When Ewan McGregor shut down George Stephanopoulos

Some years ago Stephanopolous shut down George Will when he defended the Ancient Order of Hibernia's refusal to let a gay contingent march in New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade because of their "agenda." Stephanopolous shot him a look and said, "Saying who you are is not an agenda, George." A couple years ago, Stephanapolous got a bit of his own when Ewan McGregor turned the tables on him, as seen in the YouTube clip below posted here and noticed on Reddit recently.

Second biggest US gun lobby, NSSF, is a couple miles from Sandy Hook school massacre, and isn't talking to press

Like the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting
Sports Foundation (lower left in this map of Newton, CT)
is stonewalling press inquiries about this week's assault
rifle massacre at nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School
(top right)

From Time:

The NSSF [National Shooting Sports Foundation] helps write firearms safety and instruction standards and promotes shooting sports, such as hunting, skeet and trap, and target shooting. But the organization is also a powerful lobby that advocates for specific positions on gun control issues. They have faced off against New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempts to crack down on guns in New York City, have made the case that banning high-capacity magazines is an ineffective policy and have published fact sheets arguing that the term “assault weapon” is an erroneous term for a semi-automatic modern sporting rifle.
“The term ‘assault weapon’ was conjured up by anti-gun legislators to scare voters into thinking these firearms are something out of a horror movie,” the NSSF wrote in its fact sheet. “In fact, the Colt AR-15 and Springfield M1A, both labeled ‘assault weapons,’ are the rifles most often used for marksmanship competitions in the United States. And their cartridges are standard hunting calibers, useful for game up to and including deer.”

Which senators voted to kill renewal of 2004 ban on assault weapons?

Which senators voted (90-8) to kill a renewal of the ban on high-capacity assault weapon clips that killed or wounded 70+ Batman fans in CO Springs? You'd be surprised. Lots of Democrats voted to kill renewing the ban on supersized clips and assault weapons, including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and Diane Feinstein.
     Background: on March 2, 2004, the US Senate voted down a bill (Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act) to protect gun makers from liability suits (which passed anyway in 2005 after the NRA took out some southern Democrats).
     The NRA's Wayne LaPierre lobbied to kill the 2004 bill because an amendment to renew a 1994 ban on assault weapons (and high capacity clips) was also in the bill.

Tea Party tool Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)
at CPAC Chicago

     Last weekend on Fox News Sunday, GOP Senator Ron Johnson, said that restricting high-capacity magazines would infringe on a basic right. “When you try and do it, you restrict our freedom,” he said.
    The following senators who voted 'nay' killed the 2004 bill to renew the 1994 ban on assault weapons and high capacity clips, both of which killed and maimed 70+ people at the Batman premiere in Aurora, CO:

Nebraska GOP: the NRA's staunchest patsies

Earlier this year, KETV aired a summary of GOP primary Senate candidates on gun control. Deb Fischer won the primary and the general election against former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey, who stood up to the NRA in the following ad during his second successful Senate campaign in 1994. This is one of several reasons why Nebraskans elected the wrong candidate for US Senate.

Lee Terry and Adrian Smith got a 92% from the NRA; Nebraska's assault rifle massacre enablers

Nebraska congressman Lee Terry (top left) and Adrian Smith (top right) with the type of
assault weapon (top centre) used to kill all 20 Sandy Hook children,
14 of whom you see above.

On December 5, 2007, before the Aurora, Colorado "Dark Knight" shootings and before last week's Sandy Hook grade school killings, but three days after the Omaha World-Herald gratuitously revisited the Charles Starkweather spree killings of 1958, Robert Hawkins took his dad's commercial copy of an AK-47 to Von Maur, in Omaha's Westroads Mall, and gunned down 13 people (eight of whom died) before shooting himself.
     You might think that another Nebraska massacre (this time with a military and not a hunting rifle or shotgun) might have given the state's congressional delegation pause about the 2004 lapse of the assault rifle ban. Nah. Here's what the Omaha World-Herald said at the time:

After the Westroads shootings, Nebraska Reps. Lee Terry, Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith, all Republicans, made speeches in the House to address the tragedy and offer condolences to the victims and their families. None said anything about changing gun laws.
     Smith said he opposes the assault weapons ban legislation because "gun control doesn't work." "Someone wishing to cause harm, if they can't acquire it (a gun) legally, they acquire it illegally," he said.
     Terry declined a request for an interview on the subject. He released a statement saying he had heard of "absolutely no plan" to debate the assault rifle ban.

Here's what Kyle Michaelis at New Nebraska Net said then, in a piece called The Politics Of Gun Control in a Post-Westroads Nebraska:

Mayor Fahey and Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren support reinstating a 10-year federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004...But not a single member of Nebraska's congressional delegation did.
     No doubt, what Lee Terry doesn't want to talk about is the role he's played over the last 9 years weakening our nation's gun control laws.  In particular, Terry probably doesn't want to answer questions about his relationship to the NRA. That shouldn't come as a surprise when, in 2004 - the year the Assault Weapons Ban lapsed in Congress - Terry was one of the top 20 recipients of the NRA's lucrative campaign contributions.  In fact, since he was first elected to Congress in 1998, Terry has taken more than $37,000 from the NRA. [Update: Terry has now taken almost $60,000 from the NRA and is currently #4 on their list of tools.]
     Meanwhile, Smith's pre-emptive pandering on this issue - ignorantly declaring that "gun control doesn't work" - probably rates him as even more contemptible.  The Westroads shooting has been Smith's first real opportunity to earn his keep as an NRA-lackey, and it seems he's more than risen to the occasion.   In just his first term in Congress, Smith has already taken $8,150 in NRA campaign contributions.  His eager reliance on outlandish right-wing talking points suggests Smith should be cashing-in in an even bigger way in no time.
     Of course, Terry and Smith may be the most culpable and the most offensive in their respective positions towards gun control, but the fact remains that Jeff Fortenberry, Chuck Hagel, and Ben Nelson have also taken substantial sums from the NRA and also stand opposed to renewing the assault weapons ban.

Gun nuts immediately blame gun control advocates for Connecticut mass killing of school kids

Larry Pratt in 2011

ThinkProgress published the statement by Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, blaming the death toll on gun regulations, arguing that had weapons been permitted on school grounds, the murders could have been avoided:

“Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones. The only thing accomplished by gun free zones is to insure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun.

 From Wikipedia:

In October 1992, at Estes Park, Colorado, Pratt addressed a three-day meeting of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity adherents organized by Pete Peters in the wake of the Ruby Ridge incident. Pratt shared the stage with Richard Butler and Louis Beam. In 1994, Pratt unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Nevada State Assembly as a Libertarian, winning 27% of the vote.
     In the 1996 U.S. presidential election, Pratt served as a co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's campaign. In February 1996, the liberal Center for Public Integrity issued a report that claimed Pratt spoke at meetings organized by white supremacist and militia leaders. Pratt denied any tie to racism, calling the report a smear aimed at hurting Buchanan before the New Hampshire primary election. However, Pratt was forced to resign his position with the Buchanan campaign

The seven countries in which atheists can be put to death — and the seven US states which prohibit them from holding office

Abbie Ohlheiser of Slate ticks off some interesting facts you might want to turn into talking points the next time one of God's Bullies attempts to con you or a television reporter into thinking his or her religious freedom is being assaulted. As usual, Slate's between-the-lines message is how bad the countries which surround Israel are, but there's grist here for calling out Christian evangelicals, if you read far enough to cover the last paragraph:

A new report from the International Humanist and Ethical Union names the seven countries in which atheists can be executed for their beliefs: Afghanistan, Iran, Maldives, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.
     The sobering report was presented to the U.N. on Monday. It takes a broad look at the state of freedom of expression worldwide for nonbelievers. As Reuters notes, Islamic countries overwhelmingly account for some of the most brutal anti-"unbeliever" criminalization and discrimination documented in the report. The big offenders tend to be laws pertaining to apostasy, blasphemy, compulsory religious registration, religious tests for citizenship or participation in civic life, and religious control of family law and public education. For example, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Jordan all ban or strictly limit the publication of atheist views.

...this year saw prosecutions for allegedly atheist comments on Facebook and Twitter in Bangladesh, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. In some of these cases, the governments even threatened to prosecute those who commented on, or “liked”, or re-tweeted, the offending comments.

Seven US states—Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—have constitutional provisions banning atheists from holding public office.

Evil, but funny...

 ...is this comment on Amy Davidson's New Yorker's article, The Animus of Antonin Scalia:

The Justice should be happy we have gays. Here in San Francisco, they're model citizens. I've never read one bad thing about them in the newspaper. Never a murder, a theft, car-boost, drug bust, driving-under or domestic quarrel. Not a single crime, ever. They don't even take bad photographs - always smiling and happy, save a few nudists recently. Don't see how they could engender any animus. They make the rest of us look like crap.

Posted 12/13/2012, 7:58:42pm by Teller

Evidence of undocumented deaths at shut Florida School for Boys — 31 crosses at school cemetery, but 50 grave shafts; 98 died between 1911 and 1973

The Dozier Home for Boys in Marianna opened as the Florida State Reform School on Jan. 1, 1900, operating until June 30, 2011, when the state Department of Juvenile Justice shut it down after years of controversy over physical and sexual abuse of its charges.

Men who were incarcerated there described being whipped with a metal-lined leather strap, sometimes leading to unconsciousness. Some said they were taken to the “rape room,” where they said officers sodomized boys of their choosing.
     Biennial reports to state lawmakers early in the 20th century “often listed fewer deaths than what is listed in the school ledgers,” the report said.
     Changes in state law and policy that allowed “incorrigible” children and even orphans to be sent to the reform school, and required longer sentences for inmates, suggest “that financial incentives were underlying motivating factors” for the youth prison’s operation, the report said. In 1906, for example, a superintendent complained he lacked adequate prisoners to harvest the corn crop.
     Children put out to work were overseen by local labor bosses, who were given broad authority to punish the children as they saw fit, said Kimmerle.

There may be even more victims because privacy laws have limited access to records after 1960 and overgrowth on the grounds has hindered full searches.

• Seven boys are believed to have died following escape attempts, according to the report.
• Among the children who were overlooked was a white boy named Thomas Curry, who died of blunt head trauma. Records claimed he died away from the campus after he escaped.
• The school records claim that boys who escaped happened to meet a violent death, including two who died of gunshot wounds to the chest or head.

Short takes: CIA torture, GOP DOMA subterfuge, Gov. Jerry Brown's cancer, cops loot Rivera crash site

Sir Ian Mckellen's agent says that the British actor doesn't have prostate cancer after all.

However, California Gov. Jerry Brown does.

Below: Stephen Colbert mocks Judge Shrubb's delay in implementation of law to outlaw so-called "conversion therapy" for minors in California.

Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin: My Mini Cooper against your VW Cabriolet. Anytime. Anywhere.

The man who changed how you shop is dead at 91. His invention is used 5 billion times a day.

European court of human rights unanimously ruled that CIA agents beat, shackled and sodomized a German citizen as Macedonian state police watched.

House Republicans hid budget increases to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act, even though the Supreme Court has yet to rule whether they even have standing to do so, as the White House has stopped legal defense of the law (but not, as some Republicans falsely claim, its enforcement.) House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is not amused at John Boehner's subterfuge and has issued a blistering statement.

Two Mexican cops, 23 and 24, have been arrested for stealing items from the Jenni Rivera crash site.

Antonin Scalia's son Paul, a priest, is chaplain to a Catholic group which denies gay identity.

Roger Ebert ruminates on vampire heternormative­ness, er, heteronormalness, er, hetero­normality. Whatever

Source

Saith the Chi-town God of the aisle seat: 

You have to give me credit. I may not have used the term, but I was right on top of the heteronormativeness of the first of the movies, "Twilight" (2008). 

On Prom Night, on the stage of the not especially private gazebo in the public gardens, he teeters right on the brink of a fang job, and then brings all of her trembling to a dead stand-still."
      ...Imagine, if you will, Bella and Edward having passionate sex. The mind recoils. They are more ideals than real people: Beautiful, perfect, young, idealistic. We have no desire to have the image besmirched by rumpy-pumpy.
     ...The argument is made in some studies of the Stephanie Meyer's work that she embeds her own Mormon or Christian beliefs about heteronormative behavior. Chief among them is chastity before marriage. But doesn't "Breaking Dawn" make an equally compelling argument against sex after marriage? Edward was right and they should never have gotten married in the first place. The film, in fact, makes a good case for gay, lesbian, transsexual and other vampires, in that they cannot be expected to reproduce. I don't know if Stephanie Meyer thought this through, but there you have it.

Postscript 10 a.m. Nov. 21: I continue to muse about the word "heteronormative." If you take it apart it seems to reduce to "normal heterosexual." Somehow the scientific nomenclature transforms that into a negative. I understand the reasons why non-hetero minorities feel discriminated against, and sympathize with them. But doesn't "heteronormative" apply the same process of blanket discrimination?

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan opens up about privacy, judicial diversity and public opinion

Elena Kagan in High School

Tal Kopan of Politico reported on Kagan's Yitzhak Rabin Memorial lecture and her answers to subsequent questions.

I don’t think any of us make our decisions by reading polls,” Kagan said. “One’s sense of what to do as a judge is bounded in some way by the society in which one lives” and the political process of getting appointed, she said.
     Still, the justice said, “One does think long and hard as a judge -- and I’m not sure I’ve ever been in this position --… before you do something that you think is required by law that would be incredibly disruptive to society, and that’s where great wisdom is called for.”
     One issue Kagan did cite as increasingly likely to come before the court is privacy, especially in a changing world.
     Praising her predecessor Louis Brandeis for his prescience on the issue, Kagan said he “understood how new technologies interfere with privacy, which I think will be one of the most important issues before the court in the decades to come.”

     Kagan conceded that “there are a lot of ways the court is not very diverse.” Every Supreme Court Justice is either Catholic or Jewish and a graduate of either Harvard or Yale. Four are from New York City; Justice Kennedy is the only judge from the West Coast.
     Kagan also categorized what she considers the two types of dissent and revealed that she spent three days this fall in Wyoming hunting with Justice Scalia. AKSARBENT doesn't think this is a good idea and neither does Wonkette. We think Scalia should stick to hunting with Dick Cheney.

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.”