Ole Miss freshman football players so abusive during Laramie Project performance that play's director had to call athletic department honcho to auditorium

Ensign Beedrill, Flickr

About 20 freshman Ole Miss football players, attending a student production of The Laramie Project, about the death of Matthew Shepard, were the ringleaders of disruptive hecking of the cast, according to Adam Banucheau, of the Daily Mississippian.

     According to the play’s director and theater faculty member Rory Ledbetter, some audience members used derogatory slurs like “fag” and heckled both cast members and the characters they were portraying for their body types and sexual orientations. Ledbetter said the audience’s reactions included “borderline hate speech.”
     ...The play’s House Director Lyda Phillips, who is a theater major and an athletics ambassador, became aware of the reactions of the football players and called a coach, who then called department of athletics Associate Director of Academic Support Drew Clinton to come to the auditorium, according to the theater department’s performance report.
     “The football players were certainly not the only audience members that were being offensive last night,” Ledbetter said. “But they were definitely the ones who seemed to initiate others in the audience to say things, too. It seemed like they didn’t know that they were representing the university when they were doing these things.”

     ...“The football players were asked by the athletics department to apologize to the cast,” Ole Miss Theatre Department Chair Rene Pulliam said. “However, I’m not sure the players truly understood what they were apologizing for.”
     The football players’ apology, which was given by one undisclosed football player on behalf of the entire group, caused two cast members to cry.
     ...The play ran Thursday through Sunday last week, and no incident like Tuesday’s occurred.

From USA Today:

     ...Michael Barnett, assistant chair of theater arts at the school and also chair of the Ole Miss faculty senate, said by phone Wednesday that athletes from other sports including men's basketball, baseball, golf and track were also in attendance.
     ...Garrison Gibbons, a 20-year old acting major at Ole Miss who was in the play, said by phone Thursday the atmosphere at Tuesday's performance was "radically different" from other performances and that actors had heard gay slurs from the audience and laughter at moments in the play that weren't intended to be funny, including a funeral scene.
     ...He said the cast was later told after the play's second act that the group of football players in the audience were going to apologize after the show.     The cast, however, did not believe the apology was sincere, Gibbons said.
     "One spoke up and said they were sorry and didn't mean to hurt our feelings," Gibbons said.
     "Another said they found humor in the play and then they were gone and the academic advisor who was with them basically said they had never been to a play before and didn't know what to expect."

     AKSARBENT thinks that Ole Miss athletes who yelled fag or faggot should flunk the class, not allowed to enter the college theater again, and instead of a theater appreciation class, be compelled to take a calculus class as many times as it takes them to pass.

Google's Austin gigabit Internet service rollout is challenged by AT&T

In Kansas City, winner of Google's somewhat demeaning Queen for a Day city contest, the search giant remains the only game in town for ultrafast surfing and downloading. Here in Omaha, CenturyLink has announced 1 gig internet; so far Cox has not responded.

Two more GOP Reps who won't answer a yes/no question about their government shutdown

ThinkProgress, which uploaded the video, has the transcript. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) seems firmly, intractably on message and dismissive of the implied obligation to answer the damned questions, which we thought was an implicit imperative for participating in a televised interview, but Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) seems oddly jovial and unfocused. Hmmmm.

Live mic catches Sen. Rand Paul plotting GOP spin on government shutdown

Texas GOP Rep. Neugebauer, who helped shut down federal government, tells Park Service employee she should be ashamed of herself

Antigay marriage: two Nebraska groups that killed Lincoln's LGBT fairness ordinance have merged; first order of business: attacking transgendered children

Left to right: Dave Bydalek – Policy Director, Karen Bowling – Outreach and Operations Director, Hallie Ewing – Communication and Office Coordinator, Hannah Buell – Policy Research and Intern Coordinator, Al Riskowski – Executive Director (Via Nebraska Family Alliance Website)

     The Nebraska Family Council has merged with Family First of Nebraska (an affiliate of the Family Research Council) to form the Nebraska Family Alliance.
     In the spring of 2012, after the Lincoln, Nebraska City Council passed a gay rights addition to the city's nondiscrimination ordinance, the Nebraska Family Council and Family First gathered 10,000 signatures to nullify the ordinance.
     The first order of business of the new organization is an attack on transgendered children — an appeal to oppose adoption of a proposed transgender participation policy by the Nebraska School Activities association.
     The Nebraska Family Alliance says it "will be the state affiliate for Focus on the Family and work with Citizen Link, Alliance Defending Freedom, and other national organizations to bring national expertise to our local issues."
     The Nebraska Family Alliance's partner, Alliance Defending Freedom, was known as the Alliance Defense Fund when it ran the following false, gutter-level attack on the ACLU. You can't appreciate the depth of ADF's amoral chicanery until you see what the ACLU was really doing, here.
     Ironically, it was Lisa Biron, a member of the ADF's "Honor Corps Society," who, last spring, was convicted of eight counts related to child pornography.
 
 
     Dave Bydalek, the Executive Director of Family First, who worked as an attorney in the Nebraska's Governor's and Attorney General's offices, will become the new organization's Policy Director and plans to become "even more involved in the legislative process."
    Below, Bydalek testifies against gay-inclusive adoption reform in Nebraska by citing the discredited University of Texas Regnerus Study (just after the 3:00 mark) to a properly skeptical Brad Ashford, Judicial Committee Chairman.
     The scholarly merit of the laughable Regnerus Study has been questioned by 200 PhDs and MDs; it was concocted to influence the gay marriage debate when it reached the Supreme Court and it was called "bullshit" by an editor of the very journal that published it, Darren E. Sherkat, who was assigned to audit the study after the uproar it caused.
     The prestigious American Sociological Association ripped apart the junk science of the Regnerus "research" in a Supreme Court brief opposing the upholding of California's Prop 8 (on pages 15-22, which you may read here.)
 


     In 2012, Hannah Buell, the new Policy Research and Intern Coordinator of the Nebraska Family Alliance, blatently lied to the Lincoln City Council, which was then considering an LGBT fairness ordinance, by falsely claiming that the University of Toledo's Vice President of Human Resources, Crystal Dixon, "was fired for exercising her first amendment rights to write a column to a newspaper and in that column she was writing as a private citizen, but she expressed disagreement with a bill, an ordinance similar to this and expressed her disagreement in that form. She was fired for this."

Hannah Buell giving false testimony to
Lincoln City Council against LGBT antibias
ordinance in 2012

     Contrary to Hannah Buell's untruthful testimony to the Lincoln City Council, Dixon's letter did NOT mention any LGBT ordinances at all — either similar or dissimilar to the one under consideration by Lincoln's City Council. The letter that Buell misrepresented is still on the Toledo Free Press's website.

     Here are the rulings in Dixon's case — she was hardly the martyr Hannah Buell made her out to be:

     When her lawsuit went to court, U.S. District Judge David Katz ruled against her and dismissed the case.
     "The balance of [Dixon’s] interest in making a comment of public concern is clearly outweighed by the University’s interest as her employer in carrying out its own objectives," the judge wrote in an opinion. "Therefore, [Dixon] has failed to establish that her speech was protected. [Dixon] also claims that she was fired for violating an impermissibly vague speech policy. However, the damage she did to her ability to perform her job and to the University provide ample justification for her termination."
     After appealing Katz’s ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled on Monday that Dixon’s column "contradicted the very policies she was charged with creating, promoting, and enforcing," and her defense of being a private citizen does not excuse her from her remarks against LGBT rights. The panel supported Katz’s decision and dismissed the case once again.

The new group is appealing for new donations to cover the $20,000 cost of office remodeling, merging databases, launching a new website and sending out announcements. Presumably not much was spent on the new logo.

Barilla raked by Daily Show and Conan O'Brien

Universal closes Focus Features, art house division which made Brokeback Mountain, Milk

From Band of Thebes:

     Hideous news for art house lovers: In a terrible corporate reorg, Universal has folded the gay-friendly powerhouse Focus Features into the commercial unit Film District and replaced arty James Schamus with ex-Sony exec Peter Schlessel...
     Film District began releasing crap in April 2011. Their six most recent are: Insidious 2, Evil Dead, Olympus Has Fallen, Dead Man Down, Parker, and the rom-com flop Playing for Keeps. They did release Drive, Looper, and Safety Not Guaranteed but nothing smart since 2012 and nothing gay, ever.
     Of course Schamus oversaw the degayed ad campaigns for Brokeback and Milk then ludicrously denied they were degayed, but that seems minor compared to today's annihilation.

     Below, the remarkable scene from Focus Films' Taking Woodstock (a big subplot is the protagonist's coming-out journey) in which Elliot Tiber goes into a VW Microbus with a girl and a bisexual dude, and comes out... a hippie!



From YouTube description of the video above:

     Tiber is gay, and he lived what he describes as a double life, pretending to be straight during his weekends helping his parents in Bethel, while living an openly gay life in New York City. The book describes the difficulties and traumas experienced by gays in the 1950s and 1960s. He describes being beaten up and robbed by youths who targeted him because of his homosexuality. He also describes encounters with celebrities, including Marlon Brando, Wally Cox, Rock Hudson, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Hudson is described as lying nude and comatose at an upscale party, where he was subjected to sexual acts by guests.
     The book describes how the El Monaco became the headquarters for the Woodstock organizers, and how Tiber became the exclusive ticket agent for the festival and held a press conference at the motel. He describes in detail the strong opposition to the festival from local residents, some of whom created a human wall to try to stop young people from coming to the festival.
     Tiber claims in the book that he was approached on several occasions by underworld characters, some of whom made threats, and that he and his parents had to physically fend them off, with the help of a transvestite named Velma (see below.) He also describes rowing out into the middle of White Lake, near the festival site, to pay off underworld characters.

Breaking Bad: Right move, wrong actor

We already knew that Bryan Cranston (Walter White on Breaking Bad) shot Aaron Paul (Jesse) with a dildo-shaped squirtgun on the set of the show (in the gag reel, here) but we didn't know this:

Above graphic

Fox website now calling Gov't shutdown a 'slimdown'

All of the sudden all the stories on Fox News' website have begun to refer to the government shutdown as a government "slimdown." Why it's almost as if some evil puppetmaster with subconscious weight issues were directing Fox's "journalists" to become propagandists.

Are German Olympic uniforms a sly dig at officially-sanctioned Russian homophobia?

The German Olympic Sports Confederation protests that "the uniforms are not a protest," maintaining that designs were approved before Russia protests had even begun. But the official description, reported Spiegel, claims the outfits "were created using colors and materials specially tailored to the conditions in Sochi."
(Via Towleroad)

Chilean horse hung up on cute cameraman

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Draft dodging Rep. Steve King shows up at barricaded WWII memorial that he helped shut down — for a photo op with vets; Michele Bachmann piles on

If you think there is a floor to the level of hypocrisy to which Iowa Rep. Steve King and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann will stoop, then watch the video below, in which the Bachmann and King, who dodged the Vietnam draft for years, alternately blame Democrats and the government for the consequences of their shutdown of the federal government. (Unrelated but impressive: runner at 00:51.)

Maddow: GOP candidates doing exactly what they promised voters — burning the place down

Andrew Sullivan on the shennanigans of Deb Fischer and the GOP

How does one party that has lost two presidential elections and a Supreme Court case – as well as two Senate elections - think it has the right to shut down the entire government and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury to get its way on universal healthcare now? I see no quid pro quo even. Just pure blackmail, resting on under­standable and predictable public concern whenever a major reform is enacted. But what has to be resisted is any idea that this is government or politics as usual. It is an attack on the governance and the constitutional order of the United States. — Andrew Sullivan

USOC claims it's not muzzling figure skaters on antiLGBT law in Russia, even though only one dared take a position on the issue this week

Despite the fact that the USOC has failed to secure guarantees by ALL relevant authorities in Russia that U.S. athletes can speak freely about that country's draconian antiLGBT laws, and despite threats by the IOC that LGBT athletes who self-identify (with, for example, multi-colored fingernail polish) will be subject to Olympic sanctions, the USOC continues to pretend that it places interests of U.S. athletes first:

"I want to make it very clear that we have not asked our athletes not to speak up," USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said Tuesday at the Team USA Media Summit in Park City, Utah on Tuesday.
     ...Blackmun said that while they won't ask athletes to muzzle themselves, they are "making sure our athletes are aware of the law and aware of the possibility of the consequences. Because it's our job, first and foremost, to keep them safe while they're in Russia."
     So what would happen to an Olympic athlete if he or she decides to publicly denounce Russia's anti-gay law during the Sochi Games? The USOC doesn't know.
     Blackmun said the USOC is "actively" trying to gain clarity on what action would be taken by the Russians if [skier Bode] Miller or any other U.S. athlete speaks out. On Monday, Miller called Russia's anti-gay law "embarrassing" and "ignorant."

Lee Terry again plays constituents for fools

Terry voted to strip Obamacare from the continuing resolution, knowing the Senate would reject it and knowing that his action would help shut down the government, yet claimed he tried to "keep government open." Above is the doublespeak lie, directly from the source's taxpayer-funded website.


A giddy, exuberant Lee Terry exits closed-door Republican meeting Saturday, 9/28/2013, in which GOP representatives decided to vote for a government shutdown.

Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied. [snip] This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come."

— Andrew Sullivan

GOP shutdown by Lee Terry and friends could cost you big even if you're not furloughed

Estimates are predicated on '95-'96 realities; a shutdown today would be worse.

How GOP gerrymandering subverts democracy and breeds extremism in Republican Party

Gerrymandering is redistricting by manipulating boundaries to ensure a safe seat for a particular party. This amazing chart says it all. Look at votes cast vs. seats won.

San Francisco's Nebraska bar: Final Final

Image: Google

We at AKSARBENT were aware that Doug Simmons, an Omaha boy, wrote for and then edited New York's (and the nation's) premiere alternative weekly, the Village Voice, but were not aware that its San Francisco counterpart was also directly tied to Nebraska.
     Bruce Brugmann, an NU alumnus who was sports editor of the Rag (Daily Nebraskan) and is now editor-at-large of the [San Francisco] Bay Guardian, which he cofounded with his wife, Jean Dibble, reminisced recently in his blog about NU football before Devaney and Osborne, and then introduced his readers to the Nebraska hangout in San Francisco, Final Final (yes, it's a sports bar) across from the Presidio.

The bar is real Nebraska. It is owned by Arnie Prien, who comes from Lyons, Nebraska, and graduated from the university in 1964.  He has been running Final Final for the past 36 years and loyally broadcasts Nebraska football games every Saturday on his premier giant screen.

     Although the post did not mention gay sports fans (gays are assumed to be part of everything in San Francisco, so no need) the ensuing comments immediately focused on whether or not college sports are sexist and homophobic, whether gays should be sheeple beholden to sports hegemony in America, whether gays return the bonhomie of sports-minded straights, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
     We remember reading a long time ago that whenever two cars crashed in Rome (a not uncommon occurrence) the scene immediately became a shouting match between drivers, and soon, of opposing groups of Christian Democrats and Communists.
     The comments to Brugmann's piece reminded us of that. Below, a sample. (Disclaimer: AKSARBENT thinks that paragraph 1 is a generalization and doesn't quite buy the "nonwhite" premise, doesn't know if graf 2 is true or not, but totally agrees with 3, 4 and 5.)

The most bigoted groups are often subgroups of minorities.

     Blacks and hispanics hate each other, but reserve special venom for asians for proving that being non-whites isn't a disadvantage.
     In the transgender community, the M2F postops look down on the M2F preops, and refuse to share the same bathroom with them.
     Progressives routinely splinter into factions that hate each other more than they hate conservatives.
     And in gay bars, the femme guys who hate sports evidently look down on the butch guys who like sports.
     The idea that San Francisco is tolerant is a myth. San Francisco is tribal and you hate anyone not in your tribe.

 Hey, if you can't get to Rome, try Baghdad by the Bay!

U.S. figure skaters Gracie Gold and Evan Lysacek refuse to criticize Russian antiLGBT law; only Ashley Wagner speaks up

If Vlad Putin didn't intimidate U.S. figure skaters, the IOC and the USOC certainly did.
     In Park City, Utah, today, skaters at the U.S. Olympic Committee media summit were asked about the draconian antiLGBT legislation recently passed in Russia.
     Only one of the three skaters quoted by the L.A. Times supported LGBTs: Ashley Wagner, who said, mildly: "For me, [the law] is not something I personally agree with."
     Lysacek and Gold punted without uttering a syllable of support for LGBT athletes.
     Perhaps Gold and Lysacek are a) homophobic, b) apathetic, c) compliant tools of the IOC and/or USOC or d) worried that Russian figure skating judges may already be starting to keep score.

David Mixner: NJ Gov. Christie a 'total coward' on marriage equality

Photo via
DavidMixner.com

Mixner, a political strategist and civil rights activist of long standing, did not hide his disdain for the gap between Christie's claimed fealty to the will of the people of New Jersey in respect of voting on gay civil rights and his contradictory willingness to override that will, as measured in public opinion polling, via the exercise of his veto power. 

     He has already vetoed marriage equality once after it had passed the state legislature. The polls show that the people of New Jersey want marriage equality by two to one margin. Those number have been consistent for months.
     Christie's leadership? He wants a ballot issue that will cost millions and millions of dollars, divide the state and allow voters to vote on the rights of other Americans. He has been a total coward on this issue.

Warren Buffett tweets a photo of himself as Walter White, but no meth dealer ever took $802,000,000 from the tax base of a town of 40,000

Warren Buffett just tweeted a picture of himself in Walter White drag, but not even the most ruthless of meth dealers ever accomplished what his Berkshire Hathaway (HRC score: zero) unit, Nebraska Furniture Mart, did earlier this year when it wrangled economic incentives approaching a billion dollars from a small city near Dallas, The Colony, in exchange for building one new store.
     According to Matthew Watkins of the Dallas Morning News, $802 million in economic incentives is 15 times the city's annual budget; roads, utility upgrades and a parking garage by themselves will run $291 million.
     NFM also will get up to $261 million to offset some of the store's building expenses. This despite the fact that retail jobs are some of the worst paying. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, wonders why a city should subsidize retail and "give away your tax base for years," since "retail will take care of itself."
     Which means that stores always follow growing populations, with or without incentives.

     NFM has promised to employ about 2,000 people, but only 850 will be full-time jobs.
     Robert Bland, chairman of the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas, wondered about incentives punishing previously existing businesses which have paid their full share of taxes and will now be gaining a major competitor.

Breaking Bad, tragic story of small businessman crushed by Obamacare, draws to a close

Guess Lee Terry was right and AKSARBENT was wrong!

Mother Jones: 'Corporate farming' barely exists

Photo: Alan Light via Flickr

Very few farms are actually owned by agribusiness behemoths, but that doesn't mean the corporate giants aren't calling the tune to which farmers must dance:

     ...Why is the perception of "corporate farming" so widespread when actually almost all of the country's food is being grown or raised by family-owned operations?
     It might have something to do with the fact that corporate agribusiness is indeed very real—it's just that it has carved out the most profitable parts of food production for itself, while leaving the dirty, uncertain work of farming for others.
     The reality is that farming itself is generally a terrible business. There's much more—and much easier—money to be made by selling farmers the raw materials of their trade—like seeds, fertilizer, or livestock feed. And there's also plenty of money in buying farmers' output cheap (say, corn or hogs) and selling it dear (as, say, pork chops or high-fructose corn syrup). In his excellent 2004 book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, Richard Manning pungently describes the situation:

A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.

Tomorrow, in Mother Jones, Tom Philpott will explain "just how tough it is for farmers caught between the huge corporate suppliers and the huge corporate buyers."

Google this, you AstraZeneca/Proctor and Gamble/Prilosec whore

Please don't misinterpret us. We like Lincoln, NE (area) resident Dan Whitney (a.k.a. Larry the Cable Guy) a lot, except for the fact that he is a crass, vulgar sexist who recycles rancid, moldy jokes because no original thought could flourish inside his arid, rock-strewn skull. No one is perfect and we're not here to judge.

How Fox News makes you more ignorant: Obamacare edition

(Via JoeMyGod)

The Last Three Minutes

Serbia caves to antigay thugs for third year in a row

The Serbian government has banned (after first approving it) a gay pride parade for the third consecutive year, blaming threats from right-wing groups, but insisting, in the words of the country's deputy prime minister Aleksander Vucic, that "hooligans have not defeated the state."
     EU envoy for Serbia Jelko Kacin says it was the "wrong decision at a wrong time."
     After learning of the ban, hundreds of proLGBT Serbians marched on the office of the country's prime minister.

Straight Jersey boy, Joe Leone, gives Barilla the boot; pasta la vista, after 20 years, over CEO's LGBT insult

Joe Leone

What stronzo Guido Barilla doesn't understand: it's not the 2-4% of LGBTs you have to worry about, it's all their friends and relatives. To whit:

     ...Leone, the owner of Italian specialty shops in Point Pleasant Beach and Sea Girt, vowed on Friday to cut ties with the Italy-based company after a two-decade relationship. Leone has a wife, but said he has friends and employees who are homosexual.
      So when Barilla’s pasta baron, Guido Barilla, said in a television interview that a same-sex family does not represent his idea of a “classic” family, Leone took umbrage.
     “We are a family here at Joe Leone’s,” he said. “I feel that our family is attacked.”
     A longtime member on the board of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, Leone said he would donate the remaining 200 pounds of Barilla pasta he had in stock to the food bank and then sever his relationship with Barilla. He spends roughly $40,000 a year importing several types of Barilla pasta, he said. Between his two shops and his catering business, he runs through about 20,000 pounds of pasta from a dozen purveyors, he said.