Month: May 2006

It’s been such a hit with readers that Time.com’s photo editor is creating an online slide-show of some of the photos for next week. She’ll make the selection – so check in next week to see what made the cut. I’m continuing it through the weekend, to make a total of seven days, as promised. Several hundred photos so far. It’s a full time job downloading, selecting, editing and posting them. But worth every minute. There’s still time to send yours in – and maybe the holiday weekend will offer some more opportunities. So keep ’em coming. (As I said at the start, by sending them to me, you grant me full rights to publish and edit them as I see fit. If you want to retain any rights, don’t send ’em.)

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 10.30 pm.

The New York Sun reveals some inventive online prose-fiddling from the White House’s newest hire.

And he has some second thoughts on his past methods.

It is truly pathetic to see the Senate waste time and effort on another bid to pass a constitutional amendment that violates states’ rights, triviliazes the Constitution and stigmatizes a minority. The arguments for it keep collapsing. Jon Rauch has another superb and sane column on the subject:

Two questions for anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion Republicans: If states can be allowed to go their own way in defining human life, why not allow them to go their own way in defining marriage? Where constitutional amendments are concerned, why is preventing gay couples from marrying so much more urgent than preventing unborn children from being killed?

It is precisely because marriage is so important, and because it is the subject of such profound moral disagreement, that a one-size-fits-all federal solution is the wrong approach. California and Texas, Massachusetts and Oklahoma take very different views of same-sex marriage. By localizing the most intractable moral issues, federalism prevents national culture wars.

Conservatism, properly understood, is the solution to the question of how we integrate gay couples into society. Republicanism, as it now is, is part of the problem. Its rigid, theologically-based, ideologically driven agenda is the antithesis of a federalist, pragmatic, humane conservatism. Let the states decide. On abortion and marriage.

A reader writes:

My boyfriend and I are a gay binational couple. He’s Thai. I’m an American. Not being able to marry is, well, I don’t have words. July 28th, 2007 is the day his Student Visa runs out and there are really no choices but for him to go back to Thailand. Can you imaigine having an expiration date on your relationship? I live with that everyday.

If he stayed here illegally past this date he would be waiting tables with an MBA and be estranged from his family and/or never able to return. Cruel? Check. Unusual? Check. However with the bill in the Senate, I wish to God he was illegal right now. If he’d ditched school and gone out of status back when he’d be "long-time illegal" now and then seemingly eligible to pay some fines and eventually become a permanent resident given that he’s been here for 4 years. You know how cheap and easy that is compared to paying for an MBA degree that he didn’t even want to start with? He came here to go to language school for a year and then we fell in love and then we were force marched down an educational treadmill so that he could stay in status. Having an MBA is great and all but that isn’t where his heart is. He did it for me, Andrew. This just makes my head explode. From where I’m sitting right now we completely screwed up our lives by doing the right thing and obeying the law.

But wait… that’s not all… even getting married in some symbolic ceremony or entering into a Cali domestic parnership is "Intent to Immigrate" and in the language of my own tax funded oppression… "An alien seeking to obtain a non-immigrant visa has a burden to prove that he does not have an intent to immigrate." Ah, yes.

The law requires we break up a family and lose a legal immigrant with an MBA. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants with nothing like these qualifications get a gradual amnesty. Go figure.

Lakewood, Ohio, last night, in a thunder-storm.

A reader comments:

What I want to know is why Pat Robertson is feebly wishing for Hugo Chavez’s assassination when he could just fly down to Venezuela and stomp him to death.

Anderson did a segment on God’s massive quads last night. Hysterical.

"Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it – but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq – as Blair did," – George Galloway. You realize why he and Saddam got on so well, don’t you?

Boston, noon, in front of a soup kitchen.