Pope blesses Rebecca Kadaga, who urged passage of death-to-gays Uganda legislation

Via JoeMyGod, which has posted about Uganda's
parliament speaker here and here.

Iowa mother arrested for egging on son in YouTube fight video

From WOWT: The mother, 31-year-old Alisha Hazen of Council Bluffs, seen in the below YouTube video apparently encouraging her son to fight was arrested Thursday on charges of felony child endangerment, assault, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The video is now police evidence.

Three weeks ago, a seventh-grader and an eighth-grader outside Kreft Primary School in the Lewis Central District fought each other while a number of children watched. No one can understand why the mother stood by and even seemed to get a punch in herself.

The secret of Tom Osborne's coaching success

To paraphrase Antonin Scalia: Deadpan. Deadpan. Deadpan. Deadpan.

Marriage Equality: justice delayed, justice denied

John Singer, top left, and Paul Barwick tried to get a King County, Washington marriage license on Sept. 20, 1971. They were turned down and lost subsequent court battles. Singer, who was 26 at the time, died of cancer in 2000. Barwick, who was 24, now lives in San Francisco. Forty-one years later, in the same building, Terry Miller, (bottom left) and Dan Savage were granted their marriage license.
     On May 18, 1970, Mike McConnell (center left) and Jack Baker were refused a Minnesota marriage license in Hennepin County. Both still live together in Minneapolis. Baker became the first gay student body president of a major American University and the first Minnesota Student Association president to be reelected. Baker, a lawyer, later arranged for his boyfriend to adopt him, establishing a legal relationship and decades of tax deductions. He also got a marriage license in a second attempt, but Minnesota refused to honor it, although it was never revoked. Baker and McConnell appeared at a "Time Out" conference on human sexuality at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1972, ruffling the feathers of several university regents and a state senator.
     They were good at tag teaming a crowd. AKSARBENT saw them in Lincoln and remembers Baker railing against the sexual stereotyping exemplified by icons like the Marlboro Man, at which point his boyfriend, on cue, pulled a pack of said brand out of his shirt pocket and waved them at the crowd, smiling broadly. This got a big laugh from more than a few future pig farmers in the student union who evidently had not considered the reality that such manly cigarettes were also smoked by homos.
     (In those days, you could light up in the Student Union. Lots of people even did so in class, despite "no smoking" signs because, hey, the professors did!)
     Photos: top, Tom Barlet, Seattle Post-Intelligencer; middle, R. Bertraine Heine/Associated Press, bottom, Nate Gowdy, Seattle Gay News

Joy Behar incisively asks Downton Abbey footman, Rob James-Collier: 'What's the difference between kissing a man and a woman?'

Uh, whiskerburn, Joy? Behar assured actor James-Collier that all the View women wanted to know, at which point Octogenarian Barbara Walters said: "I don't." Rob James-Collier plays gay footman Thomas Barrow on the wildly popular non-BBC British series which airs on PBS in the US.

HRC, nation's biggest LGBT organization, rates Omaha and Lincoln — both got flunking grades

Well, the scoring isn't a numerical pass/fail, but still...
     Progressive Oasis alerted us to the newest Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equality Index rankings of how LGBT-friendly various cities are:

The Omaha index has some oddities, for example, the city has bonus points for supposedly having  openly LGBT city leadership elected or appointed with a +3.  Omaha’s overall score is a 59, still very low.  Omaha has no openly LGBT leadership, although one of its suburbs does.

Lincoln only scored 34. A small gripe: HRC, which apparently uses two-letter postal abbreviations to identify states in its report, is apparently unaware that Nebraska's is NE, not NB.

Makeup salesman got customer away from Portland shooter — then went back twice to help others

ABC reports than Allen Fonseca, a Macy's employee who worked at the Lancome counter at the Clackamas Town Center mall used his knowledge of the shopping complex to hustle a customer out of the building during Tuesday's shooting rampage and then twice went back inside to guide other shoppers to exits and safety. 



"I felt that if I knew how to get out of the mall and out to safety then I should share that knowledge with everyone else, like the shoppers that don't come here regularly and don't know all of the exits," he said. "So I decided to go back up because I wanted to see if there was anybody in panic or didn't know where to do."
      Fonseca returned to the mall and evacuated the lower level of the Macy's store, and then went back up to the "shooting floor" to look for his co-workers. Lay says she's not sure she would have done if he hadn't been there to get her out of harm's way.

Gay Princeton law student who questioned Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on his inflammatory, insulting antigay rhetoric is interviewed on MSNBC

Moderator Alex Wagner watched as George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley lit into Scalia's remarks:

Scalia has a history, first of all, of making public statements that many of us find very difficult to square with judicial codes of conduct. You know, many judges don't make speeches at all on subjects related to pending cases. The court has two pending cases and he just spoke again about one of the court issues in those cases. He's done that before. It is very troubling. At one time, a chief justice would call him up and say, 'Look, you know, you're in an exclusive club here, and the price of the ticket is — stop making these speeches,' because there's an appearance that he's maintaining a base: his own constituency...
     What's more troubling, and I really want to commend Duncan. He's a remarkable student and represents his university well and represents, frankly, all of us well... But what Justice Scalia was talking about did succeed in reducing this to the absurd... He talks about what's often called the 'slippery slope,' — that if you don't let legislatures declare things immoral, all these things will happen. But he's the one on the slippery slope. Because if you allow the majority to simply declare anything they want to be immoral, you go back to Loving v. Virginia, when they criminalized mixed marriages. That's what you get when the majority can simply criminalize what they consider to be immoral.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post ripped Scalia yesterday, too:

The court’s decision to take up a pair of gay-marriage cases is almost certainly good news for gay rights and almost certainly bad news for Scalia’s defense of discrimination. Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t let his court stand in the way of immigration and Obamacare, and he surely doesn’t want to be responsible for a modern-day Plessy v. Ferguson that stands against the fast-emerging majority in support of gay rights.
     ...This puts Nino in a tough spot. When he stood in the schoolhouse door a decade ago in his dissent in the sodomy case, he wrote: “Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means...” Now gay-rights supporters have done just that. If Scalia is to honor his own principle, he’ll vote to strike down DOMA...But don’t count on it.
     ...His 2003 dissent in the sodomy case was typical of his extra-legal logic. He accused his colleagues of signing on to “the so-called homosexual agenda” and taking “sides in the culture war”...
     A practiced cultural warrior himself, Scalia wrote that laws “called into question” by the court striking down the sodomy ban were “laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity.”
     ...A decade later, ...support for gay marriage has spread by the very means — democratic change — that Scalia praised
     ...Scalia finds himself with a growing list of foes: public opinion, empirical evidence, his own writings and an increasing number of conservative legal thinkers. Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a Republican appointee and a conservative, wrote in an opinion striking down DOMA that “the Constitution delegated no authority to the government of the United States on the subject of marriage.”
     This would appeal to an “originalist” such as Scalia — if he weren’t more concerned with bestiality.

Uruguay's Marriage Equality law also wholesale revision of hetero marriage rules; surname rule changes more controversial than gay marriage; some disagreements to be decided by coin toss

Yesterday, Uruguay's lower house voted 81-6 with 12 absentees for a sweeping reform of the country's marriage law with changes affecting adoption and divorce issues.
     Pablo Fernandez in Montevideo, Uruguay and Michael Warren in Buenos Aires reveal far-reaching effects of the law that have nothing to do with same sex marriage.
     The new law, backed by the Broad Front Party (which has decisive majorities in both Uruguayan houses), was passed by Uruguay's lower house Tuesday, makes the country the second in Latin America, after Argentina, and the 12th in the world to legalize gay marriage.
     The measure also clarifies rules for adoption and in-vitro fertilization, and substitutes the gender neutral "contrayentes" (contracting parties) in place of the words "marido y mujer" (husband and woman) in marriage contracts.

     Other changes:

• Couples, gay or straight, can decide whose surname goes first when they name their children. (For centuries in Latin America, laws have required people to give their children two names, with the father's first.) If they can't decide, the proposed law says a "sorteo," such as the flip of a coin, in the civil registry office should decide the issue. (In neighboring Argentina, heteros must put the paternal name first and homo surnames are in alphabetical order.)
• men, as well as women, may now renounce their vows without cause. (The women-only divorce option was a stipulation of Uruguay's 1912 divorce law to equalize options for women since, at the time, men usually held most of the economic and social power in marriages
• A child registered by a single parent would that that parent's name as a first surname
• One whose parents are unknown altogether would be given "two commonly used names" selected by the civil registry office

Predictable opposition by the Roman Catholic Church didn't matter much, as that church has little political influence in secular Uruguay.
     Naming changes seemed to have caused more committee discord than extending marriage to same sex couples.

Where Desperate Housewives episode titles came from

Every one is taken from the lyrics of a song from a Stephen Sondheim musical. Naturally there's a web site which quizzes you on this. Here are the first eight to get you started.

Betty Bowers covers War on Christmas; Reason for the season? A Christer lie to co-opt Pagan festivals

Remember that "the reason for the season" is an opportunistic lie, concocted by Christers, who, after centuries of ignoring Christ's dubiously-supported birth, decided to co-opt Pagan Winter Solstice rituals by declaring it to have taken place in the dead of winter, December 25th, despite biblical descriptions which rule out any time outside spring-to-early-fall.
(Via JMG)

NYT doesn't show up for Bradley Manning trial in Kansas until day nine; gets ripped by own columnist

Pubic Editor Margaret Sullivan is perplexed:

...it goes to the heart of contentious media issues in which The New York Times has played an important role, publishing much information revealed through Private Manning’s act.
     Why did readers of The Times have to turn to Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, or to one of the great number of other news organizations that sent reporters, to hear Private Manning tell of the Mordor into which he had been drawn — where he had to stand naked, in chains, in the “maximum custody” brig at Quantico, Va., imploring his prison guards for something as simple as toilet paper, or, earlier, in a “cage” in Kuwait?
     The newspaper’s absence was noticed, and criticized, by many media watchers. Beyond the story itself, The Times, which considers itself the paper of record, had an obligation to be there — to bear witness — because, in a very real sense, Private Manning was one of its most important sources of the past decade.
     “The New York Times got amazing, fantastic, unparalleled material for news stories from Bradley Manning,” Mr. Ellsberg told The New Republic’s Eliza Gray.

White House to implement black box law requiring all cars to spy on you by 2015. (You may already be driving one)

This was tucked into Senate bill 1813, reauthorizing highway funds (as was an unrelated provision, authored by Barbara Boxer, to allow the IRS sweeping new powers to have passports denied or revoked.) 
     Insurance companies love this "Event Data Recorder" law and lobbied for it. Their agenda: Contributory negligence on the part of victims! Reduced awards! Less liability for us!
     Scenario: Say you're paralyzed by a drunk driver who headbutted your vehicle while you were stopped at a light and sent your skull through the windshield. (We'll assume the airbag didn't deploy, which happens more than you think.)
    Drunk's insurance company could subpoena the black box info in your vehicle, find out you weren't wearing a seat belt while stopped at the light, and then argue "contributory negligence" on your part, reducing your damages by, say, a fifth. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 15 states do allow reduced damages for seat belt “nonuse.”
     There are many, many other ways that the insurance companies of drivers who injure you could use black box information in YOUR car/truck against you to reduce your compensation and their liability.




From Fox:

It's extremely difficult for car owners to disable the recorders. Although some vehicle models have had recorders since the early 1990s, a federal requirement that automakers disclose their existence in owner's manuals didn't go into effect until three months ago. Automakers who voluntarily put recorders in vehicles are also now required to gather a minimum of 15 types of data.
     Besides the upcoming proposal to put recorders in all new vehicles, the traffic safety administration is also considering expanding the data requirement to include as many as 30 additional types of data such as whether the vehicle's electronic stability control was engaged, the driver's seat position or whether the front-seat passenger was belted in. Some manufacturers already are collecting the information. Engineers have identified more than 80 data points that might be useful.

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