Wednesday Male Beauty

White House Bashes Liberals in Defending Its Many Broken Promises

Silly me. I thought Barack Obama was not the typical politician who will say whatever is necessary to get elected and then turn his back on those who put him in office. Stupidly, I actually fell for the lines he repeated during the campaign about delivering full equality to LGBT Americans. Two years later, we all know that Obama's campaign promises are about as good as a three dollar bill. And now our self-described "fierce advocate" is peevish because I and others like me are none too happy realizing that we were lied to. I did reluctantly attend the local Democrat Committee last night and one thing I seem to keep discovering is that the dissatisfaction of the LGBT community with Obama seems to run all across the various elements of the Democratic Party base. Faced with discontent and lack of enthusiasm across the party, what has Obama decided to do? Attack the party base through his hapless press secretary, Robert Gibbs. The Hill reports as follows concerning Gibbs' remarks:
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The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.
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During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.
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The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
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The White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in healthcare reform; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military.
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Just last week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described Obama political adviser David Axelrod as a “human pretzel” for his explanation of the administration’s position on gay marriage. Axelrod had explained that Obama opposes same-sex marriage but favors equal benefits for partners in gay relationships.
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The sin of those who have criticized Obama? Believing that words have meaning and that promises are just that, promises and not something to be discarded when they become inconvenient. In what I view as a misguided column in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus sides with Gibbs and the White House. To me, however, what is more telling is what some of Obama's critics are saying whom Marcus quotes. Here are some highlights:
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Apparently not. Responding to Gibbs, Jane Hamsher, of the blog Firedoglake, derided Obama's record of "corporatist capitulation" and noted, "Spiro Agnew -- sorry, Robert Gibbs -- says ‘the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.' Well, the Obama in the White House is not representative of the Obama who organized, campaigned, raised money and ran for office, so I guess it's a wash."
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Marcus does get one thing right, however, when she says this:
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In the old days of press-bashing, it was sound advice not to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. The Gibbs backlash shows how foolhardy it is to argue with people who don't even have to buy ink.
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The Democrats up for election need the base energized. Attacking their spokesperson is not exactly a means to accomplish that. In deed, it is doing the exact opposite.

More DADT Casualties - A Top West Point Cadet and a Navy Sailor

The blatantly religious based (and I would argue, unconstitutional) discrimination policy known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell apparently has racked up two new casualties. This time it's a top rated cadet at West Point and a Navy sailor who foolishly had a photo of his boyfriend on his cell phone. And who benefits? Of course, no one except self-congratulatory Christianist who give Christianity a bad name and whose ultimate goal is to undermine the U.S. Constitution. I'm sure Elaine Donnelly had an orgasm over the news. And what about our "fierce advocate in the White House? He's apparently sitting around with his thumb stuck somewhere I won't mention. These incidents of legalized religious discrimination disgust me and based on the e-mails I have received from readers have truly outraged a number of folks. First, here are some highlights from Pam Spaulding on the decision of Cadet Katherine Miller (ranked 9th in her class) to out herself and resigned from West Point:
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Ranked # 9 in her class overall, she routinely "super-maxes" her physical fitness tests. One of her blogs was featured in the Sunday print edition of the Washington Post as part of "The Gray Zone: West Point on Leadership." In her resignation letter, she cites the kinds of experiences she is unwilling to continue to endure: I have created a heterosexual dating history to recite to fellow cadets when they inquire. I have endured unwanted approaches by male cadets for fear of being accused as a lesbian by rejecting or reporting these events. I have been coerced into ignoring derogatory comments towards homosexuals for fear of being alienated for my viewpoint. In short, I have lied to my classmates and compromised my integrity and my identity by adhering to existing military policy.
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Miller will be transferring to Yale University this fall on a Point Foundation Scholarship. She has indicated her desire to become an Army Officer should the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy be removed, and gay and lesbian people allowed to serve freely. "This is a loss to the Academy and to the Army," said Becky Kanis, West Point '91. Kanis is Chair of Knights Out, and a former Captain and company commander. "We keep losing talented people needlessly while we wait for the Pentagon's 'review.' " Miller has been blogging anonymously about lesbian culture at West Point at velvetparkmedia.com as "Private Second Class Citizen."
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Five star General Douglas MacArthur is buried here in Norfolk and when one visits the MacArthur Memorial - which is an interesting tourist stop, by the way - one hears much about "duty, honor, country." It's hard to uphold honor when service members are forced to live a lie so that religious bigots can feel better about themselves.
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The second DADT casualty is Jarod McIntosh who had been serving his country aboard a Navy submarine. His offense? He was discovered to be gay via a photo of his boyfriend on his cell phone. Queerity has these details:
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He's being discharged from the Navy because he accidentally brought his camera-equipped cell phone into a submarine, which is a restricted area. Yes, that was a dumb move. But even dumber is what happened afterward.
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His superiors confiscated his phone to ensure it didn't contain any classified material. It didn't. But there were what sounds like intimate photos of Jared and his boyfriend Doug. Jared is being discharged not for breaking the rules about bringing audio-video equipment into a restricted area, but for being gay. He's appealing the separation.
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A video clip of McIntosh discussing the situation can be found here.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Afghanistan: Your U.S. Tax Dollars at Work (Warning: Graphic Photo)

As any reader who has read this blog for any period of time, it's no secret that I believe that the USA's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq have always been nothing more than a delusional fool's errand sold to the American public via the deliberate lies of Chimperator George W. Bush - the nation's village idiot - and Emperor Palpatine Cheney whose moral standards seem to mirror those of Darth Vader at his worse. If the U.S. was going to do anything, we needed to do limited, surgical strikes to take out and cripple elements of Al Qaeda. That would have struck back against those who launched a terror attack on the USA. Sadly, Barack Obama is continuing the Chimperator's fool's errand and - I believe in the long run - sowing seeds of long term anti-USA hatred. I will be the first to admit that our enemies in Al Qaeda and the Taliban are committing horrific atrocities. But without the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, would their be so many atrocities, or has the USA's presence increased and intensified them? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, the USA is committing its own atrocities that will only engender hatred towards us for many years. The following photo is of civilian victims of a U.S. air strike gone bad. It is graphic and disturbing, but every American needs to know what is being done in their name.
* Andrew Sullivan notes as follows concerning this photo :
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Asan Bibi, 9, (R) and her sister Salima,13, (L) stand in the hallway of Mirwais hospital October 13, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. Both were burned when a helicopter fired into their tent in the middle of the night on October 3rd, according to their father. Three members of the family were killed in the incident. The family belongs to the Kuchi ethnic tribe, nomads living in tents out in the open desert whom are very vulnerable to a war they have little understanding of.
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Each and every American bears some responsibility for this horror. With two daughters of my own, words do not begin to describe the unrelenting hatred I would bear towards anyone or any nation that did this to one or more of my children. And Obama thinks we are winning? Would he be making the same disingenuous statements if one of his daughters was the deformed girl in the photo? I suspect not. And again, I can only ponder WTF is wrong with him? It's far past time that he stops listening to the bullshit emanating from the Pentagon. Here are more of Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the Afghanistan nightmare:
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As we fight an unwinnable war in an ungovernable country, the enemy simply ratchets up the evil by targeting more and more innocent civilians, especially women and children. . . . then you see an image like that above (having scanned many of them I feel numb from the images of agony and despair) which was the result of a Coalition air-strike gone awry and you see the awful, horrible, gut-wrenching moral dilemma we are in.
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I still favor withdrawal as soon as possible. I do not in any way discount the moral price. If I thought there was any way to win, my calculus might change. But I don't. And we're broke. And evil like this occurs tragically every day all over the world. The art of politics and warfare is the art of the possible within certain limits. We've reached them - and then some. It gives me no pleasure to say this, and my heart is torn. But politics is not the art of the heart in the end. It's the art of the mind.

American Bar Association Urges All States to Allow Gay Marriage

While the boyfriend cynically said that the motivation is that the divorce bar wants to get in on the action in same sex splits (currently such splits are governed by simple contract and property law law), the American Bar Association ("ABA"),at its annual meeting in San Francisco, adopted a resolution today calling upon all states in the USA to allow same sex couples to marry. Whatever the motivation, I applaud the ABA's action and hope that the resolution may perhaps make a few people reconsider their opposition to gay marriage. Obviously, the action will have no impact on the far right Christianists who view homophobia as a cash cow and a means to make themselves feel morally superior to others. The Los Angeles Times has coverage on the ABA action. Here are some highlights:
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The country's largest lawyers' group has backed a resolution calling on all state legislatures to let same-sex couples get married.
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The American Bar Association voted at its annual meeting Tuesday in San Francisco to support the measure sponsored by the New York State Bar Association. New York State Bar Association President Stephen P. Younger says the resolution passed overwhelmingly, with only one speaker voicing opposition during debate.
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As The American Foundation for Equal Rights (which backed the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger) noted in relevant part as follows to the San Francisco Sentinel,
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By approving a resolution in support of marriage equality, the ABA has confirmed what the federal courts, the state’s chief executive and the state’s chief law enforcement officer have determined in Perry v. Schwarzenegger—that excluding gay men and lesbians from marriage violates their constitutional right to due process and equal protection and causes significant harm to them and their families.

All Mexican States Must Recognize Gay Marriages

Mexico just rocketed ahead of the USA. Its Supreme Court ruled today that ALL states in Mexico must recognized same sex marriage that are performed in Mexico City (the Court upheld that law last week) even if those other states do not authorize gay marriages themselves. This is obviously what should be the case in the USA and what would be the case but for the federal DOMA and - in my view - unconstitutional state DOMA laws and anti-gay state constitutional amendments like Virginia's. Many in the USA like to look down on Mexico, but as of today, Mexico makes a mockery of the false freedom of religion that this country claims to have for all. Unless, of course you are gay and don't live your life in accordance with the religious views of Christo-fascists. It is but one more example why I keep asking this question of Barack Obama: WTF is wrong with you? Here are highlights from the Washington Post on today's ruling in Mexico:
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MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that all 31 states must recognize same-sex marriages performed in the capital, though its decision does not force those states to begin marrying gay couples in their territory. In a 9-2 decision, the tribunal cited an article of the constitution requiring states to recognize legal contracts drawn up elsewhere.
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Mexico City's same-sex marriage law, enacted in March, extends to wedded gay couples the right to adopt children, to jointly apply for bank loans, to inherit wealth and to be covered by their spouses' insurance policies. Some of those [e.g., adoption] may end up applying only in the capital.
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One more country moves ahead of the USA. One can only wonder how many more will make the USA look backward and homophobic before full legal equality under the civil laws is available to all Americans.

Tuesday Male Beauty

Hoover's Granddaughter - Think Carefully About Your Opposition to Gay Marriage

Margaret Hoover - whose grandfather, Herbert Hoover was clearly on the wrong side of history economically as the USA fell into the Great Depression - has an op-ed piece at Fox News that chides Republicans and so-called conservatives to think twice before they launch into further opposition of gay marriage. In the long term her piece makes perfect sense: the younger generations of voters support same sex marriage, so long term the issue is a loser. The question thus becomes one of whether or not the GOP/conservatives will put short turn opportunism and demagoguery ahead of long term common sense. So far, the GOP seems to care nothing about the long term view and would rather look to short term opportunities to gay bait and court a generation of voters that is literally dying off. Here are highlights from Hoover's column:
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As a conservative Republican representing the next generation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians, I encouraged the readers of FoxNews.com last January to take a careful look at the arguments and evidence in the Prop 8 trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
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The case was presented by a constitutional conservative, Ted Olson, who helped found the Federalist Society, successfully argued Bush v. Gore to the Supreme Court (among fifty-five other cases), and was George W. Bush’s Solicitor General. Working with his Democratic legal partner David Boies, Olson sought to prove that marriage equality is a constitutional question, not a partisan issue.
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Among the seventeen witnesses Olson and Boies called to the stand were experts in areas of psychology, political science, economics, socio medical sciences and history. Economists testified to the economic harm caused to same-sex couples and their children; political scientists to their political vulnerability; sociologists and psychologists to the societal stigma associated with homosexuality; historians to the history of marriage shedding its discriminatory restrictions over time.
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Other testimony included Ryan Kendal, a young gay man who failed a “conversion therapy” attempt to alter his sexuality from gay to straight and the Republican Mayor of San Diego, a former police chief, who testified that “if government tolerates discrimination against anyone for any reason, it becomes an excuse for the public to do exactly the same thing.”
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Surprisingly, the defense’s two lone witnesses also offered compelling reasons to favor of marriage equality. They testified that allowing homosexuals to marry would increase family stability and improve the lives of their children; that sexual orientation is unchangeable; that gays and lesbians have faced a long history of discrimination, including Prop 8.
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The irony of this case is that Judge Walker is not a liberal activist judge but one whose career has proven him to be a tempered judge, true to the Reagan-Bush conservative jurisprudence that he was nominated to represent on the bench.
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The Supreme Court has previously ruled that the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right. When an unpopular minority is denied the right to marry, it is indeed the role of the courts to protect the rights of that minority, especially when a majority would deny them. This is why Judge Walker’s opinion reads, “That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
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[C]onservatives have a flawed history with civil rights, a trend that began when Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. . . . The potential consequence that conservatives land on the wrong side of civil rights history again is the alienation of an entire generation of voters. With polling definitively indicating that Americans under age 30 overwhelmingly favor gay rights, with a majority supporting gay marriage according to the Pew Millennial Attitudes report published in February this year, there are multiple reasons for conservatives to think carefully before digging in their heels against gay marriage.

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It's a shame that Hoover seems light years ahead of Barack Obama on this issue.

America Rushes Head Long Toward Third World Status

Having been born in 1952, I have witnessed America at its peak of power - both in terms of industrial power and innovation and material progress. Now, it seems I am witnessing an accelerating decline driven largely by the refusal of too many politicians to care for the fate of all citizens, stop heaping tax benefits on the increasingly rich, and a concerted effort by the far right to dismantle the U.S. Constitution and make religious and racial based bigotry the hallmark of the nation. Old Europe has surged ahead of the USA in granting equality to all citizens. Now parts of Latin America are doing so as well. And don't even get me started on the USA's failure to provide a health care safety net to all citizens which would save lives and in my view lower costs because catastrophic illness could be lessened through preventive care. When middle class people increasingly don't go to the doctor because of co-payment costs (or because they have lost employer paid coverage) it is a pretty damning situation. And does anyone care? Certainly not the GOP and its Christianist allies with whom everything is about their own wants and needs. Their motto ought to be "To Hell With Everyone Else" even though it is the opposite of the Christian dogma they claim to worship. Paul Krugman had a column over the weekend that looks at America's descent toward a third world country. It's sobering - and unfortunately it's correct in its analysis. If one wonders how ancient Rome collapsed from within one only need look at the USA's suicide from within and it has nothing to do with the acceptance of homosexuality. Here are some highlights:
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The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.
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Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
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And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
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And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.
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And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.
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[A] large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter. It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
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And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
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How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
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[W]e’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
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So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.