April 30, 2008
“Lesbians” as in “people of the Isle of Lesbos,” that is — who, I thought, have preferred to call themselves “Lesbosians” ever since we women-lovin’ women co-opted the word “lesbian” long before the idiots in this story were even born:
People of Lesbos take gay group to court over term ‘Lesbian’
ATHENS, Greece — A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.
Three islanders from Lesbos — home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.
One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.
“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.
The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using “lesbian” in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.
Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island is a favored holiday destination for gay women, particularly the lyric poet’s reputed home town of Eressos.
“This is not an aggressive act against gay women,” Lambrou said. “Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title.”
He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10. …
What a bunch of sanctimonious twits. I hope they lose their stupid lawsuit in a big way — after which we can all laugh at their pettiness.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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April 28, 2008
In the course of less than one hour this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., did more damage to Barack Obama than any ten of his lunatic “God Damn America” rants from the pulpit.
Even the Obamaniacs are upset — yes, even the ones who have been screaming “Wright is RIGHT!” and “Obama could NOT disown his pastor” and “This is just a tempest in a teapot, a manufactured controversy, a non-issue — Wright won’t have any effect on Obama’s candidacy,” and all the rest of the “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah“ garbage that, these days, has about as much effect on those of us rooted in reality-based thinking as dragging one’s foot to stop a 747.
Well, guess what? The unending Wright story is not a tempest in a teapot — and now that virtually every MSM outlet in the country is leading with headlines suggesting big trouble for the Obama campaign, now the Obamaniacs are getting it. Now they’re screaming, “OMG, Obama’s got to DO something! Obama’s got to completely, totally disown Wright, right NOW!”
How the band has changed its tune.
(The only thing that hasn’t changed: When one Obamanut expresses even a single, rational, independent thought, the rest of the Obamanuts eat their former comrade alive. But that’s the usual reaction when the collective cognitive dissonance of a cult is threatened.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. In short, Wright did the unthinkable: he opened his mouth again. And this time, he may have sunk Barack Obama for good.
Reflects WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama’s presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered — and added lighter fuel.
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
In front of 30 television cameras, Wright’s audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama’s vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan, confirmed that Wright’s security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
Not that you haven’t heard Wright’s rantings about all these things (and worse, much worse) before, nor should it come as a surprise that he and Farrakhan are still the best-bestest of buddies. So what? So this: Just when you thought Wright couldn’t make things any worse for Obama, Wright dropped a bombshell, expressing what those of us not awash in Jesus Juice Obama-flavored Kool-Aid have been thinking, and saying, about Obama all along: Obama was forced to distance himself from Wright solely for the sake of politics, and if those Wright sermons hadn’t become public, Obama would still be calling Wright his “spiritual mentor”:
Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. “He didn’t distance himself,” Wright announced. “He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.”
Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, “We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” The minister continued: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”
Joe Fitzgerald of The Boston Herald picked up on something similar Wright said to Bill Moyers: “He [Obama] says what he has to say as a politican. I don’t talk to him about politics.”
Fitzgerald’s reaction (more valid than ever in light of Obama’s characteristically pitiful attempt at damage control during a “hastily gathered” press conference this morning):
Please. When a man spends 20 years absorbing another man’s sermons, it’s reasonable to conclude his beliefs and values will be informed and shaped by what he hears; if not, the man doing the preaching must be woefully ineffective.
So take your pick: Either Obama is showing the electorate a face that’s insincere, or Wright showed the viewers a leader who’s inept.
Is Wright trying to sink Barry? “Maybe,” muses Amy Sullivan of Time, “Barack Obama skimped on his contribution when the offering plate came past at Trinity United Church of Christ. Or perhaps he nodded off during one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. It’s hard to think of another reason why the Illinois Senator’s former pastor would put on the kind of performance this morning at the National Press Club that can only be described as a political disaster.”
Or maybe Wright’s ego is so swollen from the roaring cheers bouncing off the walls inside that echo chamber known as Trinity United Church of Christ, he thinks the outside world is no different from the insulated little cocoon he’s built around himself.
Sorry, Rev. Nobody who heard you this morning is shouting “Amen!” this time.
Per Jeff Greenfield of CBS:
If you had a chance to listen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright — at his NAACP appearance in Detroit, or in his talk at the National Press Club — you came away with two impressions: first, Rev. Wright is a learned, compelling, often hilarious speaker; second, he is a genuine threat to the presidential hopes of Barack Obama.
His NAACP speech was shaped around the theme that “different does not mean deficient.” He talked about how blacks and whites were “different” in everything from language to music to religious worship. He interposed his speech with snatches from speeches, songs — at one point, brilliantly imitating the sharply different styles of marching bands. Michigan State, he demonstrated, simply did not move on the field the way the Grambling Band did.
He also offered a highly inclusive vision of the change America needed — rejecting exclusionary thinking whether it was white vs. black, black vs. white, straight vs. gays, Christians vs. Jews. There was nothing in that part of the speech that was objectionable or offensive.
Now, wait a minute. Wright emphasizes how “different” blacks and whites are, then waxes poetic about “inclusion”? I thought the goal was to appreciate our differences, while focusing on how we’re really all the same under the skin — yet Wright, in his comparison of two marching bands, makes fun of the way white people can’t dance? Hm.
Or, as the hard-right National Review put it — which will give you a good idea of how well this Wright business is going over with the tighty-righties Obama thinks he’s going to win over — in a piece titled “Jeremiah Wright May Have Just Sunk Obama’s Campaign:
And since then, it’s gotten worse, even with a Bill Moyers interview that wasn’t softball so much as it was Nerf Tee-Ball. We’ve heard Wright compare the Roman Legions who punished Jesus to the U.S. Marines, we’ve heard him argue that the U.S. and al-Qaeda are doing the same acts under different flags, etc.
Now we hear Wright analyzing the differences between white and black brains (!)…
Back to Greenfield:
So what’s the problem for Senator Obama? In his National Pres Club speech, we saw another side of Rev. Wright — utterly unrepentant about any of the things he has said, and insistent that the wave of criticism aimed at him was really “an attack on the black church.”
That argument is familiar — even pervasive. When a visible member group that has suffered exclusion is challenged, that individual is frequently heard making that argument. Senator Huey Long argued that attacks on his honesty were really attacks on the poor for whom he spoke; Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both argued that attempts to hold them accountable for misconduct were really attacks mounted by their political enemies.
No kidding. If I had a nickel for every time an Obamanut called me racist for criticizing what Obama says and does, or went into a mindless rage at Hillary Clinton for something Obama said or did (what, did she cast a spell over Barry to make stupid remarks fall out of his mouth?), I would have a lot of nickels.
In wrapping himself in such an argument, Rev. Wright never even seeks to confront the core of the criticism: What did you mean when you said what you said? Why tell your congregation that AIDS was a government conspiracy to commit genocide on African-Americans?
Jake Tapper of ABC caught that, too:
[Wright] didn’t distance himself from any of the sentiments underlying the clips shown on television. Indeed, the former pastor embraced the most controversial items he has said.
On his contention that the U.S. government had created AIDS as a method of committing genocide against African-Americans, Wright referred to a hotly-disputed 1996 book “Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?” by Leonard G Horowitz, which contends that AIDS and the Ebola viruses evolved during cancer experiments on monkeys.
He also referenced “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” by Harriet Washington, and said based on the Tuskegee experiment — in which the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a 40-year study on 400 poor black men in Alabama with syphilis whom they did not properly treat — “I believe our government is capable of anything.”
Greenfield again:
More broadly, Rev. Wright’s counterattack reframes the argument in starkly racial terms: “Attack me, attack the black church.” It is exactly the opposite what Senator Obama has been arguing throughout his campaign; that it is past time for the United States look beyond race. Indeed, Wright’s vision of this controversy strikes at the heart of Obama’s view.
Greenfield concludes — correctly — that Wright is stuck in a moribund mindset, seeming “not to believe that the United States has in any serious way come some considerable distance — and one of the surest signs of that is the plausible presidential candidacy that Wright’s comments have so seriously harmed.”
I’ve never dismissed the fact that racism still exists in this country — but Wright and his flock appear utterly unable — or unwilling — to process the fact that all whites are not stuck in the 19th-century.
Jeremiah Wright, however, is. He’s soaking in it. And for whatever unresolved personal issues he has with whites, his “ministry” appears to dedicated not to empowering disenfranchised African-Americans in any positive, progressive, forward-looking way, but to keeping the hate — and his own “us vs. them” mentality — alive.
Jeremiah Wright is not a stupid man, but one wonders if he suffers from some sort of incurable amnesia — and if he enjoys that amnesia, deliberately induced or not.
To wit (quoted from Tapper):
“Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy,” Wright said, since Farrakhan had not enslaved Africans and brought them in chains to the U.S.
Wright argued that his fiery nature was appropriate since the leaders of the U.S. have never apologized for slavery or racism.
Oh, really now? I know what President Bill Clinton said in 1998 — and it sure sounded like an apology to my ears:
“Surely every American knows that slavery was wrong, and we paid a terrible price for [it], and that we had to keep repairing that.
“And just to say that it’s wrong and that we are sorry about it is not a bad thing.
“That doesn’t weaken us.”
What does Wright want, for every U.S. president, past and present, to get down on his knees? (In Clinton’s case, yeah, probably.)
That’s just another example of Wright’s deliberate blindness and stubborn insistence to remain entrenched in a view of a United States that has long since progressed beyond Wright and his antiquated — and divisive, damaging, dangerous — ideas.
One last thing: In demanding an apology for slavery, Wright said: “Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country’s leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I’m not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I’m still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?”
Yeah, capisco, loud and clear. What’s funny is that Wright would stoop to using the language of us “garlic noses” to make his point.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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April 27, 2008
First, let’s review:
• Barack Obama says that in 2000, he was so broke, his credit card was declined when he tried to rent a car at LAX;
• Michelle Obama (who pisses and moans constantly about how rough she had it, skipping through life from private charter school to Harvard) says she and Barry were still heavily burdened by debt (specifically, by student loans from 1988 and 1991) until Barack’s book sales took off in 2005.
Despite these facts:
• In 1993, the Obamas put a $111,000 down payment on a $277,500 condiminum;
• In 2000, the Obamas earned a combined household total of $240,000.
With that in mind, get a load of what’s come out in this morning’s L.A. Times — “Obama donor received a state grant“:
After an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client — a longtime political supporter.
Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell’s firm that eventually totaled $112,000.
A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.
Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions. With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments.
Obama’s staff said the senator advocated only for the first year’s grant — which ended up being $20,000, not $50,000. The day after Obama wrote his letter urging the awarding of the state funds, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.
Uh, isn’t this sort of thing illegal?
Oopsy-daisy! My mistake! Apparently, this is just Chicago-style — or at least Illinois-style — politics as usual:
Business relationships between lawmakers and people with government interests are not illegal or uncommon in Illinois or other states with a part-time Legislature, where lawmakers supplement their state salaries with income from the private sector.
So, it’s not illegal. But you know what? It should be.
Now, you take this Blackwell wheeling-and-dealing (and there’s plenty more about it at the LAT link) along with Obama’s questionable dealings with Tony Rezko, and the way Obama got where he is today — plainly put, he was kicked upstairs by another close ally, the powerful Emil Jones, Jr., whom Obama rewarded with pork-barrel earmarks of “more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’ Senate district” — and you’ve got to start asking just how “transparent” Barack Obama really is.
It shouldn’t matter a whit if Barry’s Peter-Pays-Paul dealing is legal; the question is: Is it ethical?
I say it isn’t.
I say it all just plain stinks.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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April 23, 2008
I take it back: Randi Rhodes is not merely a foul-mouthed misogynist — she’s a nasty, stupid pig. No, wait, I take that back, too, as it is an insult to pigs everywhere.
(So sue me, Randi; if you can call Hillary a “f—king whore” and compare Geraldine Ferraro to David Duke, I can call you a stupid pig. Or worse.)
From ryeland at MyDD:
Randi Rhodes calls Hillary voters “white trash”
I hope Nova M Radio is happy with their new talk show host, the Left’s own Rush Limbaugh. Randi Rhodes is a disgrace and an embarrassment to Democrats, and I can’t imagine why any organization (political campaign or business) would want to be associated with her hate-filled rhetoric.
In the first five minutes of her show today, Randi let this one go:
“The Clinton campaign describes Hillary’s voters as older, white, and undereducated. Or as we called them in my neighborhood: white trash.”
Randi followed this, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, with a screed about how Hillary is an elitist (in part, because she loaned her campaign $5 million). Tell us more about elitism, Randi. How do “white trash” fit into your analysis?
I don’t know if Randi Rhodes is helping or hurting Barack Obama, but I do know that she’s hurting the Democratic Party with this kind of divisive, classist language. White trash? That’s how she chooses to describe the majority of Democrats who voted in this year’s primaries? I wouldn’t be surprised if Randi finds herself back on the unemployment line soon.
Randi Rhodes, you embarass me as a woman, and as a human being — both species to which, at this point, I sincerely doubt you belong.
Oh, and Randi? You may not be any whiter than I am, but you’re sure as hell older older than I am, and as far as education goes, I’ll go up against you on “Jeopardy!” any day of the week. All that Kool-Aid you’ve drunk has obviously shrunken your brain to the size of a peanut.
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Oh, no, I’m not being flippant about a death — I really do wonder what St. Peter had to say to Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the Vatican’s poster boy for a Dark-Ages mentality on same-sex marriage, stem cell research, and a woman’s right to choose, and who, most (in)famously, outright lied when he said condoms don’t do anything to prevent the spread of HIV. (The World Health Organization set everybody straight — so to speak — on that note, reiterating that condoms are 90% effective, and failure was usually due to improper installation.)
Not, mind you, that I really believe in the whole St. Peter/Pearly Gates thing; I don’t. But I’m a happy little agnostic quite content with the idea that wherever we end up, it’s of our own making: If you expect to see St. Peter, or some Pearly Gates, then you will.
But I digress, as usual.
Serendipity flowing freely this week, it was ironic, but rather satisfying in a mean, Schadenfreude kind of way, to hear that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (chaired by one of our few remaining heroes in the Democratic Party, Henry Waxman [D-Calif.]) is holding a hearing today to re-open the issue of whether or not abstinence-only programs work.
The reality is: They don’t. But as long as Radical Righteous Religionists exist — and as long as they maintain their stranglehold on our government — the reality of the situation needs to be hammered into many thick skulls before the U.S. gives up this killer (and I do mean killer) notion that if you withhold contraceptives and fact-based sex education, people will stop getting STDs, and stop having abortions.
What needs to stop is handing over taxpayer dollars to “faith-based” institutions that do nothing to decrease the spread of STDs or unwanted pregnancies, and in fact only serve to exacerbate the situation(s).
Sometimes it seems the only way to a new Age of Englightenment is to outlive the troglodytes who think they can pray the AIDS away. And so it is with an uncomfortable mixture of both sadness and relief that we mark the passing of Cardinal Trujillo: There was a man who stood no hope of being enlightened and reborn into a healthy, helpful, reality-based way of thinking, and now he’s gone. That’s the sad part. The relief (which troubles me to admit to) comes with the knowledge that there is one less powerful person on this planet standing in the way of countless millions being equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to save their own lives, and the lives of many others.
I’ll leave you with that thought, and with the ACLU’s writeup on today’s abstinence-only hearing — so my “faith-based” readers might understand that I’m not some sort of heartless ghoul celebrating the death of an “enemy.”
You see, Cardinal Trujillo called every struggle for control over our own lives and our own bodies, from same-sex marriage to euthanasia, a “culture of death,” when the truth is that lying about condoms and stem cell research and all the rest kills people. It is the Cardinal Trujillos of this world who propagate a “culture of death.”
Evidence Once Again Shows Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Don’t Work
WASHINGTON, DC — April 23 — The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing today titled “Domestic Abstinence-Only Programs: Assessing the Evidence.” The ACLU applauds Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) for bringing new attention to this deeply troubling policy and the committee’s willingness to examine the public health policy implications of abstinence-only programs. We look forward to the testimony of scientists, clinicians, researchers and youth activists who will report on the failures of abstinence-only education programs.
Their testimony is supported by research which has repeatedly shown that, at best, abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual initiation and, at worst, may actually cause harm by providing young people with dangerously inadequate and inaccurate information. A troubling recent report found teens in Florida, a state that relies on abstinence-only programs, who believed drinking a can of Mt. Dew would prevent unintended pregnancy, or drinking a capful of bleach would prevent HIV/AIDS.
In addition to the clear and compelling public health concerns of abstinence-only programs, the ACLU has submitted a statement to the committee addressing the civil liberties concerns raised by these programs. Abstinence-only programs censor information, reinforce gender stereotypes, provide inaccurate and misleading information, promote religion, serve a narrow ideological agenda, stigmatize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, and jeopardize the well-being of young people.
“The evidence leads to only one conclusion: abstinence-only programs represent a failed policy,” said Vania Leveille, legislative counsel at the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “They are driven by ideology and politics, rather than by science or good public health policy, and our young people are suffering as a result. Most troubling, they represent a purposeful campaign to mislead, distort, stifle and censor, and are part of a disturbing trend to politicize science. The ACLU urges congressional action to bring this failed policy to an end.”
Since 1996, the U.S. government has poured more than a billion dollars into abstinence-only education programs so ineffective and dangerous that seventeen states have refused funding. At a time when the administration emphasizes accountability in funding only programs with demonstrated success, the continued funding of unproven abstinence-only programs is unacceptable.
The ACLU’s statement to the committee is available here
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