Drag outlawed at pride parade

1, Restlessgeist has some excellent comments on the Kerry campaign.

2. The story on polling has gone from unanimous support for Bush to a divergence between one poll showing Bush substantially ahead and three others, also conducted this week, showing the race is once again a dead heat.

3. The DNC's new ad nicely packages together Bush's sunny, wildly out-of-touch pronouncements on Iraq and on the economy. This is an excellent tactic. In a certain way, it actually tries to draw out Americans' perception that Bush doesn't understand their economic problems, and use it to reframe their perception of him as commander-in-chief.

4. Meanwhile, the controversial new MoveOn ad has drawn the ire of the Bush administration, but as Kerry's people have said, they really can't have it both ways on the 527 issue. The ad hits hard, and it genuinely does raise the possibility of generating backlash if it is perceived as "unpatriotic." That said, the liberal 527s need to take those kinds of risks. They seem to have learned something from Swiftgate. And, in all honesty, controversy means free headlines.

5. Disturbingly, Johannesburg police are outlawing drag at this year's gay pride parade.

"McGreevy...should un-resign"

1. Food for thought from HRC's (wholly laudable, in my view) effort to turn this year's National Coming Out Day into a DNC promotion:

In December 2003, the HRC Foundation conducted a public opinion poll that found while 77 percent of respondents consider themselves “out” as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, only 32 percent talk to their parents about public policy issues, and only 46 percent talk to their brothers and sisters about such topics. In contrast, respondents were much more likely to speak frankly on these topics with casual acquaintances (57 percent) or co-workers (54 percent).

2. From Rex Wockner's column in the Sept. 15 Windy City Times (the issue is not yet online):

Golan Cipel, the self-described straight guy who says NJ Gov. James McGreevy repeatedly put unwelcome moves on him, will not sue for sexual harassment after all.

All that's left of this story, then, is that McGreevy came out as gay and admitted he had an adulterous affair with a man.

In post-Clinton 2004, that's no reason to resign.

McGreevy should tell us the full story of why he's resigning, or, if the affair is the whole story, he should un-resign.

One possibility: McGreevy and Cipel were actually boyfriends (and Cipel isn't straight) at the time McGreevy hired Cipel to work for him in a job that Cipel reportedly was unqualified for. That could provoke a resignation.

Of course, McGreevy has not told us who his affair was with and Cipel claims to be a molested straight guy, so I could be connecting dots that aren't even on the same page. Talk to us, James.

3. A phoned-in comment to the lgbt Houston Voice: "Gays supporting George W. Bush is like chickens supporting Colonel Sanders."

As ever, it's too close to call.

Electoral-vote.com now projects Kerry as likely to win more electoral votes than Bush - but, significantly, Florida is one of three states in which the candidates are polling as exactly tied (the others are Maine and Nevada), which means that the projection does not give its votes to either candidate. In any case, if Bush takes Ohio and Kerry Pennsylvania,m then neither candidate can win without Florida. Put another way, whoever takes two of these three states will be the next President. Using a somewhat more problematic methodology in which no state is interpreted as exactly tied, and in which Bush wins Florida and Pennsylvania but not Ohio, Electionprojection.com is predicting a Bush win.

It appears that Kerry must continue to work very hard to win Ohio and Florida - not exactly news - and that he must also hold on to a very teensy lead in Pennsylvania. Protecting the rights of voters of color in places like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Miami is going to be absolutely critical. In addition, it would also be good for him to pull ahead in Maine, a state he once expected to win easily but where Bush has pulled even. In addition, there's evidence that far more overseas ballots will be cast this year than ever before, and this largely unknown group could actually decide the election.

All of the above is, of course, barring election fraud.

I'm mulling over taking a trip to Ohio to help with canvassing and other Kerry activities sometime before I go to Oregon on October 26. Anyone who might be interested in joining, please get in touch!

Mark Morford has a cute column in the SF Chronicle headlined, Who The Hell Is "Undecided"? And why do so many election polls leave you angry and stupefied and drunk?

"Must" reading!

Today's blog entry is "must" reading.

1. Dr. Thomas Coates of the David Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA AIDS Center (woohoo gay philanthropy!) has written an extremely important op-ed in the Baltimore Sun on Bush's domestic HIV/AIDS policy, an overlooked deadly Bush lie (full text is available without a login at Jimberly's blog):

Imagine that you have been diagnosed with brain cancer. Your neurosurgeon recommends several strategies. Because you have confidence in a doctor, you go forward, but your cancer gets worse. And then you discover that your surgeon treated you using techniques not backed by scientific evidence.

Worse, you learn that the scientific evidence for the interventions the doctor implemented have been proved ineffective or even harmful.

Public health malpractice is what the U.S. government is practicing. Public health requires the same adherence to scientific evidence as does clinical medicine.

The Bush administration proposes that $270 million, nearly one-third of its domestic HIV/AIDS prevention funding, focus on abstinence. Draft regulations published in the June 16 issue of the Federal Register require the censoring of any government-funded content that is even vaguely "sexually suggestive" and require that all materials include information on the lack of effectiveness of condoms.

Relatedly,

here's me at the RNC, with my sign about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed rules.
Posted by Hello)

2. Read this encouraging, if not entirely believable, propaganda just received from MoveOnPAC:

Though you'd never know it from the TV news, a close look at the polls shows that the Republican convention was actually a bust for the President. According to the Gallup polling agency, Bush's bounce was "one of the smallest registered in Gallup polling history, along with Hubert Humphrey's two-point bounce following the 1968 Democratic convention [and] George McGovern's zero-point bounce following the 1972 Democratic convention . . . Bush's bounce is the smallest an incumbent president has received."[1] Bush's speech received slightly worse ratings from voters than John Kerry's, and according to the same Gallup poll, a remarkable 38% of voters said the convention made them less likely to vote for Bush.[2]
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=12922
[2] http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=183679

3. Bob Herbert in today's Times:

...A lot of other Republicans have similar views about the vote in areas with large African-American populations. Most blacks vote Democratic. If those votes can be suppressed, Republicans benefit. And there is increasing evidence that a big effort to suppress the vote among blacks and some other heavily Democratic voting groups is under way, which is why it is important to keep the following phone number handy:

1-866-OUR VOTE.

5. If you can, please contribute to No on 36, the group working to defeat Oregon's antigay constitutional amendment this November. Read here about why gay donors nationwide are choosing to focus their energies on Oregon.

6. I was blogging in numbered-lists before Julie Russo was!

The dead.

1. Go look at their pictures.

2. Regarding the man who sent them to their deaths, my dad's written this letter:

Dear Editor:

By now it has been proved beyond all doubt, and not contradicted by the White House, that in 1972 George W. Bush avoided taking the physical exam normally required by his National Guard status. Surely a simple question is now in order, one which could be readily answered by consulting the appropriate records: as of that date, did National Guard physical exams include drug-testing?

--David Winter

1 percent tip on $4500 worth of free drinks? Tacky, tacky, tacky

"On this date I ordered that 1st Lt. Bush be suspended from flight status due to failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards and failure to meet annual physical examination...as ordered"
--Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, 8/1/1972

"Since we've graduated from college, we're looking around for something to do for the next few years ... kind of like Dad."
--Barbara Bush, 22, speaking at the RNC, 8/31/2004

"If it was Bush's sons or daughters fighting that war over there, instead of standing at the Republican convention, I think it would have been different."
--Pam Lois (whose stepson, Private First Class Tim Brown, 21, died in Iraq in 2003), 9/3/2004

"They [and their entourage of about 25] drank $4,500 worth of drinks — bottles and bottles of vodka....Then, having been comped all the alcohol, they left a $48 tip. We thought 1 per cent was kind of outrageous, considering they are the president's daughters."
--An employee of New York City nightclub Avalon on Jenna and Barbara Bush, 9/4/2004

Iraq: No mission accomplished (or even explained), a thousand Americans dead, and no end in sight

It's being reported that US military deaths in Iraq have just surpassed 1,000. As the Associated Press nicely put it, "US military deaths in the Iraq campaign passed the 1,000 mark yesterday, with more than 800 of them during the stubborn insurgency that flared after the Americans brought down Saddam Hussein and President Bush declared major combat over." The LA Times brings us the latest night-is-day, 1984-style pronouncement from the Pentagon: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cast the death toll as evidence that the United States was aggressively engaging terrorists around the world."

Two pieces of gay news deserve to be circulated. In ruling that state's "defense of marriage" law violates that state's constitution, a Washington Judge has ruled that "homosexuals are a suspect class," meaning that discrimination against them requires a high level of legal scrutiny. He also confirmed that marriage is "a fundamental right." This case will probably be combined with another recent case when it is sent to the state's high court.

The Log Cabin Republicans, pathetically, have finally decided not to endorse President Bush's re-election. One does wonder what was holding them up. Amazingly, they have denounced John Kerry's "flip-flops" on marriage - "referring to statements that Mr. Kerry opposed same-sex marriage but also opposed amending the federal Constitution to ban it." This confirms my view that "flip-flop," in this campaign, is a term used by people who can't grasp complex ideas to describe the cognitions of those who can.

Congressmen want to de-fund behavioral research on HIV/AIDS

These people are stunning. Congress's inaction in the '80s wasn't enough - we must continue to make sure nobody finds out how to stop the HIV/AIDS pandemic...?


TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY

On Wednesday, September 8, Congress is expected to begin debate on the FY 2005 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill, which funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Last year, an amendment by Patrick Toomey (R-PA) offered to the bill would have rescinded funds from five specific grants that had been reviewed for their scientific merit and approved for funding by the NIH. The majority of these grants examined different aspects of sexual development and behavior and sought to inform public health interventions for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The amendment failed by only two votes.

While the amendment was defeated, some in Congress continue to express interest in eliminating federal funding for individual NIH grants they find objectionable, even though the projects are within NIH's mission and have gone through the established system of scientific review. During this week's debate on the bill, an amendment may target sexual behavior research or other areas of scientific inquiry, including basic behavioral research on identity, motivation, and personality. We hope that you will take a moment to call your member of Congress to express your support for NIH.

Condoms unavailable in 95% of America's prisons.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

What's today's reason to dispatch Bush?

Oh my God this is amazing. Daily reasons to dispatch Bush. They are so well-researched, well-written, hard-hitting. Probably not hard-hitting enough for the imaginary "swing voters," but they could be compressed into sound bites.

Kerry gets the best advice in the world

Former President Bill Clinton, in a 90-minute telephone conversation from his hospital room, offered John Kerry detailed advice on Saturday night on how to reinvigorate his candidacy, as Mr. Kerry enlisted more Clinton advisers to help shape his strategy and message for the remainder of the campaign. (NYT)

I'm glad John Kerry is getting advice from the #1 magician in American politics. I was, in fact, totally dumbfounded in the closing couple weeks of Al Gore's 2000 campaign that he was too proud to let Clinton campaign with him.

But beyond the question of whatever advice Clinton might give him, this story is the absolute best possible lead campaign item for today's Monday morning paper. The Times was the first to break the story, but its structure indicates that its basic contours were shaped by Kerry staffers. It's a great story for a number of reasons:

- it makes Kerry, not Bush, the lead story on the Monday following the RNC

- it links Kerry very strongly to America's most popular Democratic politician

- it changes the story from "the Kerry campaign is in trouble and searching for a new direction" to "John Kerry is getting the best advice in the whole wide world" (and Kerry managed to change the story in a quick, decisive way that bodes well for the coming weeks)

- it's got the added drama of Clinton being in his hospital bed (some have mused that Clinton's going into the hospital for bypass surgery and perhaps pushing Bush's convention off the front page is a very, very nice turn of events for the Dems)

- most importantly, it sets up future media coverage detailing "John Kerry's sharper attack on Bush" and discursively creates a break between Kerry's unfortunate August and the remainder of the campaign

- the story also repeats several variations on "Mr. Kerry's aides emphasized that this was an expansion of the staff for the fall campaign and did not represent another upheaval of the Kerry campaign" - which is obviously just window-dressing, but saying it over and over is still a good idea.

I also love that today's Washington Post quoted a retired math teacher in Norristown, Pennsylvania, as saying that "jobs, health care, the environment and not lying are the important issues" in the presidential race. I just love the idea that "not lying" has become an issue. Maybe the Kerry campaign should take it up. As in, "John Kerry and John Edwards - stronger on jobs, health care, the environment, and not lying."

In other news, unfortunately my home state of Michigan is going to to have an antigay state constitutional amendment on November's ballot. The hastily formed Coalition for a Fair Michigan is going to do its damnedest, but we have less of an organizing base in Michigan than in many states. Please contribute! Also, check out the website of Citizens for the Protection of Marriage and note that the country coordinators' phone numbers are listed on the website. As a private citizen, please call up these volunteers who have chosen to make their names and numbers public, and have a conversation with them about what gay people's rights mean to you.

Finally: check out some wonderful lines from Big Whicker Ventriloquist about the prospect of waking up and realizing that "George W. Bush is still in your bed...."

It's NOT the economy, stupid!

Note: Like John Kerry's campaign (or so I hope), this blog is being reorganized. Please note that my previous list of linked blogs is gone; if you have a blog and it's no longer listed, please do drop me a line and let me know its address.

Some thoughts.

1. The Kerry campaign has an uphill battle in the coming weeks. Kerry is up to the challenge; Iowa was only the latest demonstration that he is a true fighter (no pun intended), and is likely to adopt a new and better strategy soon.

2. They should run ads with Bush promises from the 2000 campaign. Especially about health care. Run these thousands of time in Ohio.

3. Or run ads about John Aschroft's lack of interest in pursuing terrorists in the summer of 2001.

4. The Swift Boat affair offers a lesson to the left-liberal 527 organizations: lie, lie, lie, and lie again. I personally would like to see TV ads aired of New Yorkers bitching about the air quality after 9/11 and the Bushies' lies about it and threats to their health, but there are so many ways that Bush can be attacked. We need massive blitz of truly vicious attack ads against the President, or we'll be stuck with him. Political scientists have shown time and time again that negative campaigns work.

5. When push comes to shove, Americans want someone who'll keep them safe from the terrorists. Why on earth so many of them think GWB is up to the task is truly beyond me, but clearly they do. Kerry needs to come up with an aggressive line of attack on this issue. And he needs to have some sort of "plan," not so elaborate as to make folks wonder why he didn't announce it earlier, yet significant enough to call into question whether Bush's performance is all it could be.

Bush's spotty record on terrorism

To the editor:

Dan Balz writes that although many Americans wonder whether Bush cares about domestic issues, "few doubt his willingness to act and act aggressively in the face of terrorist threats" ("Domestic Questions Remain," 9/3). This view is selective, at best.

No one doubts that Bush, as the author of a new doctrine of "pre-emptive" invasion, does not flinch from war-making - but aggression alone will not protect us. The administration showed no interest in fighting terrorism despite specific warnings in the summer of 2003, and the Iraq war and occupation have so overstretched American troops that we are left poorly prepared for further threats. Bush also caused offense worldwide by loosening the safeguards that could have prevented Abu Ghraib.

As I watch the Republicans exploit the anniversary of September 11, I recall my father's dismay that Bush didn't even visit New York until three days after September 11. President Clinton, he said at the time, would have found a way to get there by nightfall.

"letting 45 million americans go without health care"

From John Kerry's remarks at a midnight rally tonight in Ohio, according to an email from his campaign:

Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without health care makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi royal family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions of government contracts to Halliburton while you're still on their payroll makes you unfit. That's the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it's not going to change. I believe it's time to move America in a new direction; I believe it's time to set a new course for America.

Finally.

on behalf of girlie men everywhere

**********************************************
NATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN TASK FORCE
MEDIA RELEASE

MEDIA CONTACT:
Sheri A. Lunn - Director of Communications
202-641-5592
Roberta Sklar - Press Secretary
917-704-6358

http://www.TheTaskForce.org

**********************************************

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

On behalf of "girlie men" everywhere I'm perplexed. Last night
while you were speaking at the Republican National Convention,
you said, "To those critics who are so pessimistic about our
economy, I say: "Don't be girlie men.""

I've never known girlie men to be pessimistic about much of
anything. Think of our leading girlie men icons - Liberace, Paul
Lynde, Charles Nelson-Reilly, Freddy Mercury, Nathan Lane, and
Harvey Fierstein - all hopeless optimists, smiling and fighting
on in the face of adversity.

Oops. Now I get it. You simply misread the teleprompter. You
obviously meant to say, "To those critics who are so pessimistic
about our economy, I say: "BE girlie men." I look forward to
someone in your office setting the record straight, so to speak.


All the best,

Matt Foreman
Executive Director National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

***************************************************************

UPDATED protest pix

pix are here
click on RNC protest pix

"very good chest, very good arms, well hung, cut"

Thanks to Matt P. and Ian: go listen to the audio personal ad of the Republican Virginia congressman and Federal Marriage Amendment backer who's just resigned after being "outed."

report from NYC protests - 19 anecdotes

Before Reading: please note, some of my radical friends might worry that in the following I'll give away the anarchists' tactics and surprises. However, I am certain that there is NOTHING in the following text that is not already on tons of blogs or for Christ's sake reported in this week's Village Voice (and thus would have been easily learnable by any "intelligence" cop or Homeland Security worker who might have be assigned today to sit in the office and surf IndyMedia for updates on demonstrators' plans, or signed on to the protestors' completely un-secure web-enrolled lists of cell-phone-text message "newsgroups," which I treat only as a reporter would, in the following. I am CERTAIN about this. I've checked and proofread carefully to make sure these are all compeletely journalistic anecdotes that some kid sent by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch could have written.

1. Text messaging has in some ways changed the face of activism - or, at least, of multi-event urban protest activism. I signed up for software called TextMob, at www.txtmob.com, which permitted the automated distribution of messages from a single desktop computer to the cell phones of dozens of demonstrators, who may be widely dispered physically at the time that each of them is alerted, by cell phone, to some consideration that might affect the plans of the other group. I signed on to a couple of these lists so I'd get updates about things like where there were huge numbers of cops, where there were cops with riot gear and what direction they were moving, arrested, etc. I got a couple ones that were funny in their incoherence ("cops look panicky" at such-and-such an intersection). Maybe this is how Homeland Security workers feel when they cock their ears and strain to hear the "chatter" of the terrorists and somehow decide what color of alert to tell the country we are on?

2. For instance, apparently (I wasn't there), early this afternoon, a group of "gay" "anarchists" (to use FOX NEWS ANCHORspeak) convened suddenly at the cafe where the Log Cabin Republicans were holding their major pre-convention special event. Fliers advertising this event had been distributed at several smaller rallies and actions the previous day, and were available for pickup at bars and coffee shops on the lower east side. (At the Phoenix, I picked up a bumper sticker saying ATTENTION REPUBLICANS: GO FUCK YOURSELVES, sponsored by an indie rock band whose website was advertised in small print at the top and bottom of the bumper sticker. but a reminder just a few minutes beforehand made sure everyone would arrive at the restaurant on time - much as their Republican counterparts. They staged zany mock "weddings," like between animals and people and so forth.

3. This last phenomenon reflects the tactic that especially serious demonstrators said ahead of time in interviews that they would adopt for the convention week: learning about where Republicans would be dining, celebrating, or relaxing in the city, and then assembling at, outside, and between those functions and trying to make the delegates' stay in New York as unpleasant as possible. Early Sunday evening, I was in Times Square just before the day's big wave of arrests began. I was with a group of queers who had gathered for a "kiss-in," and who were spread across several of the square's intersections and islands just at the time when delegates began to arrive with their state contingents to attend Broadway shows. (Counterconvention.org posted a list on their website a few days ago of which states' delegates would be going to which shows, at which times).

4. I introduced myself to a Republican delegate from Oregon. He was a middle-aged white guy in a nice dress shirt and trousers. I asked him what he thought about the Federal Marriage Amendment and he said he had "mixed emotions" about it because he did have a gay nephew, and he was after all a part of the family. I told him I was gay too (in case he couldn't tell), and that I was really disturbed that his party had been taken over by extremists who put in their platform that they want to amend the Constitution to discriminate against me. He said, well, a lot of US think the Democratic party has been taken over by extremists. A woman next to us piped up, "Boy, if only that were the case!"

5. According to a story I read in the gay press, the Republicans appear to have hand-selected a group of eight Broadway shows for delegates to attend during specially scheduled performances this afternoon. What did this group of eight shows have in common?..hmm, it turns out that each show had not a single gay or lesbian character. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also tended to be the blandest, dullest shows that locals eschew (such as PHANTOM OF THE OPERA).

6. According to a text message I received, the police strung orange "arrest webbing" around a large group of perhaps one hundred fifty protestors, immobilizing them in a single place and then herding those caught in its sweep into paddy wagons to spend a hideously unpleasant eight to twelve hours or longer (how much longer we don't yet know) in the city's downtown jail.

7. On Thursday, a group of two men and two women from California and New York rapelled off the side of the Plaza Hotel, unfurling a huge banner that covered up many of the windows on the hotel's historic and architecturally important facade. The banner had two arrows, one labeled TRUTH and pointing to the right, and the other reading BUSH and pointing to the left. It was quite some time before police managed to get the banner removed. Many RNC delegates are staying at the Plaza Hotel. The photos of this action are really cool and you should check them out at http://www.indymedia.org. The four activists were arrested and charged with numerous offenses, but despite Manhattan prosecutors' efforts a judge released them on their own recognizance.

8. FOX NEWS is using photos of an immense, burning dragon-puppet that filled the stretch of Seventh Avenue in front of Madison Square Garden this afternoon, as its lead visual image displayed in tonight's website coverage of today's massive "umbrella" march (organized by United for Peace and Justice, whose appeal for permission to rally in Central Park was denied at the last minute by the state Supreme Court). However, as someone who participated in the march and even, in fact, saw the burning of the dragon from the next block, I would have chosen a different image to capture best the extraordinary intensity of the march. The image I would have chosen is of the section of Seventh Avenue directly in front of a hotel where many delegates were staying. As demonstrators literally filled the streets - moving very slowly because streets were so much more clogged than march organizers had expected - those within an easy sightline of the hotel chanted and screamed directly at the few RNC-related staff members who decided to appear, under heavy guard, on the hotel's balcony. Their chants included GO HOME BUSH, THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, HEY HEY HO HO GEORGE BUSH HAS GOT TO GO, YOU'RE NOT WELCOME - and, simply and angrily and with fingers pointed, the single word SHAME! The corporate media has set up an opposition between "good" protestors (peaceful, Quaker, middle-aged, Democratic Party, hardworking Americans) and "bad" protestors (young, disaffected, violent, dangerous), yet the overwhelming tone of the march, in my perception, was one of intergenerational cooperation, enthusiasm, and mutual education. At times, many young highly energized protestors took the lead in enacting, with their arms and bodies, the group's profound anger; other protestors with decades of social movement experience looked on smilingly, as if they appreciated that SOMEONE had finally taken up their mantle and was pissed off enough about their government's actions to flood midtown Manhattan with demonstrators. Some doubtless recalled their own youthful activism in the Vietnam era, and a number of handmade signs bore slogans referring to President Bush's avoidance of the Vietnam-era draft. (The NYT is reporting that today's protestors were part of the largest crowd ever assembled in conjunction with a political party's event, i.e., more people than Chicago '68.) One man was selling t-shirts with "Bush in '72" written in lines of cocaine (the shirts have printed on them "bushin72.com," though the guy said the website wasn't quite ready for primetime). One very elderly woman sitting at the edge of 7th Avenue in a lawn chair, watching the crowds, wore a sign saying TEXAN AGAINST BUSH, and was interviewed by a steady stream of reporters.

9. It's New York. Union Square has been mobbed for days by vendors and random folks of all stripes hawking t-shirts with all kinds of anti-Bush slogans. There were also lots of opportunities to buy these along the march route.

10. I marched with the queer "contingent," which was large enough to constitute a march in itself. By the time we left our starting point, I had received a text message saying that the front of the march had reached its endpoint but the end of it (that would be us) had not yet begun to move. Believe me, we were hot and cranky and sweaty after standing around in the middle of the street and ducking into Duane Reade or Dunkin Donuts hoping that sometime soon we might get to actually march. As my friend Sarah observed, protesting is often, it turns out, really really boring. Designated to gather in Sheridan Square at 10am, we homos and perverts and trannies and dykes formed a large "feeder march" that gathered in Sherdian Square (i.e., near the site of the Stonewall riots).

11. My favorite subgroup within the queer contingent was the GLAM BRIGADE. This consisted of extremely glamorously dressed activists - each dressed in a different elaborate outfit of totally garish makeup and prom dress, tuxedo, or undergarment, and each carrying an enormous sign whose glitter and matching plastic feather boas made it hard to miss. Each sign had a harsh, cutting message for Republicans such as

5 DEFERMENTS? TACKY, TACKY, TACKY.
G.O.P., YOU'RE NOT ON THE LIST [as in, you're denied entry at an exclusive club]
FASHION MEMO: FLIP-FLOPS ARE IN
PEACE IS BOOTYLICIOUS
ELECTION-STEALING IS SOOOOOOO 2000

and a bunch more along those lines.

12. About 250 bicyclists were arrested Friday evening at a Critical Mass event in which 5,000 people on bikes brought traffic across midtown Manhattan to a virtual standstill for several hours. (The circumstances of the arrests were described very differently in, say, the text messages I received about them and on FOX NEWS.) Few or no arrests Saturday. Then in the late afternoon today several hundred protestors were arrested (word is 150-200) in and around Times Square, which was basically shut down for a couple of hours as both delegates and protestors flooded the area. Some of these direct-action protests seemed to very effectively disrupt some delegates' arrival in the city, that is, they forced them to brave very angry, intense crowds of demonstrators who blocked their path through the streets and sidewalks.

13. I left the scene of the Times Square thing before huge numbers of people were arrested. But I was there for the beginning of the confrontation before the cops brought in horses and I walked far, far away. It started with this huge queer-kiss-in that according to fliers was supposed to fill the square just as delegates were on their way to attend eight specially scheduled performances of Broadway shows. The whole square (yes, the whole square) was pretty physically tense as protestors screamed carefully at passing delegates from behind police barricades. When the crowd in the square got really big, cops on horses suddenly came out of nowhere and galloping through the street, frightening a lot of people. Then riot squads came in, carefully arranged, and forced everyone up onto the sidewalk. The whole thing was videotaped by NLG legal observers in green hats (there were supposed to be 500+ lawyers and law students out volunteering today, the ACLU said ahead of time), and cops apparently designated by the NYPD for the purpose of videotaping us individually darted around and zoomed in at everyone carrying a sign and made sure each of us saw that our face was being captured on camera.

14. According to protestor-operated websites like IndyMedia, at least a dozen protestors were beaten by cops and and bleeding profusely in the street from their wounds.

15. I didn't see any riot gear. And, although many protestors had feared/discouraged or expected/hoped (depending on their level of willingness or unwillingness of members of a given contingent to risk arrest) that there would be physical confrontations with the police over whether the entire march could "break off" in the direction of the notoriously un-"permitted" Central Park Great Lawn, this did not happen.

16. Next to Madison Square Garden is a huge billboard for FOX NEWS. Whole sections of the march shouted FOX NEWS SUCKS as they walked past. I also took some time screaming BUSH MUST GO or YOU'RE NOT WELCOME at a couple of delegates appeared in the entranceway of Madison Square Garden. The delegates themselves were easily distinguishable from the Port Authority Police (since the NJ/NY P.A. operates Madison Sq Garden), and from the nattily-dressed-in-chinos, uniformed, walkie-talking-wearing Republican white-collar security-related personnel by their highly gender-color-coded outfits of three-piece suits and ties or tasteful, brightly colored skirts and tops.

17. I've been hanging out with my friend Kat who came from Chicago with me on an ATA frequent-flyer "companion ticket" + my Swarthmore friends and former housemates. Kat likes them and they like Kat :) We're all staying in Sarah Allegra and Judy's 3-bedroom apartment near Columbia, even though their really isn't enough bed space for all of us.

18. Protestors are having their own party all over the city. In my social set, the really cool kids had tickets to Margaret Cho, who was performing at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street (Harlem). In case you don't know, Margaret Cho is a Korean American comedian [thanks those of you who corrected me on that] who grew up in SF's gay Polk Street area, is a big fag hag, and icon for gay men who care about politics (think Judy Garland circa 2004). These shows at the Apollo were part of her STATE OF EMERGENCY tour. (Cho was, as you may know, nixed from a scheduled performance at a DNC-related function in Boston when the Democrats discovered she had intended to speak up about her opposition to their party platform's lack of support for gay marriage.) I tried to get a ticket on Saturday morning for one of her last two shows that evening, but they were completely sold out.

19. A final story - from yesterday, when I marched with 20,000 people across the Brooklyn Bridge in a pro-choice march. (In this case too we had to wait for hours before marching because only the pedestrian lane over the bridge was permitted....urrrgggh). Let me tell you, cheap-Chinese-restaurant operators were not equipped for the influx of folks they had after we made it across the Brooklyn Bridge. We were tired and our feet hurt and we had to wait like an hour for really really terrible food. During the wait I struck up some conversations with cops munching at nearby tables. One of them, a Bronx cop, told me they needed the Bronx and Brooklyn cops when something really bad was gonna happen, cause the Manhattan cops wouldn't be able to handle that (we shared an anxious, very very conscientious on both sides laugh over this joke). Another cop shushed him for saying this out loud 'cause he thought it would offend Manhattan cops within earshot (I am not making this up), but a third cop glanced at the nearby tables and assured the others that there definitely weren't any Manhattan cops who could have heard the insult.

20. Photos coming soon!

a city under siege

Letter sent to the New York Times:

To the editor:

I was living in New York when Mayor Bloomberg was elected in the fall of 2001, and returning to the city protest at the Republican National Convention, I only wish I could vote against him again. �I have been welcomed by the mayor's belligerent disdain for peacefully assembled protestors and his warning that the city expects to arrest 1,000 protestors every day. �I am deeply disturbed by the city's aggressive media campaign to depict demonstrators as a threat and to promote their overwhelming, militarized preparation.

It's easy to see why President Bush wants to come to New York - this is the city, after all, that was willing two months after one of its greatest crises to elect a mayor almost solely on the say-so of Rudy Giuliani, whose cool and competence stood in such constrast to President Bush's silence. �Since 2001 many New Yorkers, like many Americans, have learned a great deal about the preciousness of our civil liberties and even our longstanding international alliances. �I only hope that Americans increasingly recognize the exploitation of tragedy as an empty and profoundly corrosive form of politics.

Instructions received from United for Peace & Justice:

We all know that large numbers of people are planning to go to Central Park�s Great Lawn on Sunday, despite � or because of � the court�s ruling that we may not hold a rally there.

United for Peace and Justice emphatically supports the right of people to peacefully assemble in Central Park.

We are committed to having a safe, legal protest march, that anyone and everyone can attend � kids, seniors, immigrants, people with disabilities. We therefore are NOT leading our march to Central Park, and we ask everyone who plans to participate in our march to respect our desire for a safe and legal event, and not to organize breakaway marches from it to the Park.

To those who wish both to march with us and to assert their right to assemble in Central Park on Sunday, we ask that you follow our march to the end, disperse peacefully at Union Square, and then make your own way to the Great Lawn.

the right of the people peacefully to assemble

One of my favorites of numerous clever, happy posters being prepared for wheatpasting in NYC.

"I left the doors unlocked"

On reports that the FBI has launched 24-hour surveillance of 56 protestors in anticipation of the RNC (from a visitor's comment):

Dear Federal Bureau of Investigation,

Can I just say that I am deeply disappointed that I have not yet received my personal visit from the FBI. I have put a great deal of time into my radical activities over the last couple months and frankly, it's time I received proper recognition for my work.

I left the doors unlocked. I have stayed up long nights waiting for you to enter my window. So where are you?

Do you seriously think I organized all those traffic blocks and banner hangs just to be ignored like some lowly petition gatherer? Do you think I locked myself to a crusty punk by the neck with bicycle U-locks just for fun? Do you think it's easy to create a costume-pirate-hook-out-of-papier-mache-that-is-intended-to-be-mistaken-by-the-Boston-police-as-a-molotov-cocktail-hoax-device? Those kinds of nuances take work. And those giant puppets of sunflowers, moon spirits, and earth goddesses, well guess what -- they weigh a fucking ton! . . .

Nice work. Keep it up.

The Kerry campaign has finally found an effective response to the Swift Boat bullshit. I love this ad. I could watch it all day long.

But why is it only being shown on the Internet? If the footage can't be broadcasted for copyright reasons, surely a transcript of it can be displayed and read by a narrator...?

Meanwhile, the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush have released a whole new ad, attacking Kerry's antiwar activism (in which they misspell "Genghis Khan").

Where is the inherent criminality in appointing your fuckbuddy to your gubernatorial staff?

From an exchange with a friend concerning New Jersey Governor James McGreevey:

I do not accept the notion that Cipel was clearly, unambiguously "unqualified" to serve in a new staff position in the New Jersey governor's office in charge of "disseminating and coordinating public safety programs with other state departments and branches of government." Cipel essentially was supposed to act as a liaison between the governor's office and state and federal security agencies. While four years as the chief information officer of the Israeli consulate in New York City perhaps do not make one the best person for the job, they also probably provide some amount of relevant experience for what I continue to insist is not a very important position, and we do tend to allow elected officials to hire for their staff persons they already know and feel comfortable with, even when there may be other persons whose qualifications on paper are more notable. That New Jersey paid Cipel's immigration fees seems in keeping with the practice of many US employers who provide administrative and legal support in obtaining proper immigration credentials for persons they want to hire (as my own former employer in New York did for my former boss).

Sure, McGreevey didn't tell the public that the two of them were boinking, but does the presumption that it is the public's business not warrant a second thought? If he didn't tell other family members, why is it important to tell the People of New Jersey who he's boinking? And on a more profound level, what is sex, and what does it "do" to the relationship - whether professional or of some other kind - between two persons? If the appointee in question will be a subordinate who reports directly to the governor (and I haven't heard one way or the other whether Cipel was), it's probably not optimal to be boinking, but what if we scrutinize the presumption that sexual involvement make someone into one's "lover," "intimate," or "family member," and thus cast the appointment of the person one boinks as a case of "nepotism" or conferring undue advantage on that person? Could that presumption be viewed as an effect of universalizing a particular scheme concerning the epistemological and relational status of sex, i.e., as a heterosexist presumption?

I am saying this partly to be outrageous, yes. But I haven't gotten a clear idea of why this appointment was so much more egregious than a president appointing a family member to lead one's task force on reforming the nation's health care system. To be sure, the public is aware of the sexual or intimate relationship in that instance, but, again, it's necessary to weigh whether or not the need for secrecy of a politician living in the closet might help not only explain but even justify the secrecy surrounding the boinking. Again, I say this partly based on the idea that we shouldn't jump to conclusions regarding the precise relational, emotional, and political context of the boinking, and partly because I think that we ought to give closeted queers a certain kind of break.

> That part might be parallel to Kentucky's Patton, but not trying to
> appoint your lover to a state office that's taken seriously and salaried
> highly (no matter how un-yummy the "homeland security" concept may be,
> which I'll grant)... and not one of your other examples even involves
> leveraging elective office to financially benefit your hoochie.

Again, let's say a president were to appoint his wife head of the task force in charge of planning his major domestic policy initiative. Would that be equally egregious? Or would it be just as bad to secretly and continuously boink one's Senate colleague, and then the nation's vice-president, before assuming the presidency oneself, as President Buchanan likely did in the 1840s and '50s?

To what extent is the moral primacy and indispensability of particular forms of disclosure surrounding sex and employment constituted by a set of moral norms that are deeply bound up with heteronormativity? Should it not concern us that it was a closely related set of expectations concerning sex and employment - more closely related than we might like to admit or even understand - that forced recent politicians ranging from Ronald Reagan to Lyndon Johnson to Martin Luther King to fire subordinates when the mere fact of their homosexuality became known?

Shouldn't we give this closeted fag a break?

> Look, of course being gay is upping the magnitude on this thing, but
> there's no way that that alone would have been enough to cause a
> resignation. That's all I'm saying. Don't you agree???

Of course, if McGreevey had announced that he is gay, though he had never "acted on it" or not since his marriage, he would not receive meaningful pressure to resign. That, I do not dispute.

URGENT: Get the lying Republican smear ad OFF THE AIR!

Loyal readers, please view the "Swift Boat" ad at swiftvets.com, the Moveon response ad at the website below, and then GIVE MONEY. If you are broke, CHARGE IT to a credit card like I just did. We CANNOT let them get away with this, and we must show John Kerry that he MUST strike back.

There's no point nominating a Vietnam vet if we don't make sure we win on the military service "issue."

----

Dear MoveOn member,

President Bush still won't condemn his allies'
outrageous "Swift Boat" ad, despite calls from
Republican leaders, Vietnam vets, and over
175,000 of us who signed yesterday's petition --
including 6,000 current military service members
and their families. Together, we can make sure he
pays a political price for green-lighting this attack
ad that spreads outright lies about John Kerry's
leadership and service in Vietnam.

We've put together our own ad that sets the facts
straight on John Kerry's time in the military. It also
points out Bush's hypocrisy in condoning an
attack on a combat veteran, after he himself failed
to show up for service in the National Guard. We
need to raise $200,000 to start airing this ad
TODAY. Together, we can put it on TV in precisely
the markets where the "Swift Boat" ad ran,
making sure that no swing voters are misled by
this smear campaign.

View the ad and donate to get it on the air at:

https://www.moveonpac.org/donate/swiftresponse.
html

George Bush can't have it both ways. If he wants,
as he claims, to let the past be the past, he should
call off his associates' smear campaign, which is
re-opening this national wound. If he won't, he
should at the very least be willing to make a full
accounting of his own military service. If George
Bush wants to make Vietnam a campaign issue,
that raises a simple question: Where was he?

According to the Boston Globe, which researched
the available facts extensively, there's no
evidence Bush reported for duty during the
summer and fall of 1972, a time when he was
supposed to be serving in the National Guard. But
despite a promise on "Meet the Press" to open
up his "entire record," Bush has yet to offer any
documents that show he was there.[1] In fact, the
Associated Press has been forced to go to court
to force the release of clearly germane documents
that Bush wishes to keep secret.[2]

It's as simple as this: If you evade military service,
you have no right to allow attacks on the service of
others. Yet that is precisely what George Bush
appears to be doing. And together, we can call
attention to that grave hypocrisy with our new ad,
which we'll run to "shadow" the "Swift Boat" ad.

Can you help us get it on the air? Take a look at
the ad and give what you can at:

https://www.moveonpac.org/donate/swiftresponse.
html

Yesterday's petition signers included many
military veterans and their families. Mavis from
Fremont, CA told Bush, "To make such claims
against Senator Kerry's record also smears the
record of the other soldiers who served honorably
in Vietnam and are serving today." And Stuart
wrote from Manassas, VA that he is "among the
veterans who deplore the type of misleading ads
[that] ran against John Kerry. Anyone who shed
blood, or [who] knows anyone who shed blood in
defense of what our country stands for, knows that
these ads are not only inaccurate, but immoral as
well."

Incredibly, the "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush"
operatives have responded to our campaign by
issuing a statement that claims, "We were there.
We served with John Kerry." But even that is a lie.
While the ad presents its subjects as former
crewmates of Kerry's, the reality is that the only
thing most of the men share with him is that they
were in Vietnam at the same time. And the men
who did serve with Kerry are unanimous in their
support of him.[3]

It's time to call Bush to account for these dirty
tricks. Together, we can do that on TVs across the
country.

Sincerely,

--Eli Pariser
MoveOn PAC
August 17th, 2004

Career in the toilet; great sex life awaits

Before we get started, I need to point out this adorable headline (and it's not even from The Onion): God invalidates the California Supreme Court.

The following was received from a New York City club promoter (original spelling has been preserved):

for immediate release! August 12, 2004

Ex Govenor McGrevey has just contacted our offices here at DN Industries to announce that he would like to take up go-go dancing given his newly appointed freedom!

So tonight he will be shaking his 47 year old groove thang tonight for dollars at Manhattan's only underwear party Tigerbeat! Come experience "geezer fever" as the hottest govenor since Arnold Schwarzenegger swings his meat for the masses. He expressed interest in exploring his sexuality the old fashioned way, as a booty-clapper for guys who hold dollars.

McGrevey claims "I figure that I'd follow in the footsteps of other major politcal figures such as Rudi Guiliani, Gavon Newsom and Condoleeza Rice who are all veteran pole-dancers from way back when."

For more information on this, or for an interview with Ex-Gov McGrevey, call (212) 330 6926

In all seriousness, here's what we have to contend with: The revelation that Jim McGreevey improperly appointed his gay lover as homeland security chief for New Jersey, a post for which he was not qualified, has cast a pall over an announcement that had not previously been associated with public wrongdoing. Right-wing assholes are saying McGreevey should resign resign now rather than on November 15, which would allow a new election to take place on November 2 - an outcome that could mean a new governor. McGreevey, in other words, is protecting his party. And rightly so, I say.

Here at securityrisk.blogspot.com, we stand by our initial perception that Jim McGreevey is suffering more than a straight person would in his position. As our review of politicians' hetero affairs indicates (see previous post), they typically result in scandal and finger-wagging. Occasionally, these scandals end in resignation, after a long buildup during which some extraordinary level of wrongdoing is revealed. Even when official misconduct has taken place, it is not typical for resignation to accompany the initial disclosure of the affair - even when the politician has been an outspoken critic of the extramarital affairs of others or faces multiple sexual harrassment allegations. Jim McGreevey resigned because he is gay. He is a sacrifice on the altar of Democratic Party unity.

More broadly, it's useful to remember that closeted fags do have the potential to get involved in seedy shit, in a way that open fags do not - there's no way around it. Read David Carter's new book Stonewall; that place was practically overrun with mobster-blackmailers. This is why we need people to come out of the closet. Jim McGreevey refused to pay hush money and preferred to ruin his career. Pretty admirable, in my book.

Just as a reminder, let's recall that Barney Frank, though he was not actually in the closet, used his office to try to get the felony probation of his lover shortened, and to waive many, many parking tickets obtained when this lover was driving the car. This lover was also publicly accused of running a prostitution ring out of Frank's home.

This leaves only one bad thing that McGreevey did: appoint his totally unqualified lover as homeland security chief for New Jersey. I personally would applaud this, as a totally yummy though probably unintended way of slighting the whole Homeland Security Concept. I mean, for real. (John Ashcroft, if you're listening, fuck you.)

A final point: coming out has helped McGreevey's approval rating, a concept that was politically unthinkable just a few years ago. Moreover, 41 percent of New Jersey residents say they were not surprised to learn that he's gay. The American people's gaydar seems to be improving by leaps and bounds.

One happy outcome, as a friend of mine pointed out, is one the papers seem afraid to print: Jim McGreevey is going to have a great sex life. The man is gorgeous.

On resignations and extramarital affairs

Chapter One

October 5, 2002 Embattled [Kentucky] Gov. Paul Patton reiterated Friday he has no plans to resign and said leaving office before his term is over would be detrimental to Kentucky....Patton is under investigation by state and federal government agencies for allegations he misused his office to help, and later hurt, the business of a western Kentucky woman with whom he had an affair....when she refused to continue the relationship, Conner said, Patton sicced regulators on her facility, Birchtree Healthcare.

January 18, 1999: Congressman and House Judiciary Committee member, Bob Barr['s] affair became known this past week. Barr, and his second wife, Jeri were in an affair while he was still married to his first wife, Gail. His former wife has stated that Barr paid for her abortion in '83 and never tried to stop her. In his '86 divorce testimony, Barr stated that he never objected.

April 26, 2001: Arnold Schwarzenegger backed out of his plan to run for governor of California after he learned the National Enquirer was planning to print details of an extramarital affair, says The New York Post....Premiere Magazine recently reported incidents of Schwarzenegger allegedly groping women and being caught having sex with another woman on the set of "Eraser," and carrying on an open affair with his "Total Recall" co-star Rachel Ticotin.

May 07, 2004: Former [Oregon] Gov. Neil Goldschmidt admitted Thursday that he had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 35 and mayor of Portland, and said he is resigning all his public and private positions to "rebuild my life."

May 15, 2001: Beleaguered by media inquiries about a rumored extramarital affair with a top state official, Gov. Jeb Bush — who is weighing whether to seek re-election in 2002 — took an extraordinary step Monday by publicly denying the rumors and calling them an “outright lie.”

Sept. 30, 2002: Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie's revelation this weekend that she and former Prime Minister John Major had a four-year extramarital affair in the early '80s provided plenty of fodder for the British press. Several papers expressed a grudging new admiration for Major, who was seen for so many years as an extraordinarily bland politician.

September 19, 1998: An offer by Illinois Republican Henry Hyde to resign as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee because of an extramarital affair 30 years ago was rejected by Speaker Newt Gingrich, CNN confirmed Saturday.

July 19, 2001: Senator Trent Lott intoned that every member of the House who has had an extramarital affair ought to resign; Senator Ted Kennedy gamely responded that the House would then be empty, implying that adultery should never justify resignation.

October 17, 2000: A top official and radio announcer for Focus on the Family said he has resigned from the conservative Christian group because he had an extramarital affair.

October 1998:Results of opinion polls taken since the report was delivered to Congress on 9 September remain identical to before: roughly two thirds of those polled think that Clinton should not resign from office over an extramarital affair while roughly one third think he should resign or be impeached.

Chapter Two

From Governor James McGreevey's announcement yesterday:

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused....

[F]rom my early days in school, until the present day, I acknowledged some feelings, a certain sense that separated me from others. But because of my resolve, and also thinking that I was doing the right thing, I forced what I thought was an acceptable reality onto myself, a reality which is layered and layered with all the, quote, good things, and all the, quote, right things of typical adolescent and adult behavior.

Yet, at my most reflective, maybe even spiritual level, there were points in my life when I began to question what an acceptable reality really meant for me. Were there realities from which I was running?

Which master was I trying to serve?...

And so my truth is that I am a gay American....I realize the fact of this affair and my own sexuality if kept secret leaves me, and most importantly the governor's office, vulnerable to rumors, false allegations and threats of disclosure.

So I am removing these threats by telling you directly about my sexuality....It makes little difference that as governor I am gay. In fact, having the ability to truthfully set forth my identity might have enabled me to be more forthright in fulfilling and discharging my constitutional obligations.

Given the circumstances surrounding the affair and its likely impact upon my family and my ability to govern, I have decided the right course of action is to resign.

This blog's first-ever prize contest!

What would you do if, hypothetically, your landlord put up a Bush/Cheney sign in the front yard? (Yes, he does live on the premises.) A free marriage equality bumper sticker will be awarded to the person who, in my sole discretion, posts the most creative, successful, or original response.

Prince apparently missed that memo

Some extremely timely media criticism from the Village Voice:

The down-low has all the makings of a sensation: Here is a tale of sex, lies, and death. Better still, here is a tale as old as America: the threat of Black Dick. In the olden days, the warlocks of lede, hed, and deck mostly saw the black phallus as a menace to white daisies. But in the era of equal opportunity, Black Dick has turned on its own....

The story's linchpin has been the accepted truth that the black community is acutely more homophobic than the rest of America. The down-low is stirring up emotions in "the often-homophobic black community," reported The Advocate. "Black men aren't allowed to have even the slightest feminine characteristics of the average metrosexual." Andre 3000, Prince, and Fonzworth Bentley apparently missed that memo. As did most of black America, whose rampant homophobia nonetheless puts it behind such bastions of tolerance as Bensonhurst, Hasidic Williamsburg, and the whole of Mississippi.

A study published last year in Public Opinion Quarterly concluded that "evidence that blacks are more homophobic than whites is quite limited." While blacks were significantly more likely to object to homosexuality, it found, they also were significantly more likely than whites to support laws against anti-gay discrimination.

What the down-low mythology demonstrates, more than anything, is an an adherence to the cult of black pathology. Black people are more homophobic, more misogynist, more anti-Semitic, more anti-intellectual, more violent, and generally a problem. The viewpoint persists despite facts on the ground.

Bush Relief

>How to start each day with a positive outlook :
>
> 1. Open a new file in your PC.
>
> 2. Name it "George W. Bush"
>
> 3. Send it to the trash.
>
> 4. Empty the trash.
>
> 5. Your PC will ask you, "do you really want to get rid of
> George W. Bush?"
>
> 6. Answer calmly, "yes" and press the mouse button firmly.
>
> 7. Feel better and vote in November.....

The soul of wit

Barack: "I want to welcome Alan Keyes to Illinois and to this Senate race."

More than just reductionist sloganeering - the case for today's "left"

The following is a response to a post by Thomasgeist on restless geist (under the heading "Reductionist sloganeering"):

Thomasgeist, I disagreed with you on this when we discussed it at Chip's last week, and I still disagree. I challenge you in the following respects:

1) Today's "left" doesn't just address personifications of problems rather than problems themselves. For instance, MoveOn doesn't have a critique of capitalism, but they do have a critique of crony capitalism, and I personally think they're right to draw a distinction between DLC free-trade capitalists running the country and Halliburton running the country, and I also personally think the former is preferable to the latter. I actually think there is growing popular awareness of the concept of crony capitalism, and at some point it will reach some critical moment - it may not be Enron, it may not be the airline pension bailout, it may not be Iraq reconstruction contracts, but I do think there is a growing articulation of corporate control as problematic, and not only among this mythical coastal liberal college-educated professional Jewish homosexual elite.

2) The "left"'s slogans about Bush are not all empty nor do they all concern the fact that he got C's at Yale. Have you seen MoveOn's 17 new ads, directed by Errol Morris, profiling current and former Republicans who have decided to vote for Kerry? They articulate not one unitary message that Bush is a poor manager, but a wide variety of messages emphasizing his failed domestic and foreign policies. I would go so far as to say that they articulate a moral economy and position Bush as violating it. I think that constitutes effective politics. The one with the Louisiana woman, who concludes her message by saying, "I'm still a Baptist, but I'm no longer a Republican."

(Michael Moore, I grant, IS as bad as you think. Still, clearly articulating to such a large number of people that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 ALONE makes the movie worthwhile.)

3) It's not fair to say that this supposedly bankrupt monolithic left wants smart Yalies instead of dumb Yalies running the country. We can argue whether or not it is bona-fide "leftism" to point out that GWB is unqualified and surrounds himself with similarly unqualified people, but even if it's not, it's still true, and it's still worth pointing out. Having good manners and good grades are not the only things that differentiate JFK1 or JFK2 from GWB. Endorsing capitalism, liberalism, or imperialism do not put all these leaders in a single category.

4) You say that "the left's reduction to bland and increasingly unoriginal sloganeering simply reifies the problems associated with this administration's...policies and the above mentioned global systems and ideologies." Okay. Let's consider some of these horrible slogans the left has come up with lately. In my view, they are all quite a bit more substantive and original than you give them credit for.

* "we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in America" - this has isolationist overtones and it oversimplifies the problem, but it nonetheless articulates a belief in the importance of government's provision of basic public welfare. to be sure, this could be said to "reify" the new-deal capitalist welfare state, but i (and this may be the core difference between you and me) proudly claim that new deal welfare state as an improvement on many of its predecessors and alternatives, in spite of its deep entanglement with ruling-class values and persons and while acknowledging its gross inadequacies and limitations. you might say that in the first half of the 20th century america's ruling elite came to regard itself as having a different type obligation of public service, and you can see that as culminating in vietnam and that's not wrong, but these days i truly think it's not silly or pointless to feel and articulate a certain nostalgia for some of its accomplishments - among which i would actually put not only social security and medicare (which i think are properly the objects of nostalgia in these times, not just more-radical-than-thou contempt), but also the rise of meritocracy as a central tenet of american political culture, and (relatedly) a limited but still very real improvement in the race/caste system (as my friend payton put it, fifty years after the brown decision america can justly pat itself on the back that "lynching is down"). honestly, if you're going to hold their massachusetts elitism against JFK1 and JFK2, you gotta also give them credit where credit is due, and recognize that they formed alliances with, advocated for, and got enthusiastic political backing from able, intelligent people not from their own background (starting with john edwards and lyndon johnson), which I think testifies to the fact that they cannot be viewed as the political embodiment of the desires of some this fantastical coastal elite but rather were positioned by their elite status to obtain political power while also themselves being idealistic individuals committed to nationalist and liberal ideas that are in important respects worthy of being disaggregated from bush-cheney cronyism. and frankly that bush attracts religious-right folks is all the more despicable because the religious right isn't just disenfranchised and poor, but is also incredibly pernicious - and to say that the liberal elite rejects religion because they articulate this perniciousness is, i think, to deny the incredible variety of actually existing religious belief and of ways of conceptualizing the relationship between faith, churches, and politics - of which john kerry's vision is in my personal opinion quite an admirable one.

* "support stem cell research to help find cures for alzheimers, parkinson's, etc" - this oversimplifies the nature of scientific research, but it manages not only a critique of bush's "antimodern religiosity" as you put it and not just his overriding belief in the Bible - it also manages to articulate the significance of the lengthening lifespan and the aging baby boomers who face new health problems that require not only insurance but also basic research. you can complain that it's elitist of kerry to go around saying he "supports science," but in fact I think the alzheimers issue resonates for a LOT of people of all races and backgrounds who are facing the issue of aging, dependent parents who are living longer, and many of whom are honestly likely to be weighing these matters against moral and religious qualms about embryos. this does a nice job of deflecting the charge of immorality that bush continually lobs at the democrats and especially socially progressive ones, and i think we are seeing that the deflection is working (witness laura bush coming out this week to defend her hubby's hard-line stance).

* "we need to make more friends and fewer terrorists" - i have heard that this concept polls exceedingly well with a wide variety of groups, and that it is the best angle the democrats have yet come up with to argue that they are better on counterterrorism than the republicans are. because after all there is a difference between unilaterialist imperialism and multilateralist imperialism, and the difference helps explain why america, but not germany france britain russia japan, is now the object of such intense hatred around the world. and the fact that america is so hated really SHOULD be an election issue; insofar as it relates to this question, the terrorism issue is a real one, not a silly one, even if americans unreasonably expect more security than do people in many other industrialized societies. this slogan helps articulate why bush is a failure at protecting americans from terrorism, and that's very, very critical and it's the one issue that kerry still consistently polls behind bush on. i think the democrats are right to think that while people want jobs, ultimately when they pull the lever this time around there are going to be a lot of people thinking about 9/11 and all the worrying they did that day and in the aftermath.

None of these slogans has anything to do with Bush's dumbness. All of them correspond to genuine social problems and criticize carefully delineated, varied aspects of Bush POLICY. Sure, the Internet forwards and animations and whatnot that some of us circulate about Bush's dumbness aren't politically important, and in some cases show the prejudices of the liberal elite (the hoax about the IQs of red- and blue-state populations being the most obvious example). And there are too many books being published, PERIOD - not just ones about how Bush is dumb, but also substantive ones about how he is evil and a crony capitalist and a bad manager. Even these books, though, are not the end-all and be-all of the contemporary left. The paper-ballot and voter registration projects, for instance, are innovative, new, intelligent, and there are a lot of people working hard for them.

5) Since when does Norman Mailer know fuck-all about anything?

The new, improved HRC.

Wonderful news.

Following Saturday's HRC board meeting the organization, the largest gay civil rights group in the US, released a statement saying it "will only support ENDA if it is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression."

Defection and disaffection: vote for your favorite story

These MoveOn ads are terrific. The ones who say they're still Republicans are very critical (most of them are men, too). But my absolute favorite is the Louisiana woman who concludes her testimony by saying, "I'm still a Baptist, but I'm no longer a Republican."

This blog now comes with a BUMPER STICKER!

That's right. Here at Security Risk we've developed a bumper sticker and lots of other yummy products with our clever and persuasive message. Stock up today!

"There is not one among them that any of us should not be proud...to sit with at small desks on back-to-school night"

Below are my key excerpts from King County Superior Court Judge William L. Downing's opinion in Andersen v. Sims (thanks Jeremy for pointing me to the text). I feel as though some of these passages should be put in newspaper ads and on billboards around the country:

There was no deeply rooted tradition of interracial marriage at the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, supra; yet, the Court analyzed the issue of their constitutionality in terms of the broad right to marry and found that right to have been infringed. There was no deeply rooted tradition of marriage while delinquent in child support payments at the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of statutes prohibiting this in Zablocki v. Redhail...(1978); yet, the Court analyzed the issue of their constitutionality in terms of the broad right to marry and found that right to have been infringed. There was no deeply rooted tradition of inmate marriage at the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of statutes restricting this in Turner v. Safley...(1987); yet, the Court analyzed the issue of their constitutionality in terms of the broad right to marry and found that right to have been infringed....

It is true that marriage has long been defined as the union of one man and one woman. It is equally true that the shape of marriage has drastically changed over the years. It took a very long time for the courts (with legislative bodies sometimes understandably following just a little behind) to break down the traditional stereotypes that relegated women to second class status in society and in the marital relationship....Serving tradition, for the sake of tradition alone, is not a compelling state interest....

Some declaim that the institutions of marriage and family are weak these days and, in fact, stand threatened. Any trial court judge who regularly hears divorce, child abuse and domestic violence cases deeply shares this concern. It is not difficult, however, to identify both the causes of the present situation and the primary future threat. They come from inside the institution, not outside of it. Not to be too harsh, but they are a shortage of commitment and an excess of selfishness. Before the Court stand eight couples who credibly represent that they are ready and willing to make the right kind of commitment to partner and family for the right kinds of reasons. All they ask is for the state to make them able....

Of course the laws never have placed a requirement on marriage that the parties procreate nor do they prohibit from marriage those who are unable or disinclined to procreate....

The legal question is not whether heterosexual marriage is good for the replenishment of the species through procreation. It is. The precise question is whether barring committed same-sex couples from the benefits of the civil marriage laws somehow serves the interest of encouraging procreation. There is no logical way in which it does so....It rationally serves no state interest to harm certain...children by devaluing the immediate families that they have joined....

It is good for children to be raised in stable families with a father and a mother. There is not the slightest question about this. It is a situation to be encouraged by the state. But, can it be said that fewer children will have this stability because couples consisting of two men or two women are allowed to have a relationship that is state-sanctioned? There is no reasonable explanation for why this would be so. There is no reasonable expectation that, should such a legal result come to pass, married fathers and mothers will abdicate their parental responsibilities or young would-be parents will defect from the ranks of heterosexuals....

On the other hand, when one peers into the future, one circumstance is far more certain to occur. Many, many children are going to be raised in the homes of gay and lesbian partners....One, then, must try to envision two categories of future children. The first category consists of those whose heterosexual parents will either neglect them or never conceive them because same-sex marriage has been legalized. The second category is those children who will be raised in a home with same-sex adult partners and who would enjoy enhanced fmaily stability and social adjustment if these adults were granted the benefits of civil marriage. The only reasonable conclusion is that the very real second category greatly outnumbers the first theoretical one. Therefore, the goal of nurturing and providing for the emotional wellbeing of children would be rationally served by allowing same-sex couples to marry; that same goal is impaired by prohibiting such marriages....

Unlike the documented impact of children's exposure to domestic violence and substance abuse in the homes of lawfully married heterosexual couples, as to children raised by intact same-sex couples there is no science, only questionable assumptions based on stereotypes. The Court concludes that the exclusion of same-sex partners from civil marriage and the privileges attendant thereto is not rationally related to any legitimate or compelling state interest and is certainly not narrowly tailored toward such an interest.

If there is indeed any outside threat to the institution of marriage, it could well lie in legislative tinkering with the creation of alternative species of quasi-marriage....Better, perhaps (in terms of simplicity, fairness and social policy) to allow all who are up to taking on the heavy responsibilities of marriage, with its exclusivity and its "till death do us part" commitment, to do so - not lightly, but advisedly....

The privilege of civil marriage and the various privileges legally conferred by that status are not being made equally available to all citizens....[In addition, the] denial to the plaintiffs of the right to marry constitutes a denial of substantive due process.

[T]hese plaintiffs...include exemplary parents, adoptive parents, foster parents and grandparents. They well know what it means to make a commitment and to honor it. There is not one among them that any of us should not be proud to call a friend or neighbor or to sit with at small desks on back-to-school night. There is no worthwhile institution that they would dishonor, much less destroy....The characteristics embodied by these plaintiffs are ones that our society and the institution of marriage need more of, not less.

News flash: "Cost-related medication restriction" is bad for you

Shocking news from the knowledge factory:

"After adjusting for differences in sociodemographic characteristics, health status, smoking, alcohol consumption, body mass index (BMI), and comorbid chronic conditions, we determined the risk of a significant decline in overall health among respondents in good to excellent health at baseline and of developing new disease-related adverse outcomes among respondents with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and depression....Respondents with cardiovascular disease who restricted medications reported higher rates of angina...and experienced higher rates of nonfatal heart attacks or strokes....Cost-related medication restriction among middle-aged and elderly Americans is associated with an increased risk of a subsequent decline in their self-reported health status, and among those with preexisting cardiovascular disease with higher rates of angina and nonfatal heart attacks or strokes. Such cost-related medication restriction could be a mechanism for worse health outcomes among low-income and other vulnerable populations who lack adequate insurance coverage." Source: Heisler M, Langa KM, Eby EL, Fendrick AM, Kabeto MU, and Piette JD, "The health effects of restricting prescription medication use because of cost," MEDICAL CARE 42 (7): 626-634 JUL 2004

Meanwhile, a news flash from the annals of America's growing war on club drugs. You may have seen pictures showing PET scans of people taking MDMA or "ecstasy" on big-city billboards and postcards, suggesting that it fries your brain. Now, it turns out those changes disappear once you stop taking ecstasy. Funny how we didn't bother to find this out until after the government started cracking down. (Previous studies were "limited by small sample size, lack of tracer selectivity, unreliable assessment of MDMA doses, insufficiently matched comparison groups, or region-of-interest analysis.") Source: Buchert R, Thomasius R, Wilke F, Petersen K, Nebeling B, Obrocki J, Schulze O, Schmidt U, and Clausen M, "A voxel-based PET investigation of the long-term effects of "Ecstasy" consumption on brain serotonin transporters," AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY 161 (7): 1181-1189 JUL 2004

"I would have told those kids the president has something that he needs to attend to"

John Kerry is learning that he's going to face a disgusting, dishonest right-wing smear campaign. And it also seems he's concluding - rightly, I think - that the best way to meet this challenge, in a political world in which negative ads are proven to be highly effective, is with aggressive, harsh, but honest and delicately worded criticism:

At a morning appearance before minority journalists in Washington, Kerry faulted Bush for spending seven minutes reading to Florida schoolchildren after learning the World Trade Center had been attacked. "Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear that America is under attack, I would have told those kids very nicely and politely that the president of the United States has something that he needs to attend to," Kerry said.

Can we afford a flip-flopper in the war on terror?

Today's NYT:

And a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Kerry, James P. Rubin, said, "Why did President Bush flip-flop" on the national intelligence director's post, using a term the Bush-Cheney campaign has tried to affix to Mr. Kerry.

"First he was against it; now he's for it," Mr. Rubin said. "Does that sound familiar?"

I think the Kerry should push this theme as hard as he possibly can. It's like a brilliant judo move, drawing attention to Bush's literally years of gyrations on the 9/11 commission: he's for it and he's against it, he will testify and he won't testify, Condi will only testify privately and Condi will testify publicly after all, he needs time to think it over and he's got a counterproposal in 11 days, he's against a Director of Central Intelligence and he's for it.

And then there's greatest flip-flop of all....

Bush in the first 2000 debate: "The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders....I believe we're overextended in too many places....[I]f we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road, and I'm going to prevent that.

Bush in the second 2000 debate: "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building....I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That's what it's meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops."

On "flip-flopping" as in other matters, let he who is without sin....

In case of unwanted presidency

Some creative poetry on view recently at Magnet, a new gay men's health center in the Castro

The desperate tone of the new Bush/Cheney ads

Bush's latest attack ads, titled "Family Priorities" and "Priorities," are, respectively, possibly the smarmiest and the most frivolous campaign commercials I have ever seen. They are both utter pieces of shit. Watch them. The first one pushes the abortion issue; I can't possibly imagine this working too well on the soccer-mom crowd, though, or really on anyone but the core religious-right constituency. It just reinforces Kerry's point in his convention speech: that Bush's concept of "family values" kind of leaves out the task of valuing families (in favor of abolishing the separation of church and state).

The second ad, "Priorities," is about how Kerry has missed Senate votes while campaigning. This comes across as utterly baseless. I think Americans will likely understand it as a clear sign that Bush is unable to confront Kerry/Edwards on the issues.

And the newest Bush ad of all, a dose of feel-good bullshit about "Moving America Forward" that features a white suburban child boarding a school bus in front of his heterosexual parents' house, just demonstrates that Bush is grasping to emulate Kerry's really quite brilliant attempt to claim the high ground, draw on public perceptions of John Edwards, and proclaim that "We're the Optimists." It's great stuff when a challenger to the incumbent can claim that.

This is sooooo not an ordinary election. I heard somewhere that 2/3 of young voters say they're paying attention to the campaign, up from half in 2000. And needless to say it's incredibly polarized and aggressive earlier than ever.

I'm a bit afraid of a Bush-Cheney smear campaign, or - worse - of Bush dropping Cheney in favor of Colin Powell. Everyone says Powell and Bush don't get along, but Bush clearly will do anything to get reelected, and Powell, whatever his supposedly lofty convictions and decency, so far seems to have proven incapable of ever standing up to his boss.

While I've got your attention, I'd just like to say these people MAJORLY suck.

Fuck Bush and other fashion statements

Here's the t-shirt that Brad and I bought in LA. I wore it to a party that he took me to, where I knew absolutely no one, and it sort of made a nearly instant bond between me and a few other people at the party - people for whom that degree of rage over the war and the election feel natural and comfortable.

So many people I know think about the election almost all the time. I'm definitely one. One has to work hard, actually, to keep its place in one's life under control.

In so many ways, this presidential campaign is following a highly unusual and unprecedented course, and the electorate is perhaps more polarized three months before election day than it has been in decades.

Meanwhile, on Castro Street in San Francisco, "Just Married" t-shirts are on the Super Sale rack out front, going for $10 (see my photo below), and greeting cards tailored to married queer couples are also deeply discounted. Merchants cannot sell these shirts in large numbers, in other words, while San Francisco's case against the California Supreme Court is being litigated and City Hall is under court order not to license any more same-sex couples.

Anti-gay constitutional amendments are on the ballot in 13 states, including my home state of Michigan, and we are generally expected to lose in 12 out of the 13. The last state is Oregon, and I'll be traveling there in November with a bunch of volunteers from NGLTF.

Running against Hollywood

Bush has turned up the attack against that industry that America's radical right most loves to hate. "They somehow believe the heart and soul of America can be found in Hollywood," he's telling Heartland voters.

The question of the day: Why can't Bush steer clear of the ugliest themes in American political history?

Turning the corner

Bush: "We are turning the corner, and we're not turning back" What exactly does he mean?

Kerry: "Let me tell you something, folks: The last time we had a president who talked about turning a corner, and ran on the slogan of turning the corner, was Herbert Hoover, and he ran on the prospect that 'prosperity is just around the corner.'"

Meanwhile, in America:

In an echo of the savings and loan industry collapse of the 1980's, the federal agency that insures company pensions is facing a possible cascade of bankruptcies and pension defaults in the airline industry that some experts fear could lead to another multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout.

Attacks against American troops in Afghanistan and Afghan security forces and civilians have increased steadily in the past several months, posing new hurdles for reconstruction and political stability efforts, American commanders and Afghan officials say.

Bush, never one to be distracted by domestic or foreign policy matters, is keeping his campaign-trail message focused like a laser on today's critical global issues. "We stand for the 2nd Amendment, which gives every American the individual right to bear arms....I've got a record on that issue. It stands in stark contrast to my opponent."