The State of Washington doesn't have gay marriage. The state provides some benefits for gay civil unions, and just this year the state legislature passed a law expanding the rights and benefits for domestic partnerships. The law is nicknamed "Everything But Marriage."
Because of the economic meltdown, benefits that would be covered by taxpayers are being delayed until the economy improves. So, gay couples can have most (and soon all) of the rights and benefits of married couples, but it isn't called "marriage." Everybody's happy. Right?
Never ever ever underestimate the petty meanness of a gang of Biblehumpers looking for a scapegoat. Their hatred and bigotry are exceeded only by the huge amount of free time they obviously have.
The Washington Values Alliance is collecting signatures to put a referendum on the state ballot next November, which would overturn the "Everything But Marriage" law.
If they collect enough signatures — they have until July 25th — the "Everything But Marriage" law will be delayed until after the November election (and that's assuming the referendum gets defeated by voters).
Several "Christian" organizations tried to defeat Washington's assisted suicide referendum last November; it passed by a landslide. Here's hoping these busybodies can't collect enough signatures for their current flamefest. If they do, their referendum will hopefully get trounced by the voters next November.
###
Onward Christian Soldiers
"Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." [The quote appears over an image of a tank at sunrise]
"Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed." [The quote appears over an image of a soldier in Baghdad]
"It is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." [The quote appears over an image of Saddam Hussein]
"Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, The nation that keeps faith." [The quote appears over an image of tanks entering an Iraqi city]
PZ Meyers: God's Own War
President George W. Bush was a god-fearing child given control of our military apparatus…or perhaps he was a child manipulated by a military that found religion a convenient hook. Frank Rich describes the internal propaganda used during the war. What I find shocking is that Bush received regular intelligence briefings with covers that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."
Well, now they've leaked. Here's an example.
It's appalling on so many levels: that Rumsfeld thought that polishing up his report with the jingoistic equivalent of a clear plastic binder would win him points; that it apparently worked; that religion was used to promote war in the White House; that it was used despite the fact that it could worsen our chances of success. And we still have Dick Cheney doing a cheerful media tour encouraging us to support torture, which really wasn't torture, but if it was, it was good for us.
We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can't just pretend it didn't happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.
###
Cheney and Rumsfeld, what a crazy pair.
In addition to the Jack Chick-level proselytizing about invading a Muslim Country, Rummy got his mitts deep into the disaster that was Katrina:
- Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, "We're not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?"
"No, sir," said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida's Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. "I'm just here because you're here," the pilot added. "My whole unit's sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we're not being used."
This while the Coast Guard was working tirelessly, with limited resources, rescuing people. The military helicopters were not being used because Don Rumsfeld was engaged in a turf war.
Even the tragically clueless George Bush saw the damage to his poll ratings and figured that out.
"Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I'm watching? What the hell are you doing?"
###
Well look at this: Maureen Dowd of the famous NYT caught plaigarizing from little old blogger Josh Marshall:
Maureen Dowd, Pulitizer Prize winner. Today. New York Times:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Josh Marshall. Blogger. Last Thursday. Talking Points Memo:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
###
When Latin America is teaching the United States about human rights, the world has truly come full circle.
###
Daddy Frank with a must read: Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush:
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in "Godfather III," just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high ambitions.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. [...]
###
If your ideology ends up with thousands of dead bodies in the streets, your ideology is immoral and wrong. Sorry. That applies whether you call your ideology "neo-conservatism", "conservatism", "libertarianism", "communism", or whatever. The only ideology that has ever actually worked is pragmatism, for the simple reason that pragmatism is defined as, "do what works", heh. I.e., if there is a problem, look at all the solutions that have been tried and choose the one that works, rather than choosing according to whatever specific ideology first proposed and implemented that solution. That's pragmatism.
Let us remember that the whole purpose of any form of social organization is to produce the most good for the most people. People who raise any "-ism" to the level of religion are dangerous - and, in many cases, evil, and not knowing they're evil because they view their own ideology as "good" and everything else as "evil". But if their ideology leads to dead bodies on the streets... I don't know what else you can call these people other than evil.
####
Creepy old guys protest Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame
It's telling that the pro-life guys doing the protesting are both men who clearly didn't graduate recently. I'm all for public protests, but there's an astroturf quality to some of these religious right protests, and conservative protests overall. You'd think, if the students were truly upset that Obama was coming to their school, that some - uh - students themselves might protest?
###
Why will the auto industry bailout end up with layoffs - the thing the bailout was supposed to avoid?
###
The Centrist
Gaze in awe at the single dumbest thing ever said by a sitting United States Senator. (Please recall this clown's lofty rhetoric during the Great Fellatio Hunt of '98 and be prepared to bust a gut.) Why Senator Huckleberry seems to be pleading the case, not only of Dick Cheney, but also of the Spanish Inquisition, is something best left for Dan Brown to ponder, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had some curious branding somewhere on his torso, not that I'm eager to find out.
And this is the kind of person to whom President Obama regularly defers because Huckleberry is alleged to be one of the "sensible ones." Good Screaming Christ In A Camaro, what has the Republican party done since January that would make any thinking human being accord it the tiniest smidgen of a modicum of respect? Laugh at them and then do what you want to do. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the President of the United States is something of a political coward. The flip-flop on the Rumsfeld Porn Collection is just the most recent example. He's walked back much of what he said during the campaign on rendition and on the Military Commissions Act. Gitmo is still open. His Department of Justice is pleading state secrecy. He has lifted not an obvious finger to put pressure on anyone to get qualified people like Dawn Johnsen confirmed. (LBJ would have had Harry Reid hanging by his entrails in the Mural Room by now.) Even when his administration does something correctly, it turtles in the face of hissy-fits tossed by a discredited political movement adhered to by less than 30 percent of the public.
I think the source of the president's timorousness lies in the fact that, for all his new-politics bombast, he's pretty much decided that he's a critter of the respectable Beltway center. We should have seen that coming when he supported Weepin' Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont or, at least, when he took that ungainly dive on FISA and the issue of telecom immunity. His financial team is straight out of the Retired Wall Street Hiring Hall, and his complete disinclination to call crimes what they are bespeaks an unseemly lust for a middle ground that lie somewhere between Oz and the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Political cowardice has many sources, and its effects are not always uniform or predictable. Lyndon Johnson was brave enough to stuff the Voting Rights Act down the gullet of American white-supremacy, but he lost his nerve when confronted by a bunch of Harvard intellectuals with a jones for Southeast Asia. It took a great deal of courage for Barack Obama to get to the White House last January, and a great deal of courage to want the job at all during this period of history. It's too bad he seems to have left that courage back in Iowa some place.
Obama can't coast on that forever. Sooner or later, he's going to have to be brave about something other than running for office. That really is the bare minimum for a leader.
###
Pakistan rapidly adding nuke arms - Are billions in US military aid being diverted to nuclear program?
###
Chief Justice Roberts - No More Mr. Nice Guy: in every major case he has sided with the prosecutor over the defendant: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/25/090525fa_fact_toobin
###
Seven weeks after the Treasury Department announced that it was ousting General Motors chief G. Richard Wagoner Jr. in the federal bailout of the company, he is still technically on GM's payroll.
Wagoner's removal has been held up because senior Treasury officials have yet to decide whether he should get the $20 million severance package that the company had promised him.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702268.html?hpid=topnews
###
AP Economic Stress Index - Check your county on this interactive map.
###
Corruption in Iraq? Say it isn't so.
Twenty-three arrest warrants on Sunday were issued for government employees on corruption charges in Diwaniya province, according to a local official.
"The employees included the director of Diwaniya's municipalities department and a number of engineers," the official told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
"They face charges of financial corruption pertaining to a project in al-Sadeer district (15 km south of Diwaniya)," the official noted, adding that the arrest warrants have all been executed.
Diwaniya, the capital city of Diwaniya province, lies 180 km south of Baghdad.
###
4,296 soldiers killed in Iraq; 683 in Afghanistan.
No comments:
Post a Comment