Des Moines' cityview blasted for titillating transgender cover accompanying serious story

Apart from the dubious cover, Des Moines' alternative weekly laudably attempted to report the trouble transgender people have when they need to use public facilities from their perspective as well as those people in charge of public facilties. The article, we thought, was commendable. The cover was a rather low-rent attempt to snag readers.
     You can read the piece online, here, and the reaction of Donna Redwing, of OneIOWA, who was interviewed, here.

One Iowa to @dmcityview: You owe the #transgender community an apology http://t.co/xWgOgWifn1
— One Iowa (@OneIowa) December 16, 2014

Both sides joust in SD gay marriage fight, winning and losing some

Pro-marriage equality advocates are accusing the state of stalling.

     "The state's position being that the voters of South Dakota should pick the definition of marriage, rather than the federal court," South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley said.
     "That's too bad, because the Constitution was written for a reason. It was written to ensure that our rights are protected and not subjected to the whims or majority of a popular vote," said Attorney Josh Newville, who represents six gay South Dakota couples.

Twins outfielder Torii Hunter calls reporter a 'prick' for bringing up his anti-marriage equality ad; 'I don't even know you, man'

The Twins recently held a press conference at Target Field to announce Hunter's 1-year, $10.5 million deal with the team.
     Hunter ended the press conference shortly after reporter Mike Berardino indirectly asked him if he had discussed his public stance on gay marriage with management. (Hunter made a radio ad in support of GOP gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson and his anti-marriage equality stance.)
     Hutchinson was beaten by Democrat Mike Beebe in November.

     “Nothing to talk about,” Hunter said. “You already know, so why keep talking about it? I said it. It is what it is. So, no, I’m not going to talk about it if you bring it up. It’s not even baseball related. You can do that later, when I retire, then I’ll tell you everything.”
     A few seconds later, Hunter turned his attention back to the reporter.
“Hey, Mike is kind of a prick, huh? No, seriously. You’re a prick, man. I don’t even know you.
     You’re a prick, seriously,” Hunter said. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that, man, that’s your job. He’s definitely a prick, though.”
     One more question was asked before the conference ended. Before leaving, Hunter pointed to the reporter and said he ruined the press conference.

Sydney hostage who rushed gunman, allowing others to flee, died a 'second class' gay citizen

AKSARBENT defines a hero as someone who risks his or her own life to save someone else's. (By our standards, if you pull someone out of a wrecked, burning car, you're a hero. If the car isn't on fire, you're merely a Good Samaritan.)
      Two people in the Sydney hostage crisis appear to have died heroically. The first was Katrina Dawson, a lawyer and mother of three, who it is claimed, was shot to death shielding a pregnant friend from gunfire.
     The second was Tori Johnson, manager of the Lindt Chocolate Café for two years and whom employees and customers could not praise enough.
     Here's part of what James Peron, President of the Moorfield Storey Institute, just wrote about Johnson in the Huffington Post:

     Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called Tori Johnson, and the other victim "good people."
     Yes, Tori was good people, but to Abbott he still wasn't good enough, at least not when it came to marriage.
     Tori and his partner of 14 years, Thomas, could never be married, not in Australia. Tori and Thomas deserved the same rights as other Australians. But that right was denied them, and now, for Tori, it's too late.
     Prime Minister Tony Abbott laid flowers and said nice words but he's still fighting to deny marriage rights to "good people" such as Tori Johnson.
     If Abbot wishes to honor the heroism of Tori Johnson he should push for marriage equality. At the very least, he should get of the way and allow his own party caucus freedom to vote their conscience.
     For all couples like Tori and Frank it's time to pass Senator David Leyonhjelm's marriage legislation.

Jon Stewart goes inside the scariest place in the universe: Dick Cheney's mind

Fun fact: it's widely known that Dick Cheney was kicked out of Yale, but less widely known that he was kicked out of his kindergarten class at Randolph School.

The Daily Show

Bob Dylan gives a Philadelphia concert for superfan Fredik Wikingsson — just Fredik Wikingsson

From Stereogum:

Last month, we found out that Bob Dylan had played a show in Philadelphia for just one person as part of the Swedish film series Experiment Ensam, which sets people up in situations alone that they would normally experience with a crowd. The lucky attendee was Swedish superfan Fredik Wikingsson,
(Via JoeMyGod)

How much of your taxes will NE GOP officials squander to fight gay marriage, already legal in 4 border states?

GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner hired expensive private attorneys to fight the federal Defense of Marriage Act, later largely gutted in the Supreme Court's 2013 Windsor decision. That cost you $2,300,000.
     The Obama administration, which (unlike right-wing ideologues) saw the writing on the wall and in previous decisions on DOMA in lower courts, wisely didn't bother to defend DOMA, although it did enforce it (contrary to what you may have heard on Fox News.)
     Various state attorney generals are now replicating Boehner's Vietnam strategy, even though U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals have been striking down state gay marriage bans such as Nebraska's, like bowling pins. From Matt Baume:

     Marriage is here to stay in South Carolina, but Attorney General Alan Wilson seems to be having a hard time accepting it. Even though South Carolina couples have been getting married since last month, Wilson has continued his losing battle to stop the weddings. But the longer he drags out his appeal, the more money he may wind up having to give to a coalition of gay rights groups.
     That's because the coalition has filed a petition seeking to recoup the money that they've had to spend to keep marriage legal. If the court grants their request, Wilson will have to give over $150,000 to organizations fighting for equality. Wilson really has no chance of stopping marriage at this point. He's appealing to the Fourth Circuit, which has repeatedly allowed marriages to go forward. So all he's doing now is running up a huge tab.
     And the same thing's happening in Arkansas...

Nebraska AG Jon Bruning pictured
with Eames and Barcelona chairs

Last February, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning spent an undetermined amount of Nebraska public funds filing an amicus brief in support of Utah's efforts to keep gay couples strangers to the law. Leaving aside the fact that Utah is in the 10th U.S. District Court of Appeals and Nebraska is in the 8th, the preparation and filing was a complete waste of Nebraska taxpayers' money by Bruning because (via WikiPedia):

     The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah found the state's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in December 2013. Its order that the state cease enforcing its ban took effect immediately. In January 2014, after stays had been denied by the District Court and the Tenth Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of the District Court's order pending consideration of the appeal by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
     In June 2014, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the decision of the district court, finding that Utah's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, but stayed their mandate pending petition to the Supreme Court.

     Last month, ACLU Nebraska sued the state over its ban on gay marriage (and civil unions AND domestic partnerships!), joining similar challenges in every other state in the 8th U.S. District Court of Appeals.
     Incoming GOP Governor-elect Pete Ricketts has already vowed to fight challenges to the state's ban, as has the state's current GOP governor, Dave Heineman, who, in respect of his unrelenting hostility to LGBTs, is quite a piece of work.
     What we'd like to know is how recklessly GOP officials in Nebraska plan to pander to homophobes or indulge their own bias.
     Will they take things so far that they too will be sued for reimbursement when marriage equality advocates likely win in the 8th Circuit but face dragged-out hopeless appeals by the Ricketts administration and/or new GOP Attorney General Doug Peterson?

---

     UPDATE: In addition to the examples cited above, you can add Minnesota Wisconsin to the roster of states in which officials who stubbornly delayed the inevitable may have to pay for their efforts to stall the civil rights of gay couples — leaving Gopher Badger State taxpayers on the hook for as much as $1.25 million because, according to a new ACLU suit, state officials decided to:

"file multiple motions, conduct discovery, assert novel arguments, and frantically try to stop marriages from occurring increased the substantive and procedural complexity of plaintiffs’ counsels’ work in the trial court and the Court of Appeals, and thus the time required to competently prosecute the action."

Will this now happen in Nebraska during a Ricketts administration?

NPR, broadcasters: Nag cell firms to activate the FM radio chip in your smart phones

Evidently, carriers would rather have you stream radio content so they can charge you for data band­width rather than activating the FM chip in every smart­phone. A coalition which includes NPR and NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) wants you to, ahem, encourage carriers to get with the program. They've set up a web page for you to bitch. Use it, darlings. And tweet this post using the twitter button below, adding the hashtag of your cell phone carrier. (#ATT, #Verizon, etc.)

Ted Shoebat: the most appalling Christer troll you'll see all week:

JoeMyGod just posted a couple videos from a clown who evidently fancies himself another James O'Keefe.
     His schtick is to call up gay or gay-friendly bakeries, lie to them about wanting a cake for his unspecified pro-traditional marriage group, then ask them if he can have a cake with "Gay Marriage Is Wrong" written on it.
     If they balk, he badgers them by demanding to know why they don't believe in equality, when gay people have harassed Christian bakers in what he falsely asserts is a similar way. (The video below is the short successor to a longer video of the same stunt.)
     Obviously there are several problems to his approach. Telling people you want a PRO-traditional marriage cake, then specifying a message saying "Gay Marriage is wrong" is like saying you want a cake for a Black Is Beautiful social club that says "Kill Whitey."
     We wouldn't want to see Shoebat's scores in IQ tests that measure the ability to identify similar things.
     Another problem is that Shoebat may have broken the law repeatedly. If he called bakeries in states which do not allow the recording of telephone conversations without notifying the other party, he could be in trouble even if he called from a state which allows such practices.

    

Attn: Sean Hannity, Todd Starnes and Mike Huckabee; why aren't you defying Dean Martin's war on Christmas

Granted Deano has been deceased since Christmas, 1995, but his version of the scandalously secular "holiday" anthem is still the best ever recorded and is all over the radio every Christmas. WHY ARE YOU STANDING FOR THIS, YOU FOX PHONIES!!!

We doubt Focus Features and Universal will like this

Everybody's a Copywriter/Art Director, continued... (scrap metal billboard via Australia). pic.twitter.com/kBhl3d8Erf

— Mark Duffy (@copyranter) December 14, 2014

Tide goes all Will and Grace on Canada

And Jon Bruning's world just got a little smaller.


(Via Towleroad)

Oxford University's a capella Out of the Blue group is back, with a Mariah Carey Christmas song for charity

The group's last charity single, Sharkira's Hips Don't Lie, released last August, has well in excess of five million YouTube views. Proceeds benefit Helen and Douglas House, a children's hospice.

New legal filings by NE ACLU in support of marriage equality

From wire services:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska filed a December 2nd for a preliminary injunction requiring the state to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples and allow same-sex couples to marry while the lawsuits proceeds. The motion cites the ACLU's likelihood of prevailing in the case. Same-sex couples can marry in at least 32 other states.

Here's the brief in support of the preliminary injunction and here's the motion and here's the amended complaint.

'McCoy, you're going straight to hell': gay IA state senator publishes book of emails about gay marriage

From the Des Moines Register:

A publicist says the book reveals personal stories and opinions sent to him from those supporting same-gender marriage as well as those bitterly opposing it.

Omaha loses gay top librarian to King Co., WA where he can marry partner; Omaha GOP mayor: 'not worried'NE GOP Gov.: 'It's their choice'

But because Nebraska's leading GOP politicians are so nice, they all refrained from saying, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out of the Cornhusker state."
     Gary Wasdin, the head of the Omaha Public Library system, has decided to take a job heading one of the best library systems in the U.S., in King County Washington, a state where he can marry his partner of 10 years. From the Omaha World-Herald, where the comments, so far, are scorching:

     Wasdin, 47, said it grew frustrating to see his counterparts in other states have that freedom as Nebraska leadership fights for the state’s constitutional gay marriage ban.
     ...But here, his partner couldn’t get health benefits through Wasdin’s job with the city.

Nebraska's attorney general Jon Bruning and the state's lame-duck Governor, Dave Heineman, are two of the most anti-LGBT GOP state politicians in the country.

     In November, Gov. Dave Heineman said Nebraska’s same-sex marriage ban is positive for the state. Asked then if that invites same-sex couples to leave Nebraska, Heineman responded, “It’s their choice.”
     “There’s a lot of good reasons to live here in Nebraska,” he said. “And, again, one of those is because we value that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Before being elected Omaha's mayor, Jean Stothert was a firm City Council opponent of Omaha's recently-passed LGBT-rights ordinance (which does not cover housing). Excerpts from her condescending speech to LGBTs in the City Council chambers were posted to YouTube by AKSARBENT and may be seen at the bottom of this post.

     When asked whether she worries about losing other employees over the issue of same-sex marriage, Mayor Jean Stothert said gay marriage is outside her purview. But she said Wasdin is leaving for a “great opportunity.”
     “The primary reason Gary accepted a new position was it was a great opportunity with a much larger library system,” she said. “I am not worried about losing employees for a great opportunity. I am happy for them.”
     Stothert added that city unions could negotiate partner benefits into their contracts. She said she is willing to negotiate “on this and any other number of subjects.”

The above crap excuse by Jean Stothert perfectly illustrates her fundamental dishonesty. She pretends that the only way to treat gay couples equally in partner benefits is to "negotiate" with city unions. Yeah, she can do that. Or she could do what Chris Beutler, the mayor of Lincoln, Nebraska's capitol and second largest city, announced last week:

     Mayor Chris Beutler recently approved changes that will allow same-sex spouses of city employees to receive health insurance and other benefits.
     Beutler’s decision to accept Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s definition of marriage, which includes same-sex marriages, opens the door to city benefits being extended to same-sex spouses of city employees. The city’s insurance carrier changed its definition of marriage following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act.
     “The city accepted the new definition because it doesn't make sense to deny legally married same-sex couples the same insurance benefits that we grant to other legally married couples,” said Rick Hoppe, Beutler's chief of staff.

Unlike Mayor Stothert, who has been pressuring Omaha libraries recently to give out patron information to the police without a court order, some Omahans are sorry to see Wasdin go:

     “He’s really elevated the position in the last five years,” said Mike Meyer, chairman of the library Board of Trustees.
     City Councilman Ben Gray said he’s sorry to see Wasdin leave.
     “We’re losing a really good guy,” Gray said.

Fox News strikes again

Two hours ago:

Five minutes ago:

Boston Speedo Santas cross finish line of charity run

Video here. Onlookers in the Internet peanut gallery were not without their customary cynicism:

     looks to me a bunch of straight boys wishing they were out of the closet — Randy Ciletti
     I guess the black men in Boston are so busy dodging police bullets that only 2 were courageous enough to participate in the run. I'm glad that they made a showing, Goodness I'm blind after looking at all of that pale pink flesh. LOL. — Edmund Jordan · Seattle, Washington

NE Senator-elect Ben Sasse has a message for all you bad, false and ugly nonbelievers!

Mr. Sasse was far too busy this week to answer even one damn question from KMTV about the CIA Torture report, but he sure wasn't too busy to talk to hate group leader Tony Perkins.
     In his interview, at about the 5-6 minute mark, Sasse had the following stern advice to all you 17 million atheists and agnostics in the USA:

The good, the true and the beautiful exist in places where people know each other and they're trying to live out a life of gratitude to God...

     Our heart goes out to Ben Sasse for the tough road he has chosen for himself — living out a life of gratitude to God in his search for the good, the true and the beautiful amidst the carnivorous lobbyists of Exxon-Mobil and Goldman Sachs. We hope his purity is never sullied, or, if it is, that there are no incriminating fingerprints. 
     Oh, by the way, before we forget, Ben — about that pre-election trip to Israel that you mentioned in your fun chat with KKK-mailing list customer Tony Perkins: who paid for the fact-finding drinks, entrees, airfare, hotels and excursions? Will they be getting a decent Return On Investment for their shekels? Will Nebraska taxpayers?

NE GOP House delegation votes to bail out bankers with your taxes if they blow up the financial system again

The usual suspects, encircled.
Left to right: Smith, Fortenberry and Terry

If you had any doubts that GOP lawmakers continue to turn tricks for corporations, check the nearly identical verbiage of what Citygroup's lobbyists proposed and what actually passed the House. Disgusting.
     The bill is called the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act and will gut a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the "push-out rule" that forbids banks from trading certain risky derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with vales derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates) with money insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). If this bill passes the Senate, taxpayers will be on the hook for more of Wall St.'s reckless gambling losses. The vote is here.
     Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) called the bill "a good example of capitalism's death wish."

Best Buy gets whacked by Internet for darkly funny tweet about a real life murder and is now very sorry

Details here, if you don't get the joke.

Chick-fil-A attempt to bully T-shirt maker backfires after VT gov. and U of NH law students get involved

Chick-fil-A's ridiculous attempt to bully a T-Shirt maker with cease-and-desist orders after he tried to trademark the correctly-spelled phrase "EAT MORE KALE" ended Friday after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted his application, not buying Chick-fil-A's claim that "EAT MORE KALE" could be confused with the fast food behemoth's slogan, "eat mor chikin."
     Vermont folk artist Bo Muller-Moore had state officials, Governor Peter Shumlin and a posse of pro bono lawyers on his side, including students from a University of New Hampshire law school legal clinic.

John Lotter still on death row for murder of Teena Brandon, born 42 years ago today — even though Tom Nissen says he shot Brandon

In 2007, 14 years after the fact, Tom Nissen recanted his courtroom accusations and admitted to killing Teena Brandon, subject of the film Boys Don't Cry, as well as Lisa Lambert, 24, of Humboldt, NE and Phillip DeVine, 22, of Fairfield, Iowa. Nissen is serving three life sentences; Lotter could be executed any day.

PFOX billboard tries to con Virginians into thinking sexual orientation has no genetic cause

Aside from the bad science implicit in the message, there are a couple of other lies on the billboard: the "twins" are actually two photos of the same guy, and (h/t JoeMyGod) he's happily gay:



About the ad's pseudo-science: substitute "left-handed" for "gay" and the innate stupidity of the billboard comes into sharp relief. People are already complaining to the company pocketing money for the ad, Lamar Advertising.

     Sadly, not all the deniers who assert that sexual orientation has no genetic component are civilians.
     Lincoln psychologist Dr. Edward Stringer, who has repeatedly lobbied against legal measures which would give LGBT Nebraskans legal recourse when subjected to arbitrary discrimination and who "treats" homosexuals who want to become heterosexuals, asserts in the video below that "sexual orientation by its very nature is highly fluid."
     Stringham cites a Dr. Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago, who Stringham claims has said that over half of those who profess it, eventually "spontaneously exit homosexuality."
     "Homosexuality is 0% genetically inheritable, according to the Human Genome Study," Dr. Stringham boldly claimed, without verifiable attribution, to the Lincoln City Council. "That's just one example of the so-called pseudo science that we've been given today."
     Here's what Dr. Francis Collins, respected geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, actually said about the subject, after having been misquoted before by the ideological ilk of people like Dr. Stringham of Lincoln, Nebraska:

The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.

Quote of the day: Dan Savage in Playboy

Photos: Marius Bugge

PLAYBOY: In your view, who are the most offensive homophobes now?
SAVAGE: Vladimir Putin and the president of Uganda. We expected the backlash here in the U.S., but the backlash is abroad. What is our responsibility to queer people in Uganda who are being brutalized because of the rapid success of the gay-rights movement in the West? In countries like Uganda, leaders have this easy way to assert their moral superiority: hating gay people in the same way shitty, fucked-up Christians in America do. Putin is very blunt about this. It’s how they prove their moral superiority to the West. They don’t have to take better care of their citizens, they don’t have to have a functioning democracy, they don’t have to have a decent environment, they don’t have to have a justice system that works. They just have to hate gay people really hard and they’re better than the United States, better than Canada, better than France.

Ben Sasse too busy to comment on CIA torture report but found time to chat with hate group leader

Here's what Senator-elect Sasse told KMTV when it asked him if he had any opinions about the just-released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture:

Right now, Senator-elect Sasse is focused on building the best team to serve Nebraska when he hits the ground running on January 6th. As such, he is politely declining requests to discuss matters before the lame-duck Congress.

But Sasse found time in his busy schedule to talk to the so-called Family Research Council, an SPLA-designated hate/extremist group headed by Tony Perkins, who was once fined for lying about buying a KKK mailing list in order to elect a Louisiana politician.

In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins against Mary Landrieu, Perkins paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. The campaign was fined $3,000 (reduced from $82,500) after Perkins and Jenkins filed false disclosure forms in a bid to hide their link to Duke. Five years later, on May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins who addressed the group while standing in front of a Confederate flag, claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation, because in 1999 — two years before Perkins’ speech to the CCC — Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had been embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group. GOP chairman Jim Nicholson then urged Republicans to avoid the CCC because of its “racist views.”

SD decides to pull Don't Jerk And Drive campaign; officials admit double-entendre was deliberate

Also: Is Nebraska's most dedicated anti-LGBT organization hiding its biggest donors?

FOLLOW AKSARBENT ON TWITTER. CLICK THE KITTY.

Jones

Here is a statement from Trevor Jones, Secretary, S.D. Dept. Of Public Safety:

I decided to pull the ad. This is an important safety message and I don't want this innuendo to distract from our goal to save lives on the road.

Officials admitted to the Argus Leader that the double entendre was intentional."

     ...[Rep. Mike] Verchio, a Republican from Hill City who chairs the House Transportation Committee, said he heard from several citizens who were upset about the ad after reading the Argus Leader Media story about it.
     ...The part of the campaign that's garnered the most attention so far is the #DontJerkAndDrive hashtag, pushed out through social media. That wording might not sit well with everyone, but the message isn't meant for everyone, either.
     That particular portion of the $100,000 campaign — a figure Axdhal called "a drop in the bucket" — targets young men, as they're the drivers most likely to overcorrect and cause fatal traffic accidents.

     ...The ad campaign, despite the second thoughts, was shaping up to be incredibly successful for South Dakota.
     More than 16,000 people saw the campaign on Twitter in its first week. Page views at the DPS's Facebook page have jumped to almost 30,000 since the campaign launched, outperforming previous public safety campaigns 25 to 1.
   ...The ad industry average for interaction in sponsored tweets is between 1 percent and 3 percent. The "Jerk" campaign's sponsored tweets have a 6.9 percent interaction rate.
     ...Bryan Ruby, owner of the web consulting business CMS Report, was impressed with the campaign from a marketing standpoint. Online, he called it "brilliant."

Is Nebraska's most anti-LGBT group hiding its biggest donors?

The Nebraska Family Association (now called the Nebraska Family Alliance), gathered thousands of signatures to put a stop to the Lincoln City Council's addition of LGBTs to the list of classes (including Christians) protected from discrimination in employment, accommodations and housing in Nebraska's Capitol.
     Then it torpedoed a similar effort in the state legislature.
     In between, it went to war against accommodations for transgender school athletes.
     Right now, the NFA is demonizing an effort by the Lincoln Public Schools to codify an inclusive approach to dealing with the problems its transgender students often have in middle school.

Nebraska Family Association is touting $70,000 worth of
matching donations on the same page of its web site in
which it brags about targeting Lincoln Public Schools for
attempting to create schools inclusive of transgender kids.

     Painting a bulls eye on LGBT Nebraskans obviously brings home the bacon for the NFA; right now it is soliciting donations with a hook baited with the news that two unnamed donors have agreed to match up to $70,000 in new contributions.
     Said announcement is paired with an anti-LGBT attack on the Lincoln Public School system.
     This made AKSARBENT wonder how many well-heeled people are fueling NFA's jihad against LGBTs in Nebraska, so we looked up the organization's Form 990, required of tax-exempt organizations like the NFA.
     Interestingly, NFA's administrative expenses are about 55% — ten times that of nonprofits like Save The Children.
     Unlike more transparent, tax-exempt groups, the Nebraska Family Alliance doesn't make its Form 990 available on its website. (However, by law it must provide the document to people who show up in person during business hours and ask for it.)
     Although the NFA won't make its current (or any other) Form 990 available on line, AKSARBENT found two organizations which have published NFA's latest 990 — one is here.
     Interestingly, both copies omit Schedule B, the list of large contributors that NFA itself indicated was required in its Form 990 filing:

(Page three of the Nebraska Family Alliance's 2013 Form 990 is filled out in a manner that seems to indicate that the organization is required to complete Schedule B, Schedule of Contributors)

Yet the PDF of the Nebraska Family Alliance's 2013 Form 990, retrieved by AKSARBENT from two different sources, does not include a Schedule B listing of large donations; the document skips from Schedule A to Schedule D, as seen below.

South Dakota reminds you not to jerk and drive

Update: South Dakota pulls #DontJerkAndDrive campaign, admits double-entendre was deliberate
Also: Is Nebraska's most dedicated anti-LGBT organization hiding its biggest donors?


AKSARBENT has absolutely nothing to add to this stern warning from the South Dakota Office of Highway Safety except for the ellipse we childishly could not restrain ourselves from drawing on one of the panels. Sorry.

Video: Sen. Mark Udall says CIA and Director John Brennan are still lying

It's becoming increasingly evident that the American people owe Leon Panetta and the honest staffers who wrote his sobering review of CIA practices a debt of gratitude.


Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress writes:
Following Tuesday’s release of a 600-page declassified summary, the CIA acknowledged that the agency “did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves.” However, it insisted that “[o]ur review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.”
     Udall contradicted that statement, arguing that a classified 2011 internal review conducted by former CIA Director Leon Panetta “directly refutes information in the Brennan response.”
     “Director [John] Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Udall said, reiterating his call on Brennan to resign. “In other words, the CIA is lying.”