Month: October 2009

The WaPo is right about this: the president is not responsible for not legislating something; and everything the gay rights movement wants is a legislative act right now. So aim the pressure at the appropriate people. Why does Nancy Pelosi believe the US should still be firing soldiers solely because they're gay? Has anyone put her on the spot about that lately?

Alex Massie reports on an attempt to undo constitutional guarantees dating from 1688.

I'd just absorbed the "wait till 2017" message from HRC's Joe Solmonese and was at a poorly attended AIDS vigil Saturday night when I was asked by Reel Gay TV to speak my mind. Hence the anger. I was wrong to personalize this, but at some point the anger needs to be expressed. I'm not a politician and this video helps explain why. I should have let myself cool down before gabbing in front of a camera. I really do believe that many people working for and with HRC are good people and they do good work (Maine right now is one such example); and I should not have called anyone "self-loathing." HRC are not self-loathing; they're just, in my view, misguided in being too eager to please DNC power-brokers. Maybe it was the memory of my friends who died that got to me, but I've learned over the years that anger has its place; and a refusal to go along to get along has its place. The message I want to give is: reform HRC to make it more accountable and less coopted. Keep the pressure up. Keep their feet to the fire as much as any politician. Because they can so easily turn into politicians.

Zac Morgan urges conservatives to lead the way and make a point against the Islamists at the same time:

President Obama addressed the Human Rights Campaign last night and re-declared his opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  But wait a minute: he’s commander in chief. If he’s opposed, why doesn’t he actually do something about it? Here’s one issue where conservatives with their traditional concern for the military can outbid the all-talk president.

As former JCS Chairman General John Shalikashvili pointed out in the Washington Post, scant evidence exists that allowing openly gay enlistment would harm unit cohesion or spark mass resignations from our fighting men and women.  Other countries, including the Israeli Defense Forces, have allowed homosexuals to serve, with no serious adverse effects…Besides, I can think of only a few things more fitting than for a homophobic radical Islamist in Afghanistan to discover that his latest plans for a terrorist attack were foiled because of the quick work of a gay member of our armed forces.

Mudflats impatiently taps her foot. ADN reports:

"I think they're hiding something, I think this is a travesty of justice," state Democratic Party Chairwoman Patti Higgins said Wednesday. "The law says they have 10 days to do it."

The public requests were filed 13 months ago. She can "write" a "book" in ten minutes but some things can wait.

All Hallows' Eve is right around the corner. Get your Palin on.

Suderman is against government regulation of TV commercial volume:

[T]he larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government's job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That's bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It's also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And, in the end, I think that's far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Is everyone who watches Fox a little deaf? It sometimes feels that way.

“They’re a shameless bunch of lying, distorting, propagandists, which I respect, and I don’t know what MSNBC would do without them,” Michael Goldfarb, on the liberal bloggers of Think Progress. My italics. His "which".

Today on the Dish we saw what was apparently a shot from the White House at “left fringe” bloggers demanding equality. Officials denied it, but Andrew suspected Rahm. John Cole and Dish readers pushed back against Sully. Benen got the back of the administration while DiA urged action.

We wondered if McCain or Schwarzenegger would be any better than Obama and if conservatives have any chance of advancing marriage equality. At the end of the day, we saw signs that the White House could be moving on DADT. Dan Blatt gave props to the gay blogosphere.

The Dish also looked back at yesterday’s best speeches, best signs, best coverage, and best anecdote – and post from Andrew. (While we’re at it, here’s the best typo from readers.)

Andrew is hosting a book signing tomorrow for his friend Tad Friend. More details here.

— C.B.

"It's often forgotten or obscured, but the central political fact now is that the Democratic Party controls everything in Washington — from the branches of government to favors doled out to lobbyists to the policies that Congress and the President enact. Wars that are fought and bills that are or are not passed and policies that are maintained are, by definition, Democratic actions. The dreaded Right can't dictate or stop anything. That's the burden of having massive majorities in all areas — everything that happens is the result of what the Democratic Party does, and that's why the divisions and conflicts that truly matter are ones with the party itself. The "right v. left" and even "Democrat v. GOP" drama dominates most of our discourse, yet at this point it is a distracting and largely irrelevant food fight. It's the Democrats who have won the last two elections by large margins and wield all the power, and increasingly the defining conflict is between those whose overarching allegiance is to Obama and the Party as ends in themselves, and those who see those things as mere means to more important ends," – Glenn Greenwald, Salon.