Month: December 2008

A Fragile Peace

jacob

The dogs have sued for peace, and as this allows us to concentrate our efforts on the war with Greater Mausistan, we magnanimously agreed. We have even allowed them to claim their “superior” technology as a factor. Why quibble when we know we are worshiped as gods?


The cessation of hostilities has allowed us to focus our attentions on more deserving enemies:


Needless to say, we were not fooled by such pathetic tactics. Our war with Greater Mausistan ended abruptly. Our soldiers are home just in time for the holidays, and peace reigns.

Some of our troops are finding it hard to adjust.


And the dogs are finding that holiday cheer can be humiliating.

While we are discovering that holiday cheer can be hazardous.


If we survive this truce, it will be nothing short of miraculous.

A Fragile Peace
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Happy Hour Discurso

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Today’s opining on the public discourse.

It may be Christmas Eve, but stupid never takes a holiday. And Ann Coulter, the diva of Greater Wingnuttia, is attempting to take the crown:

The other day, my friend Ron Chusid had an item arguing that Ann Coulter’s piece on Sarah Palin was clear evidence of “the wrong direction the conservative movement is moving in” and the dominance of “anti-intellectualism” on the right.

I finally read Coulter’s piece, and I have to admit, it’s even more inane than I expected. Coulter, heralded Palin’s selection as “Conservative of the Year” and applauded the Alaska governor’s role in politics. To hear Coulter tell it, Palin is a hero because she sent “the left into a tailspin of wanton despair.”

Who cares if Palin was qualified to be President? She was running with John McCain! There was no chance that ticket was going to place her anywhere near the presidency. In fact, I can’t think of a better place to put someone you wanted to keep away from the White House than on a ticket with McCain.

Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode.

Got that? Palin is necessarily wonderful because liberals didn’t like her. (That plenty of independents and Republicans found the thought of her vice presidency horrifying is irrelevant.)

Now, I realize that Coulter is a circus clown, and quite possibly a liberal plant meant to make conservatives look ridiculous as part of some kind of satirical performance art, but over the course of nearly 2,000 words, Coulter couldn’t actually point to any of Palin’s genuine strengths. Coulter blasted the media, Democrats, women she finds insufficiently attractive, and John McCain, but in applauding the greatness of Sarah Palin, she neglected to mention anything that makes Sarah Palin great, outside of Coulter’s disdain for Palin’s detractors.

I hope she is a liberal plant, because the idea of someone this fucking ridiculous actually being taken seriously, even by the Limbaugh lobotomites, is just depressing.

Karl Rove tries to be a close runner-up:

Yesterday, a water main break in Maryland trapped a dozen commuters in their cars and sent rescuers scrambling to pull motorists from frigid floodwaters. Despite the fact that officials had been warning for years of the dangers of the crumbling pipe system, Maryland did not have the money to make the necessary repairs. As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, the water main break is a wake-up call for the need for massive infrastructure spending by the federal government.

Just hours after the water main break, however, Karl Rove belittled the idea of infrastructure spending on Fox News, calling it “goofy, pie-in-the-sky spending ideas,” and agreed with host Rich Lowry that infrastructure spending doesn’t “make[] any economic sense”:

ROVE: What we’ve got to worry about some of these sort of goofy, pie-in-the-sky spending ideas in which this wisdom of the government is substituted for the wisdom of private individuals in the market, and there we have every right to question. For example, look, I’m in favor of infrastructure spending, but let’s be honest about it. It’s not stimulative. […]

Think Progress really has things too easy. Their blog is dedicated to refuting silly right-wing statements, and when people like Rove say that things like desperately-needed infrastructure spending is a “goofy, pie-in-the-sky” idea, it’s altogether too simple for even a pressed-for-time unpaid blogger such as myself to shoot them down. Three words: Works Projects Administration.

Bush isn’t a good enough dancer for the fancy footwork this little backtrack requires:

Only a day after issuing a presidential pardon to Isaac Robert Toussie, a real estate scammer from Brooklyn, President Bush decided to reverse the pardon, after it emerged that Toussie’s father had contributed almost $30,000 to the Republican party.

Pardons are absolute. They can’t be reviewed or reconsidered or overturned, even by the president who issued them. According to the White House press release, President Bush had sent a “Master Warrant of Clemency” with 19 names to the Pardon Attorney at DOJ to execute. But he hadn’t executed it yet. In other words, the White House is claiming none of these folks had actually been pardoned yet. So the president can just send word now not to ‘execute’ that one pardon.

If you want to know who Toussie is, Steve Benen has a blistering rundown. Basically, the reason why Bush is trying to walk back this pardon is because it stinks even to those who think that pardons for cash are ordinary business.

Now, all of these folks have displayed stunning stupidity, but for sheer tone-deaf, misogynistic, idiotic, must-be-missing-a-brain fuckuppedness, you really can’t beat Dennis Prager:

As Paul Krugman pointed out, if you’re a right winger –no matter what crazy, f*&ked up thought you utter, it’s A-OK.
Case in point is wingnut extraordinare Dennis Prager. Here’s a sample:

The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is not in the mood and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband.

It gets more preposterous from there. In right-wing culture, it’s always the ladies that are at fault.

This is a major reason many husbands clam up. A man whose wife frequently denies him sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most men will never tell their wives why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their wives. They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

I think James Dobson has it wrong. It’s right-wing freaks like Prager who want to destroy the institution of marriage. Yet this nut is a frequent guest on CNN. Why does he get the megaphone that he does?

Because our mainstream media is simultaneously dazzled by the brazen batshit i
nsanity of the right, and terrified of getting hit in the face by them.

There’s plenty more, but alas, I am out of time. A very merry Squidmas Eve to you all, my darlings.

Happy Hour Discurso

RIP Universe?

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Criminy. It really has been a long time since I’ve read up on cosmology. No one told me there was another theory about the end of the universe:

A rather harrowing new theory about the death of the universe paints a picture of “phantom energy” ripping apart galaxies, stars, planets and eventually every speck of matter in a fantastical end to time.

Scientifically it is just about the most repulsive notion ever conceived.

The speculative but serious cosmology is described as a “pretty fantastic possibility” even by its lead author, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth University. It explains one possible outcome for solid astronomical observations made in the late 1990s — that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace, and that something unknown is vacuuming everything outward.

The question Caldwell and his colleagues posed is, what would happen if the rate of acceleration increased?

Their answer is that the eventual, phenomenal pace would overwhelm the normal, trusted effects of gravity right down to the local level. Even the nuclear forces that bind things in the subatomic world will cease to be effective.

“The expansion becomes so fast that it literally rips apart all bound objects,” Caldwell explained in a telephone interview. “It rips apart clusters of galaxies. It rips apart stars. It rips apart planets and solar systems. And it eventually rips apart all matter.”

He calls it, as you might guess, the Big Rip.

Tip o’ the shot glass to my dear local friend, who has not only patiently listened to me bitch about the snow, but came through with a quick link when I emailed to say WTF? I’d stumbled across news of the Big Rip at work, whilst trying to hunt down the source of a rather gorgeous picture posted on a Daily Kos blog. I flipped through about ten thousand NASA Images of the Day, and ran across this:


I’ve had to come to a sobering realization. Most of my books on cosmology are severely outdated. Science has passed me by. I’ve been nibbling at cosmology by following a few science blogs, most notably Bad Astronomy, but the stuff on my shelf is from the Clinton era. Methinks it is time to get something a little more recent. Suggestions very welcome.

As for the image that led me to discover just how paltry my current knowledge is, I found it. It’s the Bug Nebula. Isn’t it spectacular?


I can’t wait until the snow has melted and I can go raid the bookstore. I loves me some cosmology, and it looks like there’s been some excitement while I’ve been slacking.

In the meantime, I’m spending Christmas with chaos theory. What’s on your holiday reading list?

RIP Universe?

Hilzoy Has Some Thoughts

jacob

Hilzoy borrows the Smack-o-Matic and gets to work on the banks:

From the AP:

“Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

[snip]

The super-rich seem to me, during the past few decades, to have wafted off into their own alternate universe, in which of course they are entitled to have their employers pay them not just large salaries, not just multi-million dollar bonuses every year, but the bills for everything that ordinary people pay for; in which flying on public airlines seems to them the way taking the public buses seems to much of the middle class; in which any possible contact with what the rest of us take to be reality has been airbrushed away by vast quantities of money.

Under normal circumstances, I’d think: nice work if you can get it, and worry about the effects of massive inequality on public life. But these are not normal times. The very people who are getting these bonuses and chauffeurs and private jets and financial planners have just sent the entire global economy into a nosedive. They have caused massive amounts of money to disappear. They are getting bailed out for their mistakes by the rest of us — the people who, if we’re lucky, get to fly coach, and if we’re not, drive across the country or take a bus.

If they had any shame at all, they would stop. More than that: if they had any sense at all of how angry a lot of us are getting, sheer prudence would do the trick. This is our money. We are giving it to them to get all of us out of a problem that they caused. They should bear that in mind, not treat us as if we were one great big cookie jar.

Amen, sister.

I think all of us who have been watching the disparity between how the financial industry and the auto industry have been treated respectively, and come to pretty much the same conclusions Hilzoy has:

I’ve been wondering why such different standards are applied to financial executives and Detroit’s auto workers. Consider:

* The financial executives helped cause the present meltdown. Auto workers did not.

* The financial executives run their firms, and are responsible for their troubles. Auto workers and their union, by contrast, just got themselves a good deal by bargaining with management. That’s their prerogative. I don’t see that they’re any more to blame for the problems of the Big Three than people who accept unduly large cash back bonuses on their new cars would be, had the Big Three miscalculated and given away more in cash-back bonuses than they could afford.

* Financial executives have just destroyed a tremendous amount of value and ruined the global economy. Auto workers have been busy creating useful things.

* In exchange for destroying value, financial executives get paid a whole lot more than auto workers. Orders of magnitude more. They even get multi-million dollar performance bonuses when their firms lose money! And their benefits are a lot more cushy: not just good health care but private jets and chauffeurs!

* Punishing financial executives helps reduce moral hazard. Punishing auto workers does not.

Honestly: what sense does it make to stick it to a bunch of auto workers while letting the financial executives off scot-free?

Answer: none whatsoever. But, you see, UAW donates to Dems and the financial industry largely lines Con pockets, henceforth the disparity.

But there’s an opportunity here to play political aikido. Hilzoy quotes rok for dean, who shows us the way:

…By way of comparison, in Europe, an average CEO only makes 22 times as much as an average worker, and in Japan, only 17 times as much.

If America wants to be competitive again, we need to reduce CEO pay to a level comparable to CEO pay in Europe and Japan. I know exactly how to accomplish this feat. The UAW should agree to immediately lower U.S. union worker pay to a level equal to the level paid by their non-union, non-American competitors. In return, auto CEO’s must agree to permanently lower their compensation to only 20 times that of an average union worker.

Once this has been accomplished, Congress must move to apply the same pay standards to AIG and all of the financial institutions that took one penny of taxpayer money from the TARP fund.”

Isn’t that a beautiful idea? Quid pro fucking quo, baby. If the Cons want us to be so much like foreign competitors, if they think pay disparities between American and foreign workers are such an issue, the solution is elegantly simple: everybody gets to play follow-the-leader with Japan. Including our hugely overcompensated CEOs.

Fair, after all, is fair.

Hilzoy Has Some Thoughts

A Second Front

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While the dog and his minions cast aspersions on our science while channeling their energies into weapons systems we’d discarded long ago, we discover that a second front has opened:


We suffered losses in a sneak attack from Greater Mausistan, but are happy to report that the situation is being handled:


Good intelligence wins wars. We will soon bring Greater Mausistan to its knees. Our kung fu is better than their kung fu – as the dogs will soon discover:


As the old song says, “Those cats were fast as lightning.” Oh, but we are!

A Second Front

Happy Hour Discurso

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Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Weather update: this fucking sucks. I made it to work past all the wonderful accidents, the roads are freezing, and more snow is on the way. Isn’t it Christmas yet?

Argh.

But at least there’s good news:

By now, the list of problems — structural, practical, ideological, historical — facing the Republican Party is pretty familiar. Time’s Michael Scherer makes the compelling case today that the economic crisis, in addition to contributing to the GOP’s electoral defeats, presents the party with a perilous future and threatens the Republicans’ fundamental identity.

Liquidity traps are fought with government interventions. They are fought successfully with big ones. Republicans now face the real possibility of a generation of American voters who will see government not as the problem, but as the solution.

The last time America faced such a major economic retrenchment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with a massive expansion of government spending and regulation, new programs like Social Security and new protections for unions and workers, which were controversial at the time, but which proved to be popular over the long haul. It took leaders like Goldwater more than two decades to gain some significant popular traction in opposition to Roosevelt’s vision. Conservative economic ideas did not really impose themselves on the White House until 1981, more than 40 years after the bulk of the New Deal era had been established.

In the face of this peril, conservatives find themselves without leadership, direction, or even a cogent ideological response to the crisis. Conservative lodestars, like Dick Cheney, are warning of Herbert Hoover times if Republicans don’t open up the federal pocketbooks. Even President Bush has admitted that he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” And he did not succeed, clearing the way for much more abandoning to come.


[snip]

So, what’s going to happen? Scherer predicts Republicans will “retrench to a guerrilla war,” and use EFCA to characterize Democrats as the “party of big labor.” (Look out, Democrats are on the side of working Americans! Eek!) It hardly sounds like a recipe for success.


Not really, no. And that’s all to the good, considering that the Cons’s ideas, frankly, suck leper donkey dick.

And in even better news, it looks like KBR’s chickens may finally come home to roost:

Controversial military contractor KBR has racked up quite a record of endangering the lives of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq. Over the years, the former Halliburton subsidiary has been accused of everything from giving troops ice tainted with “traces of body fluids and putrefied remains” to ignoring warnings of unsafe wiring that led to troop deaths.

Earlier this month, attorneys for 16 members of the Indiana National Guard filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that they “knowingly exposed the soldiers to a cancer-causing toxic chemical.” In a special report last night, CBS News revealed that KBR knew of the toxic exposure to hexavalent chromium long before it informed the guardsmen…

I hope these lawsuits succeed. This is one company that needs to cease to exist.

In ever more excellent news, we have less than a month of Bush stupidity to deal with. In slightly less good news, that means he and his minions are working overtime to try to convince us that he was actually a wonderful president who did all kinds of spiffy stuff, like destroy our civil liberties to keep us “safe:”

As part of the apparent Bush Legacy Project, we’ve been hearing quite a bit — from the president on down — about Bush’s record of keeping America safe from terrorist attacks since 2002.

The latest comes by way of Ed Gillespie, a White House aide and former RNC chairman, who wants Americans to remember a key “fact”:

Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.

First, this is plainly false. In the fall of 2001, someone (presumably scientist Bruce Ivins) launched an anthrax attack on the country using the U.S. postal system. Five people were killed, 17 were injured, and millions had the bejesus scared out of them. Why so many like to pretend this didn’t happen is a mystery to me.

Second, Gillespie focuses on “our homeland,” but it’s worth noting that U.S. troops have been subjected to terrorist attacks overseas, as have our allies.

And third, this notion that evaluating Bush’s legacy on counter-terrorism should start on Sept. 12, 2001, is just odd. Gillespie and others seem to be arguing, “Just so long as one overlooks the terrorism that killed 3,000 people in 2001, Bush’s record on domestic security is excellent.”

They’ll try to revise all of their insanity out of existence. They’ve been doing it for eight years – why stop now?

There are signs that the endless swallowing of bullshit spewing from the right is starting to taper off. There are even hints that the MSM is starting to get a wee bit skeptical when it comes to wild right-wing claims. I nominate this one for Question of the Month:

Earlier this month, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) released a report citing “more than 650 international scientists” who back up his claims that manmade global warming is a hoax. This list was a revision of his original compilation of 400 names earlier in the year. That list fell apart, however, when experts pointed out that many of those people 1) had no background in climate science, or 2) “demanded to be taken off, since they didn’t disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change at all.”

Inhofe’s new report with 650 “experts” doesn’t seem to be much better. Anja Eichler, one of the scientists cited by Inhofe as believing that half of the earth’s warming is caused by the sun, said that her work was “misinterpreted”; in fact, she believes that “Earth’s temperature does not change randomly — it changes when it is driven to do so by an external forcing.” TNR’s Bradford Plumer also found others on this list new who appear to support the theory of manmade global warming.

Yesterday on MSNBC, David Shuster grilled Inhofe on his report, bringing up the case of Eichler. After pointing out all the problems with the report, Shuster asked, “Senator, if there is a hoax, isn’t it this report of yours?” [emphasis added]

Beauty. More reporting like this, please.

Sorry to keep this short, but I have to slog through snow and ice to go fetch a soda before returning to glumly staring at traffic cams and wondering how I’ll get home tonight. Snowy weather sucks.

Happy Hour Discurso

Black Bart the Pirate Cat Sez: Submit!

jacob


I know it be the Solstice, and ye’re quaffing the eggnog, but remember, me hearties: stupid never takes a holiday. We Elitist Bastards must be there to fight it!

Get your submissions in to [email protected] before the end of Friday, or risk the terrible fate of bein’ left on the docks with nothing but a hangover and a halibut.

Black Bart the Pirate Cat Sez: Submit!

For Those Who Fail To Understand Why There's Such an Uproar

jacob

A lot of people get why Rick Warren is such a rancid choice for giving the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. I wish Obama would get it instead of babbling about “inclusiveness.” Perhaps he just needs a short, sharp lesson in why this has been such a cruel slap in the face to the LGBT community.

Remember that Warren was one of the big-name supporters of Prop 8. Here is one of the newlyweds he’s victimizing with his hate (h/t):

I often wonder if the people fighting to strip away our marriage really stop to think of the individuals involved, to really put a face on the news story and the nameless numbers. They are great about putting out press releases, commercials, and emails talking about the dangerous homosexual agenda, but I wonder if they think about the people they are working so hard to take things from.

I wonder how they would feel waking up one day to read a headline in a newspaper that their marriage is not valid and is over. Talk about being breaking news- the two people who are directly affected, whose marriage is being dissolved, have no real say in it.

Think about it. Think about being told your marriage is a sin, that you’re no better than a pedophile. Imagine how much that must hurt.

And if you still have trouble understanding their pain, try reading this succinct summation:

But when I heard Warren had been invited to pray at Obama’s inauguration, I felt sick to my stomach. I cried. It wasn’t a judgment; it wasn’t an intellectual assessment; it wasn’t a political strategy. It was just genuine pain.

But it was nothing — NOTHING — compared to what I felt when I started reading diaries here on Daily Kos, full of smug, ignorant pontification on how we need to not be SO ANGRY or SO HURT, and lumping us in with the “What Obama is doing wrong” crowd, and ignoring that our response to the Warren invitation is a completely separate phenomenon.

Let me explain something very carefully, for those who don’t know: none of what’s going on in the fight for LGBT rights is part of a strategy, as should be apparent by our lack of a cohesive movement and any viable leaders. It’s a true grassroots uprising among people who got a taste of freedom and decided we wanted more. We were no longer willing to settle for a long, slow, state by state battle, for death by a thousand cuts, for an extended period of second class citizenship.

[snip]

You keep telling us we need to reach out and build bridges to the religious right. Do you really think there is any point at all in telling us we need to reach out to homophobes and bigots, to the people who run the churches that abuse our youth and shove us out the doors, that have brainwashed our parents into rejecting us, that tell us they “love” us while they knife us in the hearts with their laws?

Why don’t you tell them to reach out to us? We’re the ones who have been wronged and harmed, disenfranchised, electro-shocked, had our kids taken away in ugly custody battles, lost our homes when our partner died, been thrown out of the hospital rooms of our lovers, had wills overturned and benefits denied. We’re the ones who had our equality thrown up for a popular vote, and whose rights are denied us in the constitutions of 29 states. Telling us to reach out to them is like saying battered women need to reach out to their abusers, or children to the priest who molested them.

Read this diary explaining the impact anti-gay bigotry has on loving families. A seven year-old child watches as his mother tries to show her parents that the family she was creating with her partner was one worthy of love:

Its funny, my first experience with hatred and bigotry was not from some outside source, but from within the people who I thought loved me the most. I still feel that bitter feeling I felt all those years ago still bubbling up inside me. I have never told anyone about this moment, not even my fiancee because it is still to painful for me to talk about. I cannot physically speak about this without crying, and it is entirely too complicated to try to speak about.

We got to my grandparents house and I remember having a feeling of pure tension. That is not a feeling that I had ever felt before that point. We stood on the doorstep together, all of us wrapped up in our own worry. Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the door opened and we were let inside. There were chairs in the sitting room, two on one side, two on the other and us kids were told to go play in the TV room. I went to the toy chest that had been there for all of my life and pulled out the legos that I had gotten last christmas from my grandma and grandpa. About fifteen minutes went by before the yelling started.

Once again, I don’t remember what was said, I just remember the emotions behind the words. I remember my mom’s absolute frustration with my grandparents lack of open-mindedness. I remember the hatred that dripped in my grandma’s speech. I had never heard her talk like that. Her voice was usually a sweet old lady’s voice, but in that moment, I decided that was the voice of hatred. I remember a huge clatter and my mom screaming to us that it was time to leave, and I remember Rosanne’s black eye.

My grandma had hurled a chair at Rosanne’s face. Yes, one of those aluminum fold up chairs. She got hit in the face and ended up with a black eye.

If the anger spilling from the LGBT community right now perplexes you, keep this in mind:

Yes, we’ve come a long way. But we suffered, struggled and crawled our way here… sometimes LITERALLY crawled to get here.

We endured hate, beatings, death, torture, shunning, excommunications and discrimination to get even just this small part of equality. (and when I say “we” I mean I.. I have endured EVERY thing on that list, as have many gay and lesbians here).

So, give us a bit of slack when we get angry and hurt when someone who represents, and is an integral part of, all of that hate and torture and death is giving the prayer that will bring in what we hoped will be a new and hopeful presidency.

We’ve endured a hell of a lot to get even here. There is my story, in a nutshell. So, please, don’t presume to tell us when we should be ‘calm’. I’ve spent nearly four decades being ‘calm.’

It strikes me that asking people to build bridges and reach out to embrace those who are fighting to take away their rights is awfully ridiculous, considering that battle is still raging. There will come a time for outreach and understanding. It hasn’t arrived just yet.

And how, exactly, do you reach out to hypocrites? Maybe we can start with a little lesson in what’s contained within the Bible:

The religious right picks and chooses which parts of the Bible they want to apply. And they choose based on which outsider group they would like to hate next. First, they emphasized slavery in the Bible when they wanted to hate black people. Now, they emphasize the parts condemning homosexuality so they can hate gay people.

[snip]

Now the Bible says that a man shall not lie with another man. That is true. But it also says, in the same exact book, that adultery is an abomination. And the just punishment for this sin is execution. So, who will execute the first adulterer? Please step on up. May the one without any Biblical sin cast the first stone.

Here is a question no one can answer — and lucky for the right wing, the media never bothers to ask — why do you only focus on the part of the Bible against homosexuality but not on the part against adultery? It’s one thing to say you’re against adultery; it’s another to take away their rights. How come no religious figure in this country has mounted a campaign to take away the rights of adulterers? Let alone execute them.

I think this is a question we should be asking a lot more often, myself. It could shake at least a few bigots into realizing that they’re just one literal reading away from finding themselves in the same boat with gays.

Of course, the likelihood of them having an epiphany is minimal. There’s a surer way to win this battle for equality:

A September poll showed that two-thirds of those under 35 support same-sex marriage. The most active opponents to same-sex marriage largely have been those who have received the dreaded letter from the AARP. I believe that the solution to marriage equality sprouts from these statistics.

To win marriage equality, you must live them to death.

(Consider this your pallette cleanser – it’s wonderful and whimsical and funny as hell. Enjoy, then join me back here for the wrap.)

To put everything in perspective for those perplexed by the outpouring of anger and anguish, this diary by a man who is able to understand by analogy is exactly right. He explains that he and his brother were abused by fundamentalist adoptive parents who “thought of my brother and I as their ministry instead of as their children.” They beat them, tried to cast the devil out of them, and kept one brother in their home with lies and threats because they were getting state money for him. His brother remembers the aftermath:

When he turned 30 I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t care if I went to jail for it… I got him out of their house. I remember the day he came to live with my wife and I(six months after we got married). He was so broken, but so alive too. He had spent those years doing research on his own and writing books. Down there in the basement.

He was so happy to be out. He called that day his independance day.

We found out that my parents had been lying all along. They had never had control.

My brother was so angry. He wished they would burn in hell forever. He wished they would go to jail for the rest of their lives.

At first I tried to argue with him saying that they are still our parents, but then I saw his look… the look where he retreated… where he accepted that nobody cared about what he felt… and then I couldn’t disagree with him.

I remember that. And I realize that gay people are experiencing that same thing right now. And even though I want to say that they should try not to be so extreme and how these people are still people…

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was wrong. Be angry. Tell everyone how angry you are. Fuck them if they can’t take it. Fuck me if I can’t take it.

You deserve to be free.

Do you understand now? Good.

The LGBT community, once more, has been kicked in the face. This time, it’s no good telling them to calm down and be patient and inclusive and reach out to those who think they’re evil – these things won’t help them. All they do is allow bigots to feel better about themselves.

I know Rick Warren’s starting to feel a little less certain about his stand. You can see evidence that the outcry is reaching even his religion-plugged ears:

So Rick Warren pulled the anti-gay language from his church Web site. The site used to explicitly ban gays from membership in the church.

We’re getting through. The din may even be loud enough for Obama to hear, and eventually shows he understands.

Keep shouting.

For Those Who Fail To Understand Why There's Such an Uproar