Two significant deaths today: one political, one pop culture

Eugene McCarthy and Richard Pryor Read More......

Bush is shipping Marine's dead bodies home as "freight"

Again, think what the Republicans would do with this information if the shoe was on the other foot. TV commercials, election ads, press conferences, and more. Will our guys even mention it? Read More......

Open thread

Saturday night Read More......

I simply cannot wait a week to go see this movie

Lots of photo shots from Brokeback Mountain are now online. I'm melting.





Way more to see via Michael Petrelis' blog. Read More......

Ford to meet with gay leaders this week

Ford is meeting with the gay groups next week, and that's good.

But topic A of those discussion needs to be the quotes from Ford spokesmen Mike Moran and Jim Cain admitting that Ford caved to the AFA. Which leads me to another thing...

Maybe we should have a contest for the first mainstream media reporter who actually gets this story correct.

Ford has admitted THREE TIMES that they dropped the gay advertising, and dropped their support for gay events (which never gets mentioned by the media), because of the pressure from the extremist group American Family Association. Ford spokesman Jim Cain admitted it once, Ford spokesman Mike Moran admitted it twice. At what point do mainstream media reporters do their homework and start reporting the facts of this story?

The Baltimore Sun let Moran lie yesterday in their story, he denied Ford's cave was linked to AFA pressure. When someone contacted the Sun to let them know that Moran lied to them, the Sun replied they probably weren't interested in any more stories on this issue.

Did you get that?

Someone informed the Baltimore Sun that their story was wrong, that a source lied to them, and that we had proof, and the Baltimore Sun said "not interested."

Do you think the media has learned anything since the Judith Miller scandal? Not a thing. Just report what sources tell you, don't do any background research on the story lest you actually find out what the lead characters in the story are actually up to, and when proof is presented to you that you're being lied to, don't make amends, just leave your readership believing the lies.

And the mainstream media wonders why their readership is dropping. From Bob Woodward's numerous lies about his cover-up of the Valerie Plame affair to the Baltimore Sun shrugging off the fact that they just published lies, it's clear that not too many media outlets today care about the truth, even when it's presented to them gift-wrapped. Read More......

Open Thread

Anything new to report? Read More......

Wash Post: Homophobes may be mentally ill

I always thought the fundies were sick.

Okay, this is a long-term campaign for all minority communities to get together on. We should set a long-term goal to get the psychological and psychiatric associations to officially make bigotry a mental disorder. The religious right would flip, fun in and of itself, but this would set the tone for an entire change in the culture, where prejudice of any kind of is considered the work of sick people. That would influence every debate the religious right tries to weigh in to.

I'm really quite serious. One of the large gay groups need to pick this up and run with it. It will take years to achieve, but it's the kind of long-term goal the religious right loves to embrace. A goal that ends up changing the underlying culture and helps them on EVERY issue.

The religious right is mentally ill.

From the Wash Post:

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.

Darrel A. Regier of the American Psychiatric Association favors research but says it is not clear that establishing a diagnosis would be useful.
Darrel A. Regier of the American Psychiatric Association favors research but says it is not clear that establishing a diagnosis would be useful. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

"He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."

Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis....

"When I see someone who won't see a physician because they're Jewish, or who can't sit in a restaurant because there are Asians, or feels threatened by homosexuals in the workplace, the party line in mental health says, 'This is not our problem,' " the psychologist said. "If it's not our problem, whose problem is it?"

Read More......

Jack Reed attacks Bush attack strategy

The Bush/Rove Iraq strategy has been to attack their opponents instead of figuring out how to solve the crisis. Senator Jack Reed has been taking the lead in pointing out the failures of Bush's Iraq strategy. The Senator from Rhode Island is a graduate of West Point and an Army Ranger which means two things: 1) he has credibility and 2) the Bush team will start smearing him now:

"If the president has any hope of regaining the nation's support for operations in Iraq and justifying the growing cost in lives and taxpayer dollars ... he must be candid and honest about the current situation."

Reed, a former Army Ranger who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the Bush Administration of assailing the patriotism of Iraq war critics.

"I have found it disturbing that the Bush administration has attacked the patriotism of those who question the administration's policies in Iraq," Reed charged. "Baseless partisan attacks won't help us win the war, won't help the troops and won't protect our nation from our enemies."

Read More......

No Justice at Justice Dept.

We learned the hard way in 2000 that for the Bush team, counting every vote did not matter. Now, we learn that it is that the Bush Department of Justice puts politics above the voting rights of minorities:

The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics, congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue said.

Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases.

The GOP really will do anything to win. Read More......

Saturday Morning Open Thread

What's happening? Read More......

Would Rummy quit and Lieberman become SecDef?

There's a certain perverse pleasure in having Iraq become Lieberman's fault... Read More......

Bush admin. walked out of Kyoto talks

What a bunch of drama queens. They literally up and walked out of the talks at the Climate Change conference because they can't get their way. Their way, of course, is to do nothing about global warming:

In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration came under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.

The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on the last day of the talks, during which the administration was repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.

Making us proud in the eyes of the world yet again. Read More......