Psychopolitik 2.0

To be honest, I didn’t even know my former state had a gay marriage ban. Well, for now at least, it’s gone bye-bye:

A Polk County judge has struck down Iowa’s law banning gay marriage. That means gay couples from anywhere in Iowa can now apply for a marriage license in the county.

Judge Robert Hanson ruled today that Iowa’s prohibition on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

And the word spread quickly. Less than two hours after the ruling was publicized, two Des Moines men applied at the county recorder’s office for a marriage license. Many more are expected when the office opens tomorrow morning. […]

Today’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2005, claiming six gay couples were unfairly denied marriage licenses. Des Moines lawyer Dennis Johnson, who represented the couples, says Hanson’s ruling is a moral victory for equal rights.

But the issue is far from settled.

Governor Culver says he opposes the ruling, and House Minority Leader Christopher Rants says he guarantees there will be a vote next session to ban gay marriage.

Cue the rants about “judicial activism*” from the usual characters in 3…2…1…

As is typical with this kind of issue, the field of debate is nowhere near the root. Some say the courts should decide, others say it’s a legislative or popular vote thing — “the will of the people” and all that. What needs to be asked is why government on ANY level is sanctioning or rejecting relationships, whether straight, gay, whatever, not whether tyranny of the majority is better than tyranny of the few.

Edit: gee, that was quick.  The decision is already stayed.

(* - To be honest with you, I’ve come to see the concept as 95% nonsense. Most people don’t bother to think about why any decision is made, so it amounts to “it’s activism if I disagree with it”. Rare is the person who can acknowledge activist intent in a ruling they find to be morally just — I see it clearly in this despite my approval of the principle expressed, I just don’t care because I find it absurd the question has to be asked in the first place.)

Jena, Louisiana. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

Anyway, this is what happened there: at a high school there, part of the campus outdoors was declared segregated by some students — specifically, the shade of a certain tree was declared “white”. Some black students sat under the tree, after which white students hung nooses from it. Those white students got a slap on the wrist, if anything, for that behavior from the school. Complaints about the obviously biased treatment were met by a threat from the DA.

After awhile of threats and outright violence against black students — which were ignored by that same DA — a white student, in support of the troglodytes that hung the nooses from that tree, started taunting black students, and used the magic word. Needless to say, this got him beat up, albeit not enough to seriously ruin his day.

Now, a normal person would look at that & think “typical schoolyard fight”; no real lasting injuries, the guy even went to an event later that day. The DA thought something else: “attempted murder”.

If you, like I, think that’s bullshit, click here & let that bigoted moron (and Governor Blanco) know.

Vache plays tag, and I’m it. For this one, that means the following:
“People who are tagged need to write these rules in their own blogs & share eight things about themselves that others might not know. At the end of the their blog post, they need to tag six people and list their (blog) names. Leave a comment on the blogs of the people they’ve chosen telling them they’ve been tagged and encouraging them to come over and read the eight things you’ve written on your blog.”

Sure.

1) I was in the Scouts when I was little. From what I can remember, I was pretty much the only one in my group that was actually into it.

2) Before I took up music, I used to want to write & direct movies, except rather than come up with an actual plot I’d randomly have ideas about scenes, most of which had nothing to do with each other.

3) In high school I tried out for the basketball team, only to get cut on the first day. People were asking me — during the tryouts - why the hell I didn’t try for football instead.

4) Falling down the stairs at age 6 actually had a benefit for me: it rendered one of the wrestling moves my brother would try on me ineffective. Broke my collarbone, and I guess it did something to the nerves in that area, because if you come up behind me and squeeze the area between my neck & shoulders it doesn’t hurt.

5) Thanks to the ridiculous cost of living in GA, at one time I spent a week living in a roadside motel while in between apartments.

6) Ever had a conversation about food w/ a uniformed cop while clearly under the influence & walked away? I have…

7) The longest I’ve ever had a pet was 14 years. It was a turtle.
For some as yet unexplainable reason, I was a Knicks fan for exactly one year.

Cynapse, Brad, Jeremy, Ron, whoever feels like taking it at UO, & John Cole: y’all is IT, I say!

The award for “Best kicking of a horse that should already be dead” goes to *drumroll*…LiveScience.com, for proving yet again that the right-wing view of family structure is built on sheer ignorance and not “tradition”, w/ the following:

Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.

Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.  If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past.

“Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize,” Tulchin writes in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History. “And Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures.”

For example, he found legal contracts from late medieval France that referred to the term “affrèrement,” roughly translated as brotherment. Similar contracts existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe, Tulchin said.

In the contract, the “brothers” pledged to live together sharing “un pain, un vin, et une bourse,” (that’s French for one bread, one wine and one purse). The “one purse” referred to the idea that all of the couple’s goods became joint property. Like marriage contracts, the “brotherments” had to be sworn before a notary and witnesses, Tulchin explained.

Heh.  Now watch some theocrat come unglued and twist this to be the reason for, well, pretty much anything bad that happened then.

Jon Wilde: “Teachers are basically irrelevant, kids are innate self learners”.

Sam Bagwhat: “You say that because you hang around a ton of self-learners.  It ain’t that easy“.

Me: I think there’s a chicken-vs-egg thing underneath the surface here.  If libertarian circles are overwhelmingly made up of self-learners, at least enough so that it couldn’t be coincidence, then which was the beginning trait?  Were we just naturally learning outside of traditional authority because we already rejected it in principle, or is it a matter of self-learners realizing along the way “well if I don’t need coercive authority over me for this, there’s really no reason to accept it for anything”?

Shorter Matthew Yglesias: “libertarians likee teh animal cruelty, yais yais”.  Grounds for this assumption would be _______?

Sadly, there’s even worse in the comments.  Seriously, how does one make such a leap?  If libertarianism is automatically pro torturing animals for the hell of it, I’m sorry but I missed that memo…

Mr. Torture Memo, Mr. Who-Needs-a-Warrant, Mr. Partisanship Kicks Ass, Senor Shit on the Constitution.  By any name, he is Gone-zo:

Alberto Gonzales, the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general, announced his resignation Monday, driven from office after a wrenching standoff with congressional critics over his honesty and competence.

*sniff*…do I smell spin already?

Republicans and Democrats alike had demanded his departure over the botched handling of FBI terror investigations and the firings of U.S. attorneys, but President Bush had defiantly stood by his Texas friend for months until accepting his resignation last Friday.

“After months of unfair treatment that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position and I accept his decision,” Bush said from Texas, where he is vacationing. (emphasis mine)

This guy politicizes the Justice Department so thoroughly that John fucking ASHCROFT looks like a sensible human being in comparison, and the claim slid into the sewage pond of talking points is “well, he couldn’t do his job anymore cuz of those mean ol’ Democrats”?  Those same pussies that barely even touched on the numerous crimes ironically committed by or with the approval of the nation’s #1 prosecutor?  The candy asses that hemmed and hawed about warrantless surveillance on US citizens only to LEGALIZE it?

If that’s bullying, then I’m a sentient ham sandwich.

Of course, there’s already discussion over who’ll fill the hole:

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff was among those mentioned as possible successors, though a senior administration official said the matter had not been raised with Chertoff. Bush leaves Washington next Monday for Australia, and Gonzales’ replacement might not be named by then, the official said. […]

Congressional aides and lawmakers agreed that any nomination of a new attorney general was almost certain to be acrimonious. The easiest prospects, some said, might be a current or former colleague of senators charged with the confirmation. Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Monday that he would not accept the job, if offered.

But, he said, another current or former senator “might be just the ticket.”

I have no idea why it popped into my head, but for some reason I can imagine him trying to nominate Lieberman.  He’s an authoritarian nutjob, prone to using fear for political leverage a lot like Bush, and as a twist he could claim “well damn, you guys said you wanted a non-partisan!” if anyone actually had the courage to still object.  Dear Vishnu I hope he doesn’t read this blog…

Unfortunately, though Gonzo won’t be there, somebody will.  The painful truth is, in the long term, this doesn’t matter, for one reason:

[T]he only way to change the policies of the Executive branch is to change Presidents.

Odds aren’t good that whoever comes in next will relinquish the power that the Bush regime seized.  That would be why I suspect over time scrapping the whole thing is going to stop being seen as crazy talk.  To deliberately butcher a Keynes quote, in the long run we’re all anarchists.

We’ll miss ya, Aaron…

Am I even reading this right?

As he awaits a crucial progress report on Iraq, President Bush will try to put a twist on comparisons of the war to Vietnam by invoking the historical lessons of that conflict to argue against pulling out.

On Wednesday in Kansas City, Missouri, Bush will tell members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” according to speech excerpts released Tuesday by the White House.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Bush will say.

WTF?  Who in the HELL, other than him & his fellow absolute nutjobs, would seriously claim the problem with the Vietnam War was that our involvement wasn’t long enough?

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ” the president will say.

Bad enough he’s invoking it at all, but this is to whitewash it.  Anyone who’d go as far as to claim our withdrawal was primarily responsible for the death of innocents is apparently unfamiliar with the phrase “we had to burn the village to save it”.

The president will also make the argument that withdrawing from Vietnam emboldened today’s terrorists by compromising U.S. credibility, citing a quote from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that the American people would rise against the Iraq war the same way they rose against the war in Vietnam, according to the excerpts.

“Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently,” Bush will say. (emphasis mine)

This isn’t the time for cherry picking.  What about the quotes — plural — where Bin Laden & his #2 have both said they hope we NEVER leave Iraq because we’re playing into their hands?

Another thing that weed is safer than: espresso.  Proof on this comes from Britain:

Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family’s sandwich shop.

The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.  She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.

Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began laughing and crying for no reason while serving customers at the shop. […]

The teenager, who was allowed home after a few hours of observation, suffered side effects for days afterwards and now says she cannot stand the sight of coffee.

Try taking seven bong hits in a row & see if anything happens to you other than dozing off.