Spoofs of that "Gathering Storm" public service announcement are still all the rage. There's some very good ones on Youtube (check it out).
Renew America columnist Bryan Fischer writes ("Our choice: liberty or homosexual agenda"):
On the pages of the Idaho Statesman, the Gem State's largest newspaper, Amy Herzfeld recently expressed her determination to continue pressing for legislation at the state level that will grant special workplace protections to those who engage in homosexual and transgender sexual behaviors.
Laws that provide special rights and privileges based on "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" are bad public policy because they represent a clear and present danger to religious liberty, freedom of conscience and freedom of association. Such laws are quickly used to harass, intimidate and punish individuals, businesses and organizations which adhere to traditional, time-honored values regarding human sexuality.
Bryan seems to fear laws which will make discrimination illegal. Because that is unfair to the people who are doing the discriminating.
Well, yes, Bryan. That is the point. Just like laws which make it illegal for you to kidnap people. Those laws are discriminating against kidnappers.
What follows is just a sampling of what happens under "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" statutes:
- A Christian photographer was fined $6,637 by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission for declining to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony, even though same-sex unions have no legal status in the state
Yes, but New Mexico does have a law which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. Any businessperson, including a photographer, cannot deny services to someone based on that customer's sexual orientation. The fact that the business provider is "Christian" does not enter into it.
- Christian fertility doctors in private practice in California have been barred by the state Supreme Court from declining to artificially inseminate lesbian patients on conscience grounds.
Same deal. Plus, as doctors, there is an additional moral ethic here (apart from anti-discrimination laws) — you simply cannot deny treatment based on the race, gender, or orientation of your patient.
- Catholic Charities of Boston shut down its work of finding homes for hard-to-place adoptive children because Massachusetts' "sexual orientation" law required staff to place children in homosexual households
Yup. Even charities which receive government funds can't discriminate. Don't worry — plenty of other adoption agencies picked up the slack.
- The Methodist Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association was found guilty of violating New Jersey's discrimination law for declining to rent space to a lesbian couple for a civil union ceremony.
Yup. The facts are complicated, but the "space" available for rent is actually public land.
- The Cradle of Liberty Boy Scouts of Philadelphia were evicted from a building they had occupied since 1928 because the organization does not allow homosexuals to serve as Scoutmasters, even though the Supreme Court has upheld the Scouts' policy
Oh, sure. The Supreme Court did uphold the Scouts' policy of discrminiating against homosexuals. And the Scouts can. But not while using taxpayer funded public property. That's why they were evicted.
- eHarmony, a match-making site for heterosexuals, was compelled to create a dating site for homosexuals, despite the fact that hundreds of such sites already exist
Well, I don't think "hundreds" of such sites exist, and certainly none with the widespread popularity (and seriousness) of eHarmony. In any event, eHarmony chose to create the site, in part because they knew they were discriminating.
- A nightclub in the Midwest is being sued for denying entrance to a cross-dressing male because he insisted on using the women's restroom despite the club's common sense concern for patron safety and privacy
This latter case demonstrates that privacy protections for every bathroom, dressing room, and locker room will disappear under "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" legislation.
I'm not quite sure what Bryan means here. As far as I know, there is no dressing room or locker room that bars homosexuals. I think whatever "privacy concerns" Bryan has, those have long gone out the window.
Congress is even now considering "hate crimes" legislation, which provides enhanced penalties for those convicted of bias crimes against homosexuals.
The problem here is that this gives more protection to some victims of crime than others, which violates the fundamental principle of American justice that we are all equal under the law. Every victim of violence ought to have the full protection of the law regardless of his sexual orientation.
No, it doesn't give "more protection to some victims of crime". That's like saying that people who are victims of "assult with a deadly weapon" get "more protection" than people who are victims of "assult". They're all protected.
The murder of a cross-dressing man is a cause célèbre in Colorado right now. We join with homosexual activists in wanting his murderer prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
But we want justice for the victim because he was made in the image of God, not because he dressed as a woman and wore breast gels.
Didn't know God was a cross-dresser, but okay. Whatevs.
We want every victim of homicide, regardless of sexual orientation, to have the same legal protection, no less and no more. Every crime, in fact, is a hate crime.
NO! That's really NOT true. It sounds like it might be true, but it's really not, if you think about it (which Bryan clearly hasn't done).
I was the victim of a mugging once. Did/do I think the mugger hated me? Of course not. He was indifferent to me. He just wanted my money.
The "every crime is a hate crime" is just another canard, which, upon the slightest reflection, simply isn't true.
In addition, "hate crimes" laws are "thought crimes" laws. They punish an individual not for what he did but for what he was thinking when he did it.
I have a surprise for you, Bryan. ALL crimes punish a person for what he was thinking. In fact, "what he was thinking" is, in legal terms, mens rea, or "state of mind". That's why, for example, the law makes distinctions based on what's in the criminal's head, i.e. "intentional homicide" or "involuntary/voluntary manslaughter" or "with malice aforethought".
If a gun I am holding goes off and kills another person, I haven't necessarily commited a crime until it is proven what my thoughts were at the time. Was it my intent to kill? Was I being reckless? Or was it an accident (i.e., I was asleep and didn't even know I was holding a gun?) The answer to this question lies in my thoughts.
The law has always been that way.
But as Thomas Jefferson said, "[T]he legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions."
Actually, Jefferson wrote "the legitimate powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions." But, again, we're not talking about making crimes out of one's opinions, which is what Jefferson was talking about. We're talking about the state of mind of the criminal coupled with the action.
Killing someone in a sponteous fit of jealous rage is treated differently under the law than killing someone through planning and preparation. So by the same token, killing someone for their money is intended to be treated differently under the law than killing someone for their skin color or sexual orientation. The latter is treated as harsher because it is a crime directed at a class of people, much like terrorism. It's "victims" are more than just the dead person; the victims spread to the class of people who are made afraid.
Society views a lynching, for example, as a different kind of murder than say, a mugging in which the victim is shot. That's why it has a special name — lynching — because it's an especially heinous kind of murder.
To suggest that we not inject the concept "hate" into our laws would make crimes like cross-burning no different than vandalism. But cross-burning is more heinous than vandalism. And what makes that so? It is a crime of hate, meant to scare not only the black property owner, but all blacks.
And that's the point. There are already hate crimes. Lynching and cross-burning, for example.
Religious freedom is the first right guaranteed to us in the First Amendment.
No, it's not. Establishment of religion is mentioned first.
Special rights for homosexuals receive no explicit mention in the Constitution whatsoever. Yet now we must choose between liberty and the homosexual agenda because, it turns out, we can't have both.
The term "special rights" has always puzzled me. When a straight couples get married, that is apparently a right, but not a "special" one. But when homosexual want to get married, it is a "special" right? What's so special? It's the same right — the right to marry. Rights don't become "special rights" just because they apply to different people.
In fact, they're supposed to apply to everybody. And that is in the Constitution. 14th Amendment. Equal Protection clause. Look it up.
Besides, just because religion freedom is specifically mentioned in the First Amendment doesn't mean it wins out over other rights. Read the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
Hmmm. Well, it looks like North Carolina didn't get the memo. What are the waiting times to get medical treatment here?
Just six months ago, the [Greensboro] clinic delivered same-day care to most callers, the gold standard from a health perspective. But in October the delays crept to four days, then 19 in November and 25 in December. In January, HealthServe temporarily stopped accepting new patients, and almost immediately 380 people put their names on a waiting list for when the crunch eases.
In North Carolina, more than any other state, the recession has triggered a burgeoning medical crisis. A steep rise in unemployment has fueled a commensurate increase in the number of people who do not have health insurance, including many middle-income families.
In the past two years, North Carolina's number of uninsured has climbed 22.5 percent, the biggest jump in the nation, according to an analysis by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, a quasi-state agency. Nationwide, about 22 percent of adults do not have health insurance. Here in North Carolina, 25 percent of adults — or 1.8 million people — have no coverage. An additional 9 percent are underinsured.
* Marc Theissen writes a WaPo op-ed reminding us that, despite our outrage, "The CIA's Questioning Worked". No, he just can't bring himself to call it "torture". And as for it "working", Theissen writes:
Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.
Theissen is lying here. And it doesn't take much Google to figure it out. For one thing, the plot to fly planes into the Library Tower was foiled in 2002 when we arrested the terrorist who planned to do it. KSM wasn't arrested until 2003, so there's not way KSM's questioning was responsible for preventing an already-foiled terrorist plot. (We also knew about "Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali" before the capture of KSM).
Besides, what Theissen argues is contradicted by the interrogators… who were there:
The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
* Phillip Zekelow was an attorney in the Bush Adminstration, working under the Secretary of State. About the OLC torture memos, he writes:
At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.
Stated in a shorthand way, mainly for the benefit of other specialists who work these issues, my main concerns were:
- the case law on the "shocks the conscience" standard for interrogations would proscribe the CIA's methods;
- the OLC memo basically ignored standard 8th Amendment "conditions of confinement" analysis (long incorporated into the 5th amendment as a matter of substantive due process and thus applicable to detentions like these). That case law would regard the conditions of confinement in the CIA facilities as unlawful.
- the use of a balancing test to measure constitutional validity (national security gain vs. harm to individuals) is lawful for some techniques, but other kinds of cruel treatment should be barred categorically under U.S. law — whatever the alleged gain.
The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
I'm not a pageant watcher, but the big scandal is that Miss North Carolina won the Miss USA contest this weekend. Conservative conventional wisdom is that Miss California, who was first runner-up, was a shoe-in to take the crown, except that she failed to give the "politically correct" answer to a question about same-sex marriage:
Hilton asked Miss California's Carrie Prejean her thoughts on legalizing gay marriage during the Miss USA 2009 pageant, which aired live Sunday night on NBC.
"Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage," he said. "Do you think every state should follow suit, why or why not."
At first, Prejean seemed to trip over her words before giving an answer that drew a mixed reaction from the audience and a look of thinly veiled disgust from Hilton.
"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other," she said. "We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."
The video:
As I said, conservatives are quick to say that Miss California failed to win because she answered the question wrongly. John Hindraker, for example writes:
The two co-organizers of the Miss California pageant said they were "personally saddened and hurt that Miss California believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman."
Nothing about this narrative could be surprising to anyone who pays attention to our news and our popular culture. Yet there is something very weird about the idea that Miss California lost the Miss USA crown because she gave such a "controversial" answer to a political question. After all, she represented the state of California in the pageant, and we know for a fact that most Californians agree with her, as evidenced by the recent Proposition 8 vote. Moreover, her position is not only the one endorsed by most Americans in opinion surveys, it is also the view taken by President Obama. So why is it more "controversial" than any other political opinion? We all know that if Miss California had answered Hilton's question by saying that she believes in equal rights for all, and that means gay marriage, there would have been no controversy and, very likely, she would have won the title.
Nobody, including me, has a direct pipeline to the minds of the Miss USA judges. But it doesn't seem clear to me that Miss California "lost" because her response was "wrong" or "controversial". It seems to me that her answer was simply bad. As in, poorly constructed.
Let's parse it. She started off with this:
"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage."
Well, unfortunately, we don't live in that kind of a land. You can't "choose" to have a same-sex marriage, unless you live in four of the 50 states that recognize same-sex marriage.
Now, perhaps she meant to say "it's great that Americans are able to vote on whether to recognize same-sex marriages or not". That would have been okay — a nice little nod to democracy.
The problem is, she didn't say that. So, you know, points off, right away.
Next comes the trainwreck portion of her answer:
And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.
"And you know what" — that phrase alone makes her sound like a stereotypical blonde airhead. But even if we omit that we get a "sentence" that makes no sense:
…in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.
If she wants to say that she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, fine.
If she wants to say that her family believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, that's fine, too. I mean, it's honest, so she can hardly be criticized. [UPDATE: I guess it's not honest. Miss California's sister is a gay rights activist who supports same-sex marriage, which is why Miss California admitted today: "My beliefs have nothing to do with my sister or my mom, or whatever" — so much for the "my family" thing.]
But this "in my country"? Honey, it's Perez Hilton's country, too. And the "country" does not believe that marriage should be just between a man and a woman. It's, if anything, divided on the issue. (And I won't even mention the awkward phrasing "I think that I believe…." — huh? You don't know what you believe?)
Moreover, the question was about a state's policy toward same-sex marriage. Her belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman is irrelevant. Which is what makes it a bad answer. (Analogy: A person can be a Catholic and still believe that the state shouldn't discriminate against Jews).
So, in my view, Miss California blew it on the Q and A not because of her belief in man-woman marriage, but because she largely dodged the question, and did so rather ineloquently. My understanding of the Q and A is that it is not about whether the question is answered "correctly" or even "politically correctly", but rather, to be cogent and responsive. Miss California didn't do well in this category at all.
This, then, answers the question put forth by Hindraker in perspective:
Miss North Carolina, the winner of the Miss USA competition, was also asked a political question–about bailouts. She responded by disapproving of the federal government bailing out private companies. Yet this answer, which 1) runs counter to the policies adopted by our national government, 2) stands in stark opposition to the actions of our President, and 3) is more a matter of current debate than gay marriage, was not considered "controversial" by anyone. Why not?
Again, the difference, it would seem, was not the substance of one's answer or how "controversial" it was, but rather, the way in which the answer was (or wasn't) articulated.
You know the famous national landmark, Four Corners?
It's the exact location where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together.
Every year thousands of tourists visit the marker designating where the four states meet, and they take pictures of themselves straddling four states.
Like this girl:
Cute, but a waste of time. Because the marker is off:
Four Corners — the only place in the United States where four state boundaries come together — was first surveyed by the U.S. government in 1868, during the initial survey of Colorado's southern boundary line. Its intended location was an even 109 degrees west longitude and 37 degrees north latitude.
However, due to surveying errors, it didn't come out that way.
According to readings by the National Geodetic Survey, today's official marker sits at 109 02 42.62019 W longitude and 36 59 56.31532 N latitude.
That means the current monument marking the intersection of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona is approximately 2.5 miles west of where it should be.
According to three different Internet sites for distance calculations (including an FCC site and GPS visualizer) the readings were 2.493; 2.484; and 2.499 miles.
So that ruins that vacation memory.
This 12 year old got off to a rough start, with Simon cutting him off. But then….
Britain's Got Talent Week 2: Shaheen Jafargholi – video powered by Metacafe
RELATED: The YouTube video of Susan Boyle has exceeded 100,000,000 views in just nine days. For comparison purposes, Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" video — YouTube's current reigning champion — took more than two years to accumulate its tally of 118 million views.
This is a show I will be performing in August. I thought I would create a scene using computer animation and computer voices.
UPDATE: Yeah, Norbert looks like George Bush. And he's drinking a martini. I was somewhat limited in my choice of characters and settings.
This Week With George Stephenapolous:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That’s my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?
BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.
Boehner has just demonstrated why he is in no position to be an opponent of efforts to address climate change.
Because to be an opponent of something, you have to at least be on the same playing field.
Carbon dioxide is a carcinogen? He's right when he says CO2 is not a carcinogen, but that has NOTHING to do with global warming. It's a non sequitor from left field.
But carbon dioxide, in high levels, contributes to the destabilization of the planet’s climate. And it does kill. (Anyone remember Apollo 13 and the part where they had to replace the scrubber? That's because the old one was broke, forcing the astronauts to be living in an environment full of their own CO2 emissions).
Then Boehner says, "Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide."
Uh… no. Cow farts do not consist of carbon dioxide. And if John Boehner thinks that cow farts are no different from human exhalation, he is more than welcome to lift the tail of a cow and put that theory to the test. I'll even provide the stool for him to sit on.
No, bovine flatulence is actually methane, and yes, it does genuinely contribute to global warming, albeit not on the same scale as industrial activity.
But the larger point here is that you can't do much to address the global warming issue properly in the face of powerful politicians as ignorant as Boehner.
For journalism, Fox News and newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch again got shunned, proving that the Pulitzers are part of the librul conspiracy.
The Pulitzer for drama went to “Ruined,” by Lynn Nottage. It's a "searing drama set in chaotic Congo that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness." So…. not a musical.
From the 1950's Educational Archives:
So now we know that waterboarding was used 266 times on two terrorist suspects. 183 of those times were on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of 9/11, in one month.
The Bush administration euphemistically used waterboarding as an "enhanced interrogation technique", but when you hear that it was used 183 times in one month, a couple of common sense things jump out.
The main thing is this: as "interrogation techniques" go, this one obviously wasn't working. If I were present at, oh, the 35th waterboarding, I might raise my hand and say: "Okay. Either he has given us every piece of information we want, or this near-drowning thing isn't working".
I have absolutely no way of knowing, but I suspect that what was going on had less to do with information-gathering (clearly it was ineffective if you had to do it 183 times), and more do to with — let's be honest — punishment. Or, to be blunt, outright sadism. Sadism in the name of our government.
I don't care that the subject was KSM. It's not about him. It's about us. We live in a country which has sunk to KSM's level.
Charles Lemos over at MyDD notes his close friendship with WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, who was brutally murdered by al Qaeda, and responds to the torture memos:
Those of us who knew Danny are very protective of Danny and his legacy because Danny Pearl was an exceptional human being. It is hard to talk about Danny and not wax eloquent. It is beyond belief to us that when Al Qaeda killed Danny, they killed someone who actually was interested in having their grievances heard. Not that Danny or I sympathized with Islamic terrorism, but there are many who think it important to understand its causes so that we might be able to better mitigate its spread.
In thinking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times in the month of March of 2003, I cannot but express how this denigrates everything that Danny stood for. In waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have descended to the level of that butcher. We have proved that we are no better than them and I refuse to believe that. The West has a moral obligation to live up to the ideals that Danny Pearl embodied.
Yup.
A lot of people didn't know this, but Time Warner announced that it wanted to test the idea of metering bandwidth.
What does that mean? Well, basically, the idea was to start charging more to Internet users who used more bandwidth. If you access/download songs or video (like YouTube), you would end up paying more for Internet service. It's what Time Warner called "consumption-based billing".
Where was Time Warner planning to test this idea? Right here in North Carolina. Here and New York.
I had heard about this and was not pleased. Like many around here, I use Time Warner's Road Runner service for Internet access at home.
But the people in New York went ballistic. Representative Chuch Schumer got involved.
And the bottom line? Bandwidth metering is dead in the water. Read more.
A pretty cool new feature to Google Maps was added today.
Go to Google Maps, click "More", and check "Webcams". Now Google Maps will be embedded with live webcams.
UPDATE: Hmmm. A few bugs perhaps. For example, if you go to Google Maps and zoom in to the webcam just southeast of Louisville, Kentucky……
Colbert's spoof of that anti-gay marriage ad.
But let's have a recap.
First, the original ad:
And one of the leaked "rough cut"s that someone found and posted on YouTube:
And now, Colbert's spoof:
