quickly. With actors it's the same: I see there's something wrong, and I have to cut it out. Of course cutting out a rotten spot hurts. But it has to be done.
     The worst doctors I know are the people who make Dallas. Dallas is written badly, directed badly, acted badly and filmed badly. Dallas has no limits in its tastelessness, lack of talent and completely cynical way of handling people. (He sighs) All of it makes Dallas so incredibly fascinating.

     Larry Hagman first got famous as Tony Nelson, the astronaut in NBC's I Dream of Genie. Although he loved his Dallas character, he hated Sheldon Leonard's I Dream of Jeannie scripts and was so difficult to work with that the producers seriously considered getting rid of him and replacing him with another actor. Darren McGavin was at the top of the list for Hagman's replacement. They even worked out a story where Tony lost Jeannie and McGavin found her, but the studio execs loved Hagman and wouldn't consider a change.



     Jeannie trivia from the International Movie Database:

• Jeannie was born on 1 April 64 B.C.
• The fancy antique bottle in which Jeannie called home was actually a decorative Jim Beam liquor decanter, decorated and painted with gold leaf by the show's art department.
• According to Barbara Eden, network executives and censors were unconcerned about her navel being seen until someone casually mentioned during the third season that it was occasionally visible when the waistband of her costume shifted. After that her navel was required to be covered.
• The famous theme music was actually not used during season one, but since the first season was black and white, it was generally not syndicated with the rest of the series, so few people have seen it.
• In the episode "How to Marry an Astronaut", Barbara Eden's cries for help from inside the champagne bottle were real. As a prank, director Claudio Guzmán called "lunch!" and had everyone leave the set, leaving Eden trapped in the bottle.
• Jeannie's harem shoes were made by Neiman Marcus.
• In one episode, Tony and Roger are working training a chimp named "Sam". This was seen as a slap at the show Bewitched, whose producers accused "Jeannie" of stealing some of their ideas.
• On the show, all of the characters drove Pontiac automobiles.
• Season one was filmed in black-and-white because NBC did not want to pay for the extra expense of filming it in color (The network did not believe the series would last beyond one season. According to Sidney Sheldon in his autobiography "The Other Side Of Me", he offered to pay the extra $400 an episode needed for color filming at the beginning of the series. Screen Gems executive Jerry Hyams advised him, "Sidney, don't throw your money away.")
• "I Dream of Jeannie" was the last television series to be broadcast in black and white. It began broadcasting "in living color" beginning with Season 2.
• Originally, Jeannie's power was activated by folding her arms followed by a series of eye flutters. This was soon replaced by nodding her head and blinking once.
• In Season 2, sets from other famous shows are used as locations. The most recognizable locations are the house and office featured on ABC's Bewitched plus locations from The Partridge Family and The Monkees.
• The Nelson home still stands on the Warner Brothers Ranch in Burbank, CA, where it has a new role as the Ranch Operations office. Besides minor cosmetic changes, the house remains almost exactly the same after nearly 50 years.
• Songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote a theme song titled "Jeannie" but was rejected before the show's premiere.

A strangely misbehaving dog gets multiple timeouts

National Organization for Marriage: 'Children do best when raised by a mother and father' and if you don't believe that, maybe this will convince you. Or not.

Retired Royal Navy Officer Nick Crews' letter to his son and
two daughters has created quite a stir in the UK.

There is, as you would imagine, more to the letter below. Telegraph follow-ups were published here and here.

 

Dear All Three

      With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

      It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

      We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don't ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

      Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents.

      So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.
      In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.
      I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's under­achievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don't want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it's not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won't do it by simply whingeing and saying you don't like it. You'll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn't possible, or you simply can't be bothered, then I rest my case.
     I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

     Dad

St. Petersburg judge throws out suit against Madonna

Madonna in St Petersburg last August. Photo: Olga Maltseva/AP

The Guardian reports that a $10.7 million lawsuit brought against Madonna by various reactionary groups for her support of Pussy Riot and gay rights during a St. Petersburg concert has been tossed out by Judge Vitaly Barkovsky, who deliberated for more than an hour following a day-long hearing not attended by the Material Girl.
     He "appeared to treat the case with skepticism from the start. After one claimant, Vitaly Orlovsky, said Madonna's concert would prompt the divorce rate to skyrocket, Barkovsky asked him why he was suing no alcoholics, since alcoholism was a well-known cause of divorce in the heavy-drinking country."
     One senior official called Madonna a "moralizing slut" (which is kinda true). Among other things which are not at all true, the plaintiffs argued that Madonna's performance would adversely affect Russia's birthrate and therefore its ability to maintain a proper army and would therefore lead to the destruction of the nation.

William Shatner demonstrates how not to fry a turkey

"Hot oil, wet frozen turkey pushed together make steam, pushing the hot oil over the top and igniting the open flame. DON'T DO THAT!"