I had an uncle once who doted on his nephews and nieces. He was a hard-drinking, ex-Army MP, ex-Merchant Marine veteran with a lazy approach to life. He’d take us kids out on weekends to buy comic books, and then fall asleep on the couch while we stayed up late rotting our brains with said comic books and late night creature features. He was also a confirmed bachelor almost his entire life. I had a teacher in junior high who was the same age he was, was always asking about him, and as it turned out, had once asked him to marry her, and he turned her down.

Was he gay? I don’t know, and don’t really care. He was my uncle, and his sex life was none of my business (and he didn’t make it mine). I do know that late in life he settled down with a woman and seemed to be happy. Even that isn’t contraindicative, because human lives and relationships are complicated.

I mention this because the press coverage of Lindsey Graham drives me nuts. Once again, here’s another piece speculating on whether he’s gay, and also implying that liberals are mocking him for being gay.

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I am not keen on Hilary Clinton, and Pollitt recognizes that in her peers.

My women college classmates (Radcliffe ‘71) aren’t so excited about Hillary Clinton. An e-mail to our New York City potluck group elicited distinctly modified rapture. They’re bothered by her high-priced speeches and the aura of favor-trading and favor-banking around the Clinton Foundation. They don’t like her Wall Street connections, and they don’t like Bill (a k a the “ick” factor). Plus, she’s not progressive enough. “It’s all so old and tired,” wrote one; “she’s been running forever.” “I’m definitely excited about the prospect of a woman,” another chimed in. “I am weary, not excited, about her in particular, and find it sad that she’s our best hope.” I should mention that these women are demographically much like Hillary (Wellesley ‘69) herself: prosperous, white, highly educated, sixtysomething feminists and professional women. You would think these women, of all people, would be jumping for joy at the prospect of someone so like themselves winning the White House.

Some of us guys, like me (University of Washington, 1979) feel the same way about Clinton. That’s a really good summary of why I’m unenthused.

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Edward Schlosser says, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”. Strangely, he doesn’t give any evidence that he’s at all liberal, and the one personal incident he cites involves a conservative student.

The next week, I got called into my director’s office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.

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NY Magazine has the best summary of the LaCour affair. This is the recent case of a study published by a graduate student that showed the effectiveness of gay & lesbian survey-takers of persuading people to support marriage equality…which has since been found to consist of falsified data. The article summarizes how the study was exposed, and there were grounds for suspicion long before the news broke. Reading the protocols and doing a little math, for instance, revealed that this graduate student had apparently paid out about a million dollars for this survey. And it just unraveled from there.

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