You may have heard that Morgan Spurlock, director of the painful and hilarious documentary Supersize Me, is hosting a new reality series called 30 Days for the FX Network. The show follows Spurlock and others on fish-out-of-water adventures that actually seem to pursue a progressive, empathetic message. The first episode has Spurlock and his wife living on a minimum wage salary for a month. Another shows a heartland conservative living with a gay roommate in the Castro district of San Francisco.

This is great, and I'll be watching. But I gotta tell you, I'm a little peeved that I wasn't contacted to be a part of it. After all, I did spend a very long month last year reading, watching, and listening to nothing but right-wing media for a month. Surely that must be worth something! Mr. Spurlock, I await your call.

This is the reference. You are free to decode it or leave it alone.

"Wait a second, these aren't the white robes we ordered!"

It's not really a surprise that Massachusetts Governor and Utah expatriate Mitt Romney has announced that he wants to ban same-sex marriages in Massachusetts. Mitt sees himself as a presidential contender, despite the fact that his first name is Mitt.

But what is surprising is how much of a huge mistake the people of Massachusetts made in electing the guy. To someone like me, for whom each and every person's motivation is always suspect, I knew the Mitt-man was a bad bet from the start. But many in the Bay State apparently felt that the long history of contrarian, moderate Republicans (Paul Cellucci and Willian Weld, for instance) in the governor's mansion was something to keep alive.

Wrong.

When the entire Goodridge case hit the fan, I was working at a civil rights organization that worked on gay issues and I remember writing the press release with gooseflesh. I could never have imagined how much traction, how much mud and gore, how much sheer political hay could have been spun from the simple answer to the question, 'why can't we give marriage rights to everyone?'

I don't want to reverse the decision or anything like this. There are, trust me, Democrats who wish the the gay marriage issue would disappear. I'm not like that. But I am beginning to see the political discussion of the issue as more beneficial to the radical right than the rest of the country. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a way to remove the heavy bludgeon of gay marriage from the arsenal of weapons of fear and intimidation that the GOP uses to win elections.

And even more unfortunately, the backlash has created a more desperate situation for many gay couples who may have been able to take advantage of existing domestic partnership laws before they came to light and were hatched by trigger happy right wingers during 2004.

It's easy to recount this situation; it hasn't changed much in the year and a half since Goodridge was decided (after seven years of delays!). But I didn't live through the civil rights era in America. Still, I wonder if privately some white folks didn't spend a lot of time thinking, "gosh, I'm all for equal rights but do you have to be marching in the streets and getting my perfectly nice congressman in trouble with the racists?"

My point is that progress comes at a price. When I look at the medium scale, I worry that the negative impact of the high profile of gay rights will hurt a lot of other things that I support, like electing Democratic senators some places, or whatever. But we do need to address this. It is about civil rights, and the fair treatment every American is guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution (and that's why an amendment to the Constitution is the only thing right-wingers feel will 'solve' the problem). If we don't go through this now, we'll just have to go through it later. What choice do we have?

Q: How are politics like a volcano?

A: When small cracks appear, magma and flying rocks are sure to follow.

My Sciense Progect,
by George W. Bush

I did not do a sciense progect this year because I hate sciense. I hate reading boring werds and I hate theerys. I relly, relly do not like hippo-theses.

My assinement was to make a hippo-theses about if a woman in Florida had a sick brain, and then see if the hippo-theses was right after the brain was looked at with sciense.

But I do not like sciense, so I just want to stick with the hippo-theses I started with, and my guess was that the brane was ok and could get better because of God.

Please give me an "A." My dad can get me out of this class if you don't. And Karl will fire you.

Howard Kurtz just blows.

In one column he

a) calls Nancy Pelosi a liar, twice.

b) tosses off an "on the one hand" comparison that is so easily destroyed that I almost feel sorry for him for writing it:

The press performance in covering this tightly disciplined administration has been far from perfect, especially on Iraq. But it's worth remembering that during the Clinton years, it was conservatives who saw the media as being embarrassingly soft on the White House.

c) claims that the Republicans were as ignored by the media in '93-'94 as liberals are these days. That must be why Hillarycare passed with such strong popular support. Must be.

Samih Farsoun passed away last week.

Dr. Farsoun was a sociology professor at my alma mater The American University who focused on Arab studies. He led me to better understand the intersection between popular culture, world politics and general policy, and to ask questions about people's motivations whenever possible. Samih noticed more than most folks usually do, teasing out the underlying cause of the way people speak, the conclusions they are drawing, the frames they inhabit when they take the actions that make up their lives.

He'll be missed.

WTOP radio news here in D.C. is reporting on an interesting discovery in the lush green waters of the mighty Potomac river. Male fish producing eggs:

Along the South Branch of the Potomac River, something fishy is going on with the male fish.

And the products you're using in your home may be to blame.

The male fish are behaving like female fish.

"In the male gonads, there are immature eggs," says Vicki Blazer, a U.S. Geological Survey fish pathologist who works at the national fish health lab in Kearneysville, W. Va.

Blazer, who's been studying the problem since it first appeared in 2002, says it's occurring downstream from sewage treatment plants.

Hey folks. I wanted to send along a hearty congratulations to Liquid List founder and blog-guru Oliver who asked his sweet ladyfriend's hand in marriage over the weekend -- and she said yes!

Kudos, guys.

Donna Brazile: idiot.

"Privately, people have said they don't want Howard Dean to become the story because we have more important issues to talk about," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2004.

"But publicly we will continue to give Howard Dean our strong support," she said.