November 2008 – Page 75

The Gay Awakening

The more I read and hear and listen the more it feels as if something is shifting in the gay community since the passage of Proposition 8. A reader writes:

My partner and I attended the Silver Lake Prop. 8 protest on Saturday night as a married couple defending our family. It will be some time before we know for sure, but the passage of this discriminatory amendment feels like a game-changer.

After a few days of feeling kicked in the gut, worrying what would become of our newly-legal marriages, the community came together around the issue in a way I’ve rarely seen. Since the ‘Virtually Normal’ days I’ve been waiting for something to galvanize the determination of gay rights supporters.

Through the insulting Defense of Marriage Act proceedings, Sam Nunn’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” circus and numerous lawsuits, there persisted a patience with incremental progress: a belief that we could endure the slanders and indignities long enough to triumph.

But this campaign to erase us from view and strip away what we have already achieved is something we are not going to stand for.

The protests will go on. By themselves, they may not win us much. But, all the good arguments are on our side, and the longer they persist, the more likely our fellow citizens will be exposed to the real truth of who we are and inured to the lies of the opposition.

I’ve long believed that the moment every gay person truly wanted the right to marry, and understood the depth of the injustice, we would win. That moment feels much closer today than it did a week ago.

(Photo: a protest in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, by David McNew/Getty.)

Oxford’s Word Of The Year

Hypermiling:

“Hypermiling” was coined in 2004 by Wayne Gerdes, who runs this web site. “Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.

Torture Lite?

Siobhan Gorman reports:

Mr. Obama said he opposed providing legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided warrantless surveillance, but ultimately voted for the bill, which included an immunity provision. The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.

Italics mine. It’s difficult to know how to assess the story.

It’s obviously being placed by some Clinton and Bush officials angling for more continuity with Bush’s torture regime. And we have this caveat:

Advisers caution that few decisions will be made until the team gets a better picture of how the Bush administration actually goes about gathering intelligence, including covert programs, and there could be a greater shift after a full review.

But there is blather about "centrism" in national security. There is no centrism in adhering to the Geneva Conventions. Either we do or we don’t. We haven’t and we now must. There is no middle way here. But if this new president decides to pursue such a torture-lite policy, this blog will apply exactly the same standards applied to Bush. No torture ever. No exceptions ever. No separate CIA track. Executive power, allowed to torture, is dangerous regardless of which president is in the White House, of whichever party. But we will see. This struggle is just beginning. But Obama’s statements on the campaign trail are unequivocal.The same should apply to his interrogation policy.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXII: “Harry Potter”, Ctd.

Alaska blog Mudflats has been digging into Palin’s latest interview with ADN. Here is part of a post on Palin banning books:

The reference to Palin wanting to ban Harry Potter came from an anonymous email. I got this email 3 or 4 times. There was no source cited, just a long list of “controversial” books that Palin supposedly wanted banned, including not only the first five Harry Potter books (two of which weren’t even written at the time), but Lady Chatterly’s Lover, James and the Giant Peach, and everything by Judy Blume. Not one serious news organization printed this. So when Sarah Palin whines about bad journalism, and the media not living up to their responsibility, and when she says “it was reported,” the reporters she’s talking about are simply people who forward controversial emails without knowing if they’re true.

So what books did she want removed from shelves? One that we know about is the book Pastor, I’m Gay by the Rev. Howard Bess. I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Bess, and heard the story from his own mouth.

Try Walking

"If there is an open door in ’12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door,"- Sarah Palin.

The door, I presume, is as open as the book that she calls her life.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXI: The Clothes, Ctd.

Just trying to to make any sense of the Greta van Susteren interview is beyond my cognitive skill-set, but it does confirm what has been clear for two months: Sarah Palin is seriously out there in a connecting to reality kinda way. She cannot actually deny anything factually, so she keeps plowing through in her Bush-style post-modern fashion. Here we go again:

"When I arrived at the convention, there were clothes waiting for me, and clothes being ordered for me and the family, for eight of us. And ever since then, those clothes, knowing that they didn’t belong to me … we boxed them all up, sent them back to the rightful owners, the Republican National Committee, and that’s the story on the clothes."

Try and construct some kind of chronology from those sentences and you realize it’s useless.

She lives in her own world, doin’ some things, sayin’ others, leavin’ it for the rest of us to sort it all out. She’s the kind of person you inch carefully away from if they start talking to you on the bus. And when she is trapped in an obvious, airtight lie, as she has so many times, she simply declares the subject over:

"It just seems like such an irrelevant issue when you consider what is going on in the world today and how a new administration is being ushered in and people being concerned about the direction of the nation and policies that will be adopted. Clothes just seem irrelevant."

It’s not true; it’s not true; it’s not true; it’s irrelevant. Kinda like Clinton with a few dozen IQ points shaved off the top.

(Photo: Johnny Wagner/Getty.)

Let Them Die?

Henry Blodget begs Obama to not bailout the auto industry:

Ford, GM, and Chrysler are done for regardless, Obama. Bailing them out yet again won’t fix them. It will just prolong the agony.

It’s not a good sign that Obama wants to rescue them.

Anzalone said that the high-profile attack ad doomed Dole’s chances to keep the race close. Hagan’s internal polling showed her numbers skyrocketing after the ad aired. "It would have been a much closer race [if she didn’t air the Godless ad]. Kay would have won by 3-4 points but instead she won big," Anzalone said. "I just think Dole, in the end, did herself a disservice. She was going to lose that race, but she did not need to lose that race by that margin."

Month: November 2008