A gay friend writes:

In November, when we vote for the president, there will be a ballot initiative in California in which we will be able to vote on whether or not to amend the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. I think it’s ironic that on the same ballot I will be able to vote for the first black president of the United States, which represents an expansion of civil rights, as well as a ban on same-sex marriage, which represents a contraction of civil rights. Nonetheless, it is heartening to know that for at least 20 weeks I will be an equal resident in California.

I don’t quite agree that having a black presidential candidate represents “an expansion of civil rights” (that right has been present for decades, though the social fabric to make it a practical reality has not been), but I see what he’s saying, and it does underline the “two steps forward, one step back” pattern of social progress.

By the way, if anyone reading this can posit a rational (i.e. non-religious) argument against gay marriage, please post it here — I’d love to hear it.

Oops. The Straight Talk Express just got derailed:

For realsies? Is McCain really the best the ‘publicans could come up with?

Via sotrue

Amazing/moving video from Amnesty International:

“Your signature is more powerful than you think.”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arabist.net:

The Arabist is dedicated to covering the politics and culture of the Arab world. It is published and maintained in Cairo, with contributions from journalists and researchers working in the region.

On the same hosting account are two additional popular blogs covering Arab culture and politics: Hatsheput, on women, society and academia; and 3arabawy, by Cairo-based journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy.

The Arabist came to Birdhouse looking for both WordPress expertise and bandwidth optimization assistance - we’ve been hard at work providing both.

Update: Five days after moving the sites over, many Egyptian ISPs are still pointing at the old host, which means the old “72 hours for global DNS updates” rule of thumb just ain’t true. The journalists are now trying to cover recent Egyptian riots, and many Egyptians aren’t able to see the updates. I’m getting hammered with requests to “do something,” but all I can do is to try and contact the Egyptian ISPs and ask them to please flush their DNS caches. No luck yet. Ah, the joys of running a hosting biz.

Well, I got close, but no cigar. It’s painfully hard to spend three trillion dollars. Even with the Hope Diamond and the Hannah Montana Anti-static Pink Hair Brush in my cart, I was only able to spend around 80% of what the Iraq war will cost us (with veteran care costs included) by 2017. Not much info on the site on where the cost estimates for items below come from; I’m presuming they come from Stiglitz’ book:

“Just counting the zeroes on the $3 trillion price tag of the Iraq War is enough to induce hyperventilation. But what does $3 trillion really mean? It’s difficult even to comprehend a number that big. Well, try filling your shopping cart with what the cost of the Iraq War could buy: healthcare for every American? A new home for every subprime borrower now facing foreclosure? An Ivy League university? You haven’t even gotten started.”

-Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War

Here were the contents of my shopping cart, before I grew tired of making world dreams come true and stopped shopping:

Every responsible state budget means someone gets to swallow some bitter pills when their pet project gets slashed. You can’t reign in government waste and keep everyone happy. I get that.

But Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to shutter 48 of California’s magnificent state parks is not just a blow to people who like to spend their weekends in them — it doesn’t make fiscal sense. Total savings from closing 48 parks? $9 million annually — less than 0.1 percent of the state budget. What can a state buy for $9 mil these days? Meanwhile, the cost to the spiritual and physical health of the state would be incalculable.

The state’s obligation to maintain a few slivers of natural land for public use seems crystal clear. The question, I suppose, is how much land, and at what expense? Fortunately state parks are cheap to run, and we’re talking about tiny specs of real estate in the big picture.

Check the map of proposed closures on the governor’s own site (also as PDF).

Then, let the governor know that Californians won’t make this particular sacrifice, especially not at this miniscule benefit/cost ratio.

After just having spent the last couple of hours watching the Republican half of the ABC debates, I can sort of relate to this poor four-year-old:

(not really). Actually, it was a pretty interesting experience watching the GOPs duke it out. You go through stretches thinking “See, they’re not all idiots! Some of these guys are pretty bril.” Then someone’s real agenda eeps out through the smokescreen and you’re forced to recant.

Listened to a very moving conversation with presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich on the Commonwealth Club podcast the other day, and found myself wondering why he gets such a small sliver of the spotlight. The more I heard, the more I felt myself feeling strongly aligning with his views. Apparently I’m not alone - someone whipped up a simple script to ask where you stand on various key issues, then tells you which candidate should be your guy.

The results are pretty amazing. You’d expect to find Obama and Clinton at or near the top of the pack, while in fact 57% of the 147072 who have taken the poll so far have discovered that Kucinich is their man - or would be, if aligning on issues were the whole story. No other candidate even broke out of the single digits. Of course it’s not, and realistically Kucinich has about as much chance of rising in the polls as he ever has (i.e. very little). But fascinating to see how it stacks up.

Speaks for itself. As Grady says, “How do these guys sleep at night?”

As the neocon backlash continues to swell, the “I told you so” temptation grows. Liberals: Right about the environment, right about the war. On a similar tack, the always astute (though often overly wordy) Mark Morford, for the SF Chronicle:

The hippies had it right all along.

All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

via Tim Bishop

Billy Vegas of puppetgov.com enhances a speech delivered a few months ago on the show “Boston Legal”:

A stunning summation.

Via Weblogsky

Sometimes I feel like I must have eaten some bad fish, had a few terrifying hallucinations, and woken up in Victorian England. CBS 5:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

And here’s an ABC News story on Bush’s top pick for surgeon general James W. Holsinger Jr.: Homosexuality Isn’t Natural or Healthy: “Bush’s Choice for Top Doc Compared Human Genitalia to Pipe Fittings and Said Homosexual Practices Can Cause Injury or Death”

An alien landing here would think reality imitated Saturday Night Live, not the other way ’round. File under: Not Funny.

Claus Christian Malzahn for Spiegel Online, on how the quickest way for a German politician to win public cred and rise in the polls is to take a swipe at America.

Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. … Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States … For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic.

Not sure whether this correlates to Rufus Wainwright having recently moved from New York to Berlin, recording his disgust with the U.S., and rocketing up the European charts (”I’m so tired of America.”) Of course, German politicians may simply be using anti-Americanism as a popularity mechanism, while I don’t think Wainwright is doing that. Either way, the man in the mirror is looking pretty grisly. Those who still doubt that America’s image has been irreparably damaged must be wearing some mighty thick blinders.

Want to subpoena some gubmint email? Might be tough if the correspondents are using addresses @gwb43.com (think about that domain name for a second) rather than @whitehouse.gov.


whois gwb43.com

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET


Who administers TRESPASSERS-W.NET? A little outfit called Coptix. And here’s Karl Rove with a Coptix brochure under his arm. Coptix claims the image has been Photoshopped, the brochure added artificially; Correntwire disagrees.

But let’s not get hung up on the photo. Whether Rove is involved in this or not, the law requires that public business be conducted on a public server. But Karl Rove does about 95% of his email through the RNC-controlled account — which is listed in DNS with a false phone number (illegal). Bypassing government-provided DNS servers gives the RNC the ability to bypass public oversight, to make a quick phone call and change email forwarding options in DNS, or to have email records destroyed, away from taxpayer’s prying eyes. Feeling warm-n-fuzzy yet?

More info.

Thanks Hamrah

Our clothers dryer crapped out last week, and the washer’s not doing so well either. Repairs expensive, time to replace them both. Home Depot offering a honkin’ pile of rebates, and has the unit Consumer Reports likes. Once there, learned that if we open a Home Depot credit card, we could get an additional 10% off. No penalties, what’s not to like?

Read recently that financial institutions cannot legally require you to provide a social security number, so decided to see what would happen if I entered all zeroes in that field. The application was spit back in seconds. Explained my position to the employee, who rang up credit central at HD. The guy I talked to wasted no time in invoking … wait for it … The Patriot Act in defense of the requirement. He didn’t have specifics, but claimed that the act required them to store this information, and that a separate taxpayer ID would not suffice.

I was incredulous. Either Home Depot is hiding behind the war on terror for capitalistic reasons, or the Patriotic Act is more frightening than I thought. I suspected the latter, but realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere in this round, so, with a four-year-old growing quickly impatient, forked over my SS# and took the discount. Tonight did a bit of research and found this at askquestions.org:

If you’d just like to open a bank account or engage in another banking transaction, can a bank force you to provide your social security number? How about fingerprinting you? Are either of these strictly required by law? Not exactly – although if you do not wish to provide your social security number you will have to obtain an alternate taxpayer identification number.

So if their reading of the act is correct, Home Depot was not within their rights to require this information. A little late now, but am curious just how hard a person would have to fight to get Home Depot credit approval without a valid social.

Stunning piece on 60 Minutes last weekend about David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States (Walker runs the Government Accountability Office, “which audits the government’s books and serves as the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.”) He’s a prudent guy with a frightening message: The U.S. is radically over-promised, fiscally speaking. The numbers just don’t add up, and we’re heading for a fall - possibly financial collapse - if dramatic changes aren’t made, and fast.

Example: The first wave of Baby Boomers will hit the Medicare system in early 2008, and soon that system will be 5 times more overburdened than Social Security is now. He calls Bush’s prescription drug plan “the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s” — with one stroke of the pen, Medicare’s obligations were stretched by 40-75% over the next 75 years. We’d have to have $8 trillion invested in treasury bills today to begin to cover the bill. The reality: We’ve got zip. A pile of promises backed by thin air.

His message isn’t new - he’s been trying to get the word into the ears of politicians for years, but they don’t want to hear it. So he’s taking it to the streets, on an extended “wake up” tour of the U.S., talking to people and the media - whoever will listen.

What would happen in 2040 if nothing changes? “If nothing changes, the federal government’s not gonna be able to do much more than pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits. It won’t have money left for anything else – national defense, homeland security, education, you name it.”

Our children’s future has been mortgaged over a barrel so many times over, it’ll be a wonder if there’s even such a thing as public schools in 20 years. Thinking about this kind of thing is like thinking about what life will be like when “the big one” hits California - so hard to contemplate the reality of it that, for the most part, we don’t.

Heartbreaking photo. “Wounded US Marine returns home from Iraq to marry.”

Dave Winer, on how to buy Bush out of office early:

I just got off the phone with Sylvia, who passed on a great idea that just might work, to help George Bush leave office early. Here’s how it goes. We all contribute to a fund, that hopefully would contain a lot of money, say $150 million. If Bush resigns on the first day, he gets the whole $150 million. Every day he waits, the fund goes down by 10 percent, so there’s a real incentive for him to act quickly. On Day 2 it’s worth only $135 million. On Day 3, $121.5 million. And so on. It’s kind of a simplified version of Deal or No Deal.

I love the idea! I’d kick in $5K.

Alternet collects the Most Outrageous Right Wing Comments of 2006, including this doozy from one of America’s most transparent nutjobs, Ann Coulter:

Coulter responding to Hardball host Chris Matthews’ question, “How do you know that [former President] Bill Clinton’s gay?”: “I don’t know if he’s gay. But [former Vice President] Al Gore — total fag.”

Other gems include Michael Savage asserting that Wolf Blitzer “would stick Jewish children into a gas chamber,” Rush Limbaugh blaming the obesity epidemic on liberals, and Debbie Schlussel questioning where Barak Obama’s loyalties would be as president, being that his dad is a Muslim and all. More at the site.

What’s more frightening? The fact that the FBI can install software on your cell phone that will turn it into a microphone capable of picking up conversations in the vicinity even when it’s turned off, or that a journalist can be jailed for refusing to turn over videotapes to the FBI?

“Does a democracy allow me to be a journalist? . . . By engaging in such pursuits should I become indebted to the government and forced to act as a de facto agent for the FBI? Is this the cost of committing journalism in a democratic country? I certainly hope not.”

This is not conspiracy theory stuff. This is happening. Wake up, Alice!

via MiniMediaGuy

Back when I worked at Ziff-Davis in Boston, a multimedia developer named David Drucker provided my first introduction to the Macintosh (an introduction I resisted, though his predictions that I would someday become a Mac-head ultimately proved true).

When Bush won re-election in 2004, Drucker and his wife did something many liberals talked about doing, but that few actually followed through on - they up and moved to Canada. Today, the LA Times has published a brief piece by Drucker on whether their commitment to Canada has changed now that Democrats are back: Dems in control? We’re still staying in Canada, wherein he marvels at the fact that Canada’s “conservative” prime minister Steven Harper recently referred to a new “holistic” approach to environmental policy. Imagine anyone from the Bush administration using the term “holistic” with anything but sarcasm.

We’ve come to the conclusion that the United States has drifted so far to the right that any self-respecting Canadian Conservative would be considered a raving liberal in Washington.

Fun fact, from the Wikipedia entry for Gerrymander:

The word “gerrymander” is named for the American politician Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814), and is a combination of his name and the word “salamander,” which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district Gerry created in order to disadvantage his electoral opponents.

So… when is redistricting going to be put into the hands of an independent body, rather than incumbent legislators? Why is it even legal?

J-School students are reporting on local and national contests, with full Election Day coverage planned for today and tonight. “Currently featuring advance election stories and Special Projects examining the strange life and colorful times of Bonds and Propositions, and the changing look of California’s voters.”

It’s going to be another late night — I’ll be here long after the polls close, helping to get emerging coverage onto the web. I remember going home at midnight two years ago after our coverage ran down. Bush had just been re-elected, and I was so depressed I got drunk and bought Emerson Lake and Palmer albums at iTMS to drown the sorrow. No idea what compelled me to do that, since I don’t really like ELP much. Probably just punishing myself. Happy to say I don’t expect tonight to end the same way.

Defective Yeti with punctuation-related Bushisms… and spinoffs:

“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, [the current violence] will look like just a comma.” (cf. original comma quote )

“The only way to stop the sectarian violence is to find a bridge between the Sunnis and Shiites, a hyphen that will join the two separate parties into one compound nation.”

“Victory is still possible in Iraq — albeit a victory enclosed in scare quotes and followed by an asterisk.”