James Dean, yawning

Just being a brat during a production test for Rebel Without A Cause, which Warner Bros. started filming in black and white, but restarted in color when outsized box office receipts for East of Eden started to pour in, largely on the strength of Dean's sudden popularity.

Vlad Putin daydreams about his happy place

(Via GAYSTARNEWS)

Shorts: $40 PC; Joe Manganiello's ex-roommate tells on him; NSA workers use databases agency vacuumed to spy on ex-lovers; 8 celebrities in Barilla's cookbook; proposed MN mine will need water treatments for 500 years

Interesting friendships

Joe Manganiello's former college roommate, Matt Bomer, makes an enigmatic comment about the actor's endowment which may or may not be ironic

Internal NSA bulletin reveals agency started digesting 1.8 BILLION phone records per DAY in 2011, as well as bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, GPS location information, property records and unspecified tax data

Related: The NSA sends Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley the titillating details he requested of 12 NSA agents disciplined for spying on romantic interests instead of terrorists

Seven operating systems you can use to power the Rasberry Pi, a $40, credit-card-sized computer manufactured for a nonprofit by Sony

Seven weirdest Obamacare conspiracy theories. We smell under-the-radar dirty politics payoffs by the usual suspects

These celebrities were featured in a Barilla cookbook: Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Jimmy Fallon, James Denton, Mariska Hargitay, Martina McBride, Holly Robinson Peete, Kristin Chenowith

Robert Redford was the special guest of Equality Utah's Allies Dinner



Whatsapp seems to be a popular platform for Russians to post rape/beatings of LGBTs

Average sodium in restaurant meal has hardly budged; still 1500 milligrams

Russian expert kicks back at Lawrence O'Donnell, who "O'Reilly'd" at her on his MSNBC show

Proposed Minnesota copper/nickel mine would require billions in water treatment for next 500 years, longer than the company behind it is likely to exist. Example: When the Zortman-Landusky gold mine in Montana went bankrupt in 1999, the operator turned off its water treatment plant and left. Some financial assurance had been built into the project, but the state had underestimated the volume of water needing treatment, and state taxpayers had to create a $34 million trust fund to pay for it.

Why are people hating on Microsoft's new Surface 2 tablets? They do what other tablets don't

NYT's Frank Bruni goes to Pennsylvania to visit Mike Fleck, a real life Log Cabin Republican, whose recent self-outing might make a dent in his recent election record: 100% of the vote in his last three elections

New graph shows how the State Department's Keystone XL review was compromised from Day 1

Former South Carolina State Senator John Hawkins explains why he rues his successful effort to constitutionally ban same sex marriage

The hostility of GOP states to the poor, charted

Paul Waldman, writing in The American Prospect:

When all those Southern states decided to refuse the Medicaid expansion in order to shake their fist at Barack Obama, they screwed over their own poor citizens.

And not only Southern states as you can see below, in his illuminating chart. In the piece that you really should read in its entirely by clicking on the link above, Waldman adds:

In addition, in most states childless adults can't get Medicaid no matter how poor they are, but under the ACA it will no longer matter whether you have children. This is just one more way conservative states that forego the Medicaid expansion (for which the federal government is picking up almost the entire tab, by the way) are harming their own citizens.

Don't get mad, get even: Brian Sims edition

From out Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Sims's facebook page:

All day long I've been hearing about the Governor's comments earlier this morning comparing marriage equality to incest. In truth, I'm not giving him or his comments all that much thought and I encourage you to do the same.
     No one, not even his own party, would argue that he’s an intellectual heavyweight or even a particularly thoughtful person. The larger issue is that despite the fact that the majority of Pennsylvanians disagree with him, he continues to be the heaviest hitter in Pennsylvania’s anti-equality crusade.
     Our job isn’t just to be frustrated with the homophobia coming from the Governor’s Mansion, it’s to do everything we can to ensure that his chapter in Pennsylvania’s political history is as sad and short as his record on schools, economic development and civil rights.
     Tom Corbett has been a disaster for Pennsylvania for so many reasons and I hope this fuels your resolve to vote him out of office.

Nebraska Family Alliance raising funds by unscientific, fear-mongering attack on transgender kids

The first money-beg on the newly formed Nebraska Family Alliance's web site comes just above a ginned-up attack on transgender student athletes. Why do we say "ginned-up"? Well, their very first bullet point has no scientific validity, a point raised by Zack Ford in a piece that also demolished the other two rhetorical lynchpins of NFA's cynical, fund-raising distortion of the issue.

First, the claim of unfair advantages relies on a number of assumptions that paint an incomplete picture. A national report on transgender equality in scholastic athletics points out that this argument only applies to trans women (those born male), assumes that trans women are not “real” women, and leaves no room for trans women who have used hormone blockers to avoid the impact pubescent testosterone might have on their bodies. Further, research has found no evidence to suggest trans women actually have a competitive advantage:

It is also important to know that any athletic advantages a transgender girl or woman arguably may have as a result of her prior testosterone levels dissipate after about one year of estrogen therapy. According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender girl or woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is not supported by evidence. As one survey of the existing research concludes, “the data available does not appear to suggest that transitioned athletes would compete at an advantage or disadvantage as compared with physically born men and women.”

The Nebraska Family Alliance has published contact information for citizens to relay their concerns to the Nebraska School Activities Associations. Why not use their guide to relay your concerns about unscientific objections from right-wing pressure groups being used to create policies in Nebraska's public schools rather than the best available research?

Below: the Nebraska Family Alliance's new "team"

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 (Nebraska Family Alliance website)

Woman disowns son for being gay, so her father disowns her

Not only is Karma a bitch, sometimes it's immediate. (Some people are questioning the authenticity of the letter, if not its sentiment.)

Barilla thanks you for your support

Smokey the Bear makes shocking admission to Jon Stewart; he's been getting 'bear' work on Craigslist during government shutdown

Adobe hacked: information on 2.9 million customers compromised; company has known about breach since August

     Adobe is a firm AKSARBENT loves to hate and hopes it is majorly sued over this.
     No commercial software company of which we are aware makes its customers jump through more hoops to register its programs or makes transferring licenses more complicated or is more intrusive at requiring customers to surrender information about themselves.
     Evidently information about about 3,000,000 customers was taken from Adobe, including customer IDs, encrypted passwords, names, credit and debit card numbers, and other information.
     Obviously Adobe is far less careful with customer information as it is about preventing unauthorized use of its software.
     A couple years ago, AKSARBENT purchased a Premiere/Photoshop combo at Best Buy, only to discover that the number on the package wasn't really a serial number, just the beginning step of a scavenger hunt to access a real serial number based on the package number. Ugh.
     Said software shuts down direct uploads of videos to YouTube based on the length of the video, even though (in our case) YouTube long ago expanded our upload file size limit, allowing for videos that exceed Adobe's moronic, inflexible and outdated criteria, but the product, like John Boehner, offers no way out of the problem it created.
     Adobe stinks.

Update: KrebsOnSecurity reports that:

Adobe confirmed that the company believes that hackers accessed a source code repository sometime in mid-August 2013, after breaking into a portion of Adobe’s network that handled credit card transactions for customers.

     Krebs noted that it shared several screen shots of Adobe source code repositories with Adobe that it found on a server used by cyber criminals.

Adobe has now admitted that being confronted with outside knowledge of the breach “helped steer our investigation in a new direction.”

Yeah, we bet it did, but the story gets worse:

The revelations come just two days after KrebsOnSecurity published a story indicating that the same attackers apparently responsible for this breach were also involved in the intrusions into the networks of the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), a congressionally-funded non-profit organization that provides training, investigative support and research to agencies and entities involved in the prevention, investigation and prosecution of cybercrime. As noted in that story, the attackers appear to have initiated the intrusion into the NW3C using a set of attack tools that leveraged security vulnerabilities in Adobe’s ColdFusion Web application server.

     Adobe's ColdFusion security vulnerabilities were fixed "many months ago," but hey — why would the network of an agency aiding the prosecution of cybercrime bother to keep its application server software up to date to discourage cyber criminals from finding out what the feds were working on to arrest them?
     Expect yet another Acrobat reader security update.

Exporting homophobia: Right Wing Watch exposes NOM Chief Brian Brown's secret Moscow trip to lobby for law banning adoptions by gays

Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way, has exposed the National Organization for Marriage's undisclosed trip to lobby Russia's congress, DUMA, on behalf of a law banning adoptions by qualified LGBTs, even in the face of recently publicized horrific beatings in Russian orphanages.
     The law passed less than a week after Brown's visit. NOM did not disclose the trip, refused to respond to Right Wing Watch's inquiries or to provide a copy of the speech Brown gave to DUMA lawmakers.

     According to Russian news reports, the French activists and Brown attended two events in Moscow. One was a joint meeting on changes in international adoption laws with the Duma’s committee on foreign affairs and its committee on family, women and children – whose chair, Yelena Mizulina, authored the ban on gay “propaganda” and the adoption bill.
     The other event was a roundtable discussion on "Traditional Values: The Future of the European Peoples," hosted by the St. Basil the Great Foundation – a Catholic group run by Konstantin Malofeev, the head of a private equity group and spirited anti-gay activist – and also sponsored by the Duma’s family committee, the right-wing Center for Social-Conservative Policy, and a new multi-party group of Russian MPs formed, with approval of the Russian Orthodox Church, to “protect traditional Christian values” and fight “aggressive liberalism” inreaction to Pussy Riot’s protests. Among the measures pushed by the group was the new law imposing jail time for “insulting religious feelings.”

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.