Spot the objective coverage

Globe: Mass. can bar marriage for nonresident gay couples

Herald: Gay-wed opponents cheered by SJC ruling

Out-of-state gay marriage challenge denied

Via drudge:

The state's highest court, which made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from other states cannot marry here.

No details yet.

Update from Boston.com: status of RI/CT couples ambiguous.

Vaffanculo: Scalia caught in a lie?

As much as I generally dislike the Herald, like any trashy paper, they can't resist some controversy:

“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ”

“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”

What's that they say about picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?

Again, compared to some other allegations about Scalia, this is pretty immaterial. It speaks to his character, perhaps, but so do his decisions.

Gov race takes an early turn towards the bizarre

Christy Mihos, independant candidate for governor, has launched a 'canine coordinator' program and hopes to recruit a dog from each of the 351 towns in Massachusetts. The effort is led by Regan Mihos, Christy's Yorkshire Terrier.

Reagan is very worried when walking in Boston where his pals have been electrocuted. Reagan hates “no dogs allowed” signs and wishes dogs had equal rights, similar to his dad’s view that all humans should have equal rights.

Okay. So when I made some cracks about the Mihos website last week, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek. After all, not everyone cares about or notices website design, and ultimately it's something that the candidate isn't directly responsible for.

But this is something else entirely. When Mihos really only has one other issue articulated on his website (property tax restructuring), what could say "let them eat cake" more than a page dedicated to dogs -- particularly the electrocuted dogs of rich downtown loft-dwellers?

Reagan, are those buoys in the picture from daddy's yacht?

Here's an equal rights issue for you, Christy: gay marriage. None of the other candidates wants to touch the issue with a ten foot pole. Where do you stand on that? How about immigration? That's a big topic.

Really, I was hoping he'd be able to hold it together long enough to draw off some votes from the right, but I see this as a foreshadowing of early withdrawal. Time will tell.

(via this pithy globe article)

[Update: I should point out that I have a lot of sympathy towards the dogs who were killed, and their owners. It's a broad public safety issue. But this just begs for ridicule. While standing on its hind legs.]

Grist for your paranoid fantasies

Coming to a sky near you: remote controled drone aircraft. Get those tinfoil hats ready.

Lem on atheism

"for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally."

(via cognoshanty)

Leave the tough questions to the bloggers

Is newly-elevated Cardinal Sean O'Malley really a humble Capuchin, or does he just wear the trappings?

Theology teaches that the Deadly Sins are not characterized so much the act as they are by obsession. For instance, a person feverishly weighing every ounce of food consumed is as guilty of Gluttony as a jaded gourmand consuming a seventeen course meal. It is the obsession with what ought to be a routine concern that distracts from God, not the form that obsession takes. So, a person who rejects appropriate recognition with extraordinary modesty and protestations of humbleness is as guilty of Pride as the more easily recognized arrogant and snobbish. It's always harder to see the Uriah Heeps clearly.

Now that he is Cardinal, will O'Malley begin to call the men to task also, or will he continue to reserve his condemnation for the more usual and easily disregarded targets of the Roman church, the women?

Link

They get letters

Scalia responds to the Boston Herald's 'obscene gesture' article with a letter:

Your reporter, an up-and-coming “gotcha” star named Laurel J. Sweet, asked me (o-so-sweetly) what I said to those people who objected to my taking part in such public religious ceremonies as the Red Mass I had just attended. I responded, jocularly, with a gesture that consisted of fanning the fingers of my right hand under my chin. Seeing that she did not understand, I said “That’s Sicilian,” and explained its meaning - which was that I could not care less.

It pains me to even hint at defending this guy, but I've covered the Herald's fast-and-loose reporting about gay marriage (also here)and liberals. If Laurel J. Sweet is indeed taking some liberties with her coverage of Scalia, it's not out of character for Boston's tabloid rag.

Now I should stop to point out that I have no idea if that's an obscene guesture or not. I think we can all agree that it rises to the level of 'rude', no? But, really, who cares?

The more interesting story is the increasingly high-profile role Scalia seems to be playing in the public realm. He's playing with fire by making prejudicial remarks prior to an important case -- by no means the first incident which brings his impartiality into question -- and as an outside observer it seems to me like he wants to pick a fight.

Maybe that's his nature. Writing letters to the editor of crappy tabloids about sloppy journalism indicates he's a little testy. Or maybe there's a vast Opus Dei conspiracy to produce an impeachment showdown. Certainly the right is itching for some kind of action around the Supreme Court. It's really the last holdout against their desctructive politics. Maybe not for long.

Breaking: Card to resign

AP has it. Someone had to go. Who's next?

Articulating progressive values

There's a broad failure to publicly explain the reasoning behind a progressive viewpoint: why we want to invest in the future, why people care about the disadvantaged, and how such ideas are at the core of the American Dream.

These values have been ridiculed and demonized, but I think the time has come to dust them off and take a fresh look. I'll explain five here, starting with the word at the heart of it:

Progress: History is filled with tragedy and epic success, yet between the earliest civilizations and today there's a distinct line of expanding knowledge, farther reaching exploration, and growing achievements. It is the continuation of these trends that is at the core of progressivism.

Hope: Progress is not inevitable. In the face of malice, evil and a vast empty universe, people continue to get up every day to make things better for themselves and their families. Speaking to this drive forward should be at the heart of progressive communication.

People: We can expect greatness from people without ignoring the horrible things they are capable of. People built the pyramids, went to the moon, and discovered DNA. We take these things for granted now, but the scale of achievement they represent is immense. People are still capable of amazing things, but must be put to the task.

Compassion: How do we treat the old and dying? Veterans? Others who cannot care for themselves and have no one to care for them? We can decide to care for the neediest people while acknowledging the risk of creating unneeded dependency on the government.

Strength: Sharing these is not weakness; far from it. We can share these values without sacrificing military strength, while having strong laws, ethics and punishments for people who trangress them.

These are the themes that people like Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton used with such great success. Barak Obama draws on them today. We can claim the high ground as forward looking people, and not sacrifice it to people who play on our base emotions.

Pulling the plug on a 1300 acre lake

Somehow I missed this one when I read all those disaster books as a kid. In 1980 an oil rig in a New Orleans lake penetrated the shaft of a salt mine below, and drained 3.5 billon gallons of water:

Concluding that something had gone terribly wrong, the men on the rig cut the attached barges loose, scrambled off the rig, and moved to the shore about 300 yards away. Shortly after they abandoned the $5 million Texaco drilling platform, the crew watched in amazement as the huge platform and derrick overturned, and disappeared into a lake that was supposed to be shallow. Soon the water around that position began to turn. It was slow at first, but it steadily accelerated until it became a fast-moving whirlpool a quarter of a mile in diameter, with its center directly over the drill site.

(via digg, iirc)

Corruption: the gift that keeps on giving

In light of the unfolding Republican corruption scandals of late, it's worth remembering the terrible and ongoing cost of abusing the public trust:

If you're confronting a 30-year collaboration between the FBI and powerful mobsters who've sat at your kitchen table with guns and knives drawn, you'd probably be inclined to wait for some judicial acknowledgment of the corruption before filing a lawsuit -- particularly if your previous attempt at official redress nearly got you and your family whacked.

But today a three-judge panel (all Republican-appointees) didn't see it that way. They ruled that the two-year statute of limitations had expired, and that Rakes and his wife should have sued when press reports first linked the FBI to the mobsters, instead of waiting for a judge to confirm the conspiracy.

The fact that the judges were Republicans is probably irrelevant, and I can't evaluate what's likely a pretty well-defined limitations statute. But the abuse of public trust is a very serious crime, with real human impact whether it involves civil servants or elected officials.

It seems absurd that you can get life for carjacking or selling LSD, but Connolly (the FBI agent in the case above) got off with 10 years for letting the mafia run rampant around Boston and giving passing along information that lead to multiple people being assasinated.

Backbone-related activity

Driving through Providence this weekend, I noticed this towering over route 95:



It's hard to imagine that this is the most effective way to spend campaign dollars, but it unquestionably exhibits cajones.

Carl Sheeler is challenging Lincoln Chafee, and I know nothing about the race or Sheeler's prospects, but that billboard certainly gets some attention.

Inching twoards a separation of powers showdown

Eventually Congress will stop kissing Bush's ass and fight back on this stuff:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

[...]

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

GOP credibilty gap hindering election slate

Massachusetts, in spite of whatever else you might say about it, is a well-educated, progressive, and high-income state. But with Romney travelling around the country to court the hard right faction of the party, it's no wonder that the GOP is having a hard time fielding a slate of candidates. The part of the party he's kissing ass with is the bit that's most at odds with the folks back here.

Attorney General, in particular, should be an easy one for them to field:

Just a month before GOP delegates meet in Lowell to endorse a slate, no serious Republican contenders have emerged for two of the most important constitutional positions, attorney general and state treasurer. The party has embraced a politically inexperienced candidate with few financial resources for state auditor and is courting another with few political credentials to run for secretary of state.

[...]

Darrell Crate, Romney's hand-picked state GOP chairman, said he is proud of the candidates the party has recruited so far to fill out the statewide ticket. He acknowledged the party is in a weak position, but he attributed that to what he says are years of neglect.

This was one of Romney's big pledges -- to revitalize the party. But it's not working. Perhaps because there's a growing sense that he told a bunch of bold lies to get into office with the sole idea of advancing his career on a national level.

Neglect or no neglect, the combination of Romney's slick cynicism with the overall hard-right-no-middle tack the GOP is taking as a whole makes it incredibly challenging to cultivate the Bill Weld-style fiscal conservatives that have played well here.

Any potential GOP candidate here has to spend at least some extra time differentiating him or herself from the national party -- explaining how he's not out to take over a woman's uterus, spy on email, raise massive budget deficits, or stop teaching evolution in the schools. I think we're seeing the same thing in New Hampshire as well, and I think it's indicitive of problems the Republicans are going to face in plenty of other states in the next few elections.

America to Atheists: Go to hell

Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.”

[...]

Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

[...]

The researchers also found acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

(via digg)

Let's not talk about science

I considered blogging about the study indicating conservatives were more likely to have been whiny children when it was first covered a few days ago. I wanted to say something to the tune of "we have a hard enough time covering and discussing largely apolitical science, so we should just give up all hope of a reasonable discourse surrounding anything political."

Putting the substance of the study aside for a monent, here's how my favorite local tabloid opens their coverage today:

And you thought liberals were the whiners.

Yes, Jessica Fargen, we all thought liberals were the whiners. Watch Bill O'Reilly much? Great job at rising above petty stereotypes to show some objectivity and balance. Did you help out with those hit pieces on gay marriage supporters?

Getting back to the substance of the study: did you read the study itself? No? I didn't either. I didn't try hard to find it, but that's not my job. At least not my day job. I'll go out on a limb and guess 100% of the coverage on this study is based solely on press releases and interviews.

For all we know, it could be a fantastic study, full of insight. Or maybe it's complete garbage, with false conculsions and sloppy work. But no one discussing it knows, and there is no mechanism in this country for digesting and responding rationally to scientific information, so we won't know.

Coverage like this is the other side of the coin that permits credulous reporting on 'creation science'. It's not a problem that's going away anytime soon, and it's going to bite us on the ass as more and more complex issues -- stem cell research, prenatal genetic testing, energy, cloning -- become pressing policy questions.

What can we do? Let's start with a moratorium on press releases about scientific papers.

Chavez, continued: playing with fire, fueled by crude

The Chavez issue is fascinating. Here's a charismatic populist/socialist talking trash to the United States with a cowboy in the Whitehouse. The US has a long history of involvement with violence in Central and South America, including removal of leaders through various means, and some have suggested that the CIA played a part in the failed coup against Chavez.

Yet Venezuela is the third largest supplier of crude to the US by some accounts.

A Latin America policy analyst I spoke to had this to say:

Chavez has made sure that his untimely demise would be followed by a real anti-US backlash. If he were choking on a piece of steak, the US would send in people to give him the heimlich.

The US cares a huge amount about Venezuela, despite what our ambassador says. What really scares people in DC is that Latin America, as a region, could become a continent akin to Africa -- too many civil wars, stagnant or reversing growth rates, growing inequality, crumbling infrastructure, environmental plight, governance by mob/coup, no rule of law, bastian to extremists, mass starvation due to ineptitude, you get the idea. Clearly all of Africa isn't all these things at once, but the past 30 years has seen a strong smattering of that scenario across Africa, and the State Dept guys can't imagine a worse scenario for Latin America.

But clearly the State Department isn't the entire government. Ask Oliver North. On one hand we've failed to remove Castro, but on the other there's a long list of Latin American heads of state who we've been directly involved with removing, peripherally involved with removing, tacitly approved removal of, or are rumored to have been involved with removing.

It's easy to get all conspiracy-ish, but when the Iran-link test baloons start floating and John "D is for Death Squad" Negroponte has too much time on his hands it's hard not to start thinking about black ops.

At the very least, Chavez presents the highest potential for comedy in the forgiegn policy arena that we've got going now. The rest of it is so damn serious.

Opinions are like what again?

My horoscope in the metro today advised me to keep my opinions to myself. Here's someone else's: www.fucksouthdakota.com

Can the Democrats field a viable candidate at long last? A superficial look.

The inability of the Democratic party to field candidates from outside the machine has been heartbreaking, both here in Massachusetts and nationally. It's the outsiders who have big appeal, not the Kerrys and the Gephardts.

Today, a Boston Globe survey indicates that gubenatorial candidate Deval Patrick has a 3-to-1 lead in Democratic convention delegates, an interesting early start, and a potential break in the logjam of terrible insider candidates.

Putting aside the racial comparison, I get a Barak Obama vibe off this guy: he seems to be running an upbeat campaign with positive rhetoric, a theme of hope, and a personal history that explicity references the American Dream. He's not the same stirring orator as Obama from what I can see, but he's good looking and has the message that people are looking for.

Let's look at the opponents. In the primary, he's likely to face Tom Reilly, the current Attorney General. Reilly has a pinched-looking face, seems tense on tv, sounds harsh, and got a rough start by picking a black city councilwoman with some financial problems as a runningmate.

The likely contender in the main event is Lt. Governor Kerry Healy. She'll be able to make some claims about economic growth, can probably deliver soccer moms, and seems to be highly focused on victims rights an other tough-on-crime messages. She also seems pretty tightly wound on tv.

Mentally, I think people are making some pretty simple calculations in voting situations: could candidate x run the show? do their policies sound like they make sense? where do they fall on the 1-2 issues I care deeply about? do I get a good feeling from this person?

It's not some deep and lengthy calculus. For Healy, it's policy + tough - tense - Romney = zero. With Reilly it's crime - tense - insider = -1. In each case, it's a series of minor themes taking the place of a larger one.

Duval Patrick's campaign video is full of warm fuzzies about coming to Milton Academy on scholarship, suing Bill Clinton in a civil rights case, and working for Coke. But here's the kind of gold that he should be able to cash in on during the campaign:

"I feel as a citizen tired of politics as a partisan blood sport. [...] Frankly, it's the rest of us who are waiting while the games get played by the insiders."

Hope + outsider +/- black could equal a win.

Coldwar bunker found in Brooklyn Bridge

Shit like this cracks me up:

New York workers have discovered a trove of Cold War-era supplies within the masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge, a cache meant to aid in survival efforts in the event of nuclear attack.

City Department of Transportation employees were conducting maintenance on the structure Wednesday when they found the cache on the top floor of a three-floor space inside the bridge's base, agency spokeswoman Kay Sarlin said.

[...]

The stockpile included empty water drums and boxes of medical supplies, such as tourniquet bandages and an intravenous drip. Also, there were cans of high-calorie crackers with instructions to consume 10,000 calories a day per person. The instructions said the crackers should be destroyed after 10 years, but they were mostly intact.

10,000 has to be typo.

Christy Mihos: A Perot for Massachusetts?

Convenience store magnate Christy Mihos has jumped into the Massachusetts gubenatorial race as an independent, and I'm wondering if he's just the thing to break a 15 year stretch of increasingly annoying Republicans in office.

The first thing you have to wonder when reseraching this guy is what they were thinking with the campaign website. "Christy Mihos for Governor" appears across the top in a kind of script, with the letter i dotted with a star, twice. I suspect the designer may have been trying to echo the american flag faintly visible below the title, but instead it comes across as a teenaged-girl-doodling-in-a-notebook motif. Though maybe they're courting the gay & female block? Who knows.

Mihos appears to be running on a property tax reform platform. "Protecting the taxpayer!" appears at the top of every page,* and the sole campaign position is centered around the recently reported population decline in the state:

Last year, Massachusetts was one of only three states to lose people, and it was the second year in a row that we ended the year with fewer people than we started with. Massachusetts is the only state in the entire country that can make that claim.

So why would people leave?

I’ve traveled the state asking that question, and time and again, the answer is the same: skyrocketing property taxes. Most families I’ve chatted with have said they would move back to Massachusetts in a heartbeat – but only if they could afford it.

[emphasis added]

I have a hard time believing it's *just* the property taxes in play here. Did a single person mention the state income tax? Other miriad taxes? Maybe the high cost of property itself, aside from the taxes?

To be fair, it's good to have focus. A single-issue campaign is easy for people to get their heads around. But anyone who can succesfully navigate the minefield of issues facing Massachusetts voters is going to have a better chance turing out the vote, I would think.

So if Christy stays in the race, and he sure has the cash to do it, maybe he'll simply draw off enough votes from Kerry Healy to let a Democrat win for a change. Then it'll be back to single party corruption-as-usual in the Bay State.


* really, it needs 2-3 additional exclamation points to be consistent with the star-dotted-i in the banner.

Is this part of Norquist's 'drown the government in a bathtub' theory?

Congress is scheduled to meet for just 97 days this year, adjourning completely on October 7. That's the shortest session in 60 years.

"It's not too much to ask Congress to commit to spending at least half the year -- 26 weeks -- working full time, five days a week, thus providing at least a measure of the deliberation and attention to detail that are so lacking now," Norman Ornstein, a scholar on the history and workings of Congress for the American Enterprise Institute, has written.

[...]

The absence of oversight has direct effects, Ornstein says. Some of the problems buried in a massive bankruptcy bill that Congress passed last year could have been avoided with more time to review the bill, he said. Ornstein also believes the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina was worsened by the way Congress passed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security, the sprawling agency responsible for coordinating government's response to natural disasters.

The prescription drug benefit is shaping up to be a disaster as well.

I mean, sure, there's a lot less work to do now that lobbyists write all the bills. And there are a lot of follks at home to shake down for cash. Maybe we should just give these guys a break and let them telecommute.

(via robotwisdom)

Finding new music with Pandora

I'm always on the search for new music, and a friend recently sent a link to a music recommendation service. Having tried a number of Amazon-style collaborative filter sites over the years, I was relatively skeptical. Pandora, however, quickly won me over.

Pandora invites you to create a 'radio station' based on an artist or genre of your choice, and then plays music it thinks you'll like. My current tastes run somewhere between ambient elecrontica and IDM -- a genre rife with crap and limited shelf-life sounds. A good challenge for such a service, I figured.

I entered Lemonjelly to start, a group I had been listening to on my iPod, and was quickly presented with a number of interesting tracks to listen to. Pandora does a number of things well -- you don't have to log in and register to do anything, the interface is straightforward (particularly for a Flash app), and it's easy to give feedback.

Ulrich Schnauss immediately caught my attention, as did a complilation called "OST: Original Block Party Edits". I've subsequently purchased both albums. There's no question that I'm going to double my music spending this year, particularly due to my recent failure to cancel a free Amazon Prime membership. What's a few bucks for some good music, now that I've prepaid the shipping? (Bezos, you bastard!!)

One major difference between Pandora and other recommendation systems (particularly collaborative filters) is that it appears to be based on extensive human categorization of music. You can get a hint of this when creating a new station -- for Funkadellic, it says, for example:

To start things off, we'll play a song that exemplifies the style of Funkadellic, which is features flat out funky grooves, meandering melodic phraing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, extensive vamping and electric pianos

That's Funkadellic in a nutshell.

If your tastes run towards broader mainstream genres -- Rush, U2, the Beatles -- I'm told that you have to rate quite a few songs before it starts getting good, but I'm finding a 25-50% hit rate in electronica. The Funkadellica station I just created, for example, played Peter Frampton. I can see the connection, but it's not the direction I'm going for.

Two potentially frustrating aspects of Pandora its Flash interface (no Linux support last I checked), and the limited number of songs you can skip. The skipping limitation is attributed to a licensing issue, but I think license holders would be well-advised to cut these guys some slack, and let the money flow.

Talking up the housing market

I'm no economist, but I've been looking at houses continuously since last summer, and this smells like bullshit to me:

Two of the nation's top economists said today that despite a cooling in the housing market, a strong economy and job market are expected to bolster the US and New England markets and prevent house prices from declining in coming months.

At the New England Realtors Conference in downtown Boston, Cathy Minehan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said that strong job growth in the US and New England will continue to fuel demand for housing.

New England "will have negative sales like the rest of the country" in 2006, "but prices will still go up," Lereah said. "There's no bubble bursting," he said. "You can put air in the bubble, and it inflates and now the air is going out of the balloon -- it is not bursting."

[...]

For New England home prices, "the pace of appreciation here has been greater" than the rest of the nation, Minehan said. But "unlike the '80s, residential construction has not boomed, and there has been little speculative building."

Little speculative building? They haven't been to my neighborhood, where two of the three neighboring buildings are being converted to condos and will be on the market in the next 2-3 months. Throughout Cambridge and Somerville, it seems like there are hundreds of units about to come on the market. Drive down Mass Ave between 16 and Porter, and tell me if there's not much speculative development.

There's a lot less building in the single family segment for sure, but there's no land left for that inside route 495 anyway.

My impression of the housing stock within 128 is that you're lucky to find a crapshack in an okay neighborhood that needs a new roof and heating system for under $400k. Think about what that's going to run you a month as a new buyer. How long is that sustainable?

I predict falling prices in the next 30 days. Inventory levels are extremely high now, and spring just started an hour ago.

Chavez fires back

From the playing-with-fire department:

"You are a donkey, Mr. Bush," said Chavez, speaking in English on his weekly Sunday broadcast.

"You're an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you're a drunkard," Chavez said, referring to Bush by a nickname he frequently uses to describe the U.S. president.

(via drudge)

Two views on signature gathering at Southie's St. Pat's parade

After blogging about the Boston Herald's bias against gay marriage supporters in an article about yesterday's St. Patrick's day parade, I was curious to see what the followup would be. While I'm of Irish decent, I don't celebrate St. Patrick's day (let alone in Southie) and I'm wholly reliant on the mainstream press to tell me what happened.

The Globe seems to think it went great, and interviewed MassEquality volunteers:

Two hours before the parade, volunteers for MassEquality, a gay rights group, stood on East and West Broadway asking people to sign postcards that would be sent to state legislators urging them to oppose any amendment prohibiting marriage by same-sex couples.

Volunteer Chris Mason, 24, wondered aloud about the reaction he would get at an event known for its exclusion of gay and lesbian groups. But aside from a few vacant stares and ''no thank yous," celebrants eagerly signed the postcards, he said.

Volunteers collected just under 800 signatures yesterday, said Marc Solomon, campaign director for MassEquality. ''There was . . . absolutely zero hostility," Solomon said. ''People's perception of South Boston and what the reaction would be to marriage equality is very different from the reality."

It was a bit harder to find the Herald's coverage, buried at the very last paragraph of their parade article. Rather than interviewing anyone involved with the signature gathering, or calling back the esteemed panel of marriage opponents from Friday's article, they called the cops:

A group of gay marriage advocates garnered attention as they collected signatures along the parade route for a petition backing equal marriage rights, but police did not report any related calls.

I sense some disappointment.

Was anyone there? How did it go?

Trust us, we're the Government

As allegations of warrantless Administration wiretapping are quietly swept under the rug, it's worth remembering what was uncovered the last time the US was caught engaged in widespread domestic spying:

The [FBI] documents [...] made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups — many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and antiwar groups — that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.

For instance, [FBI] agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize. They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife — and threatened to make it public. "King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.

(via digg)

Newsflash: Right-wing uses straw men. Film at 11.

Somehow the AP has just recently noticed that the right wing (and our fearless leader in particular) loves the rhetorical device known as the 'straw man'. As we all know, the straw man is an attempt to win an argument by twisting the position of your opponent into into something it's not, then arguing against the absurdity rather than their real, stated position.

So why is this news now? This technique has been a mainstay of the neocon right since the get-go.

Don't get me wrong, the reality-based coverage is a wonderful change of scene, but the emperor has been without clothes for quite some time now. What changed?

Ban on HIV+ travellers lifted. Wait, what ban?

The gay community seemed shocked this week by the existence of a ban on HIV positive travellers entering the United States, and by its temporary lifting for Chicago's Gay Games.

The ban has been in effect since 1987, and is reportedly enforced via the discovery of anti-retroviral medication in passenger luggage.

The Illinois Family Association is mortified by the policy change. I'm left wondering how this one slipped by the sharp-eyed folks in the current Bush admin, who have missed a great opportunity to pander to the right by disrupting the Gay Games.

A nice bit of 'balance' in our local media

Good job getting both sides of the issue in your article on gay marriage supporters today, O'Ryan Johnson. Interviewing three people opposed to gathering signatures for gay marriage at Southie's St. Patrick's day parade, with one comment from MassEquality -- that's balance, Fox-style.

The best part? Letting Chester Darling respond to MassEquality with this zinger:

“If [bullshit] were music, they’d be a brass band,”

That rascally Herald. They love them some gay marriage.

Wouldn't that require a spine?

Below-the-fold headline in today's Globe: "Emboldened Democrats court party's left wing"

Hmm. Really? How's that again?

Former senator John Edwards got high marks from labor for a new effort to unionize hotel workers, and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's demand this week that President Bush be censured was music to the ears of activists on the left.

Meanwhile, Mark Warner, former Virginia governor, recently hired one of the leftist blogosphere's biggest names to run his Internet outreach campaign, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana began a blog on the liberal Huffington Post, peddling his foreign policy views.

So: Bayh starts a blog, Warner makes a website, Edwards does who knows what, Feingold makes a symbolic gesture which is immediately ignored, and this is 'courting the party's left wing'?

Jesus Christ. I'd hate to see what they thought the 'flirting' bit was like that led up to the 'courting'. Mental telepathy? Extremely subtle body language?

Courting me would take something more like repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, actually passing a censure, saying some harsh words, or maybe getting tough with the evesdropping or Abramoff scandals.

Backbone-related activities, rather than this spineless-as-usual hoo-ha. Something that really stirred up the hornet's nest. This is courting soccer moms and the elderly.

Let's get real here. There's work to be done. Forget this 'courting' shit. Let's pander and inflame.

Impeach Bush, or win Congress?

Josh Marshall on why we need focus on elections, not impeachment:

people who care about politics should care about it because they care about actual politics, what actually happens, who gets votes and who doesn’t, who has the power for awesome decisions like going to war.

Critics of the president who care about those things should do the one concrete and meaningful thing they can do at the moment to have an effect on those key issues, and that is to create a counterweight in the Congress, specifically by putting Democrats in control of at least one chamber.

Once that happens, and if the Congress does its job of oversight, impeachment will still be there if the president continues his lawless ways.

Until then it’s just an indulgence.

I don't think the ideas of winning back Congress and impeaching Bush have to be exclusive, but certainly an impeachment circus would be distracting.

With Bush's current approval ratings and the results of polls for generic Democratic slates, we're in decent shape. But it all comes down to the hard work of getting out the votes, voter by voter in all the key precincts around the country. And for that, something like a censure really might grab some attention.

Missouri votes to remove contraception from state clinics

The world is full of people who believe -- largely for religious reasons -- that contraception is a bad thing and should be eliminated. While I respect their right to believe this, I think it's a horrible and illogical position that most thinking people disagree with.

It's part of another slippery slope, one heading towards forced pregnancy, and the criminalization of non-procreative sex. It also exhibits a fundamental disrespect for freedom: the freedom of people to exert control of their lives and bodies.

So when I read this, it makes me worry:

Yesterday, during debate on HB1010, the budget for the Departments of Health and Mental Health, House Republicans voted to ban county health clinics from providing family planning services.

[...]

The amendment, offered by Rep. Susan Phillips (R-Kansas City) removed "voluntary choice of contraception, including natural family planning" as one of the permissible services that county health clinics could provide with state funding.

I could be sad about the disrespect this exhibits towards the people who need and use these free services, or the misguided thinking that allows people to rationalize this, but instead it just makes me afraid of the creeping paternalism in this country and shocked at the abandonment of the fundamental liberties the United States were founded on.

(via atrios)

Doctor's orders: keep it spicy, fun, and a little dirty

Cedars-Sinai and UCLA researchers find that capsaicin, the 'hot' in hot peppers, kills prostate cancer cells:

"Capsaicin had a profound anti-proliferative effect on human prostate cancer cells in culture," said Sören Lehmann, M.D., Ph.D., visiting scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the UCLA School of Medicine. "It also dramatically slowed the development of prostate tumors formed by those human cell lines grown in mouse models."

Lehmann estimated that the dose of pepper extract fed orally to the mice was equivalent to giving 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week to a 200 pound man, roughly equivalent to between three and eight fresh habañera peppers

That's a lot of hot pepper in my book, since one raw habañera is nearly enough to make me choke to death. And this really falls into the category of 'shitty press releases about science', glossing through several experiments in a way that's definitely going to get even further muddied by downstream writers.

Still, I'm fascinated by the idea that things like peppers, curry and garlic can have a profound effect on the human body. What's more, the "spicy stuff that's great for you" seems closely related to the "vices that are good for you" category -- caffeine's benefits for asthmatics, and the overall correlation between light drinking and longevity, for example.

And continuing on, there's a whole category of "too-clean living making the human immune system attack the body" research: crohn's disease and IBD appear to be held in check if you have a small population of parasitic worms in your intestine, which suggests an immune system over-response. Not unlike the idea that allergies can result from lack of exposure to germs and dirt as a child.

Or the idea that vitamin D -- particularly in the doses associated being outside -- can cure far more cancers than the sun exposure is likely to cause?

Or the recent reports that parkinson's sufferers fall disproportionately into a personality type of rigid, driven, and straight-laced people? Or the idea that ejaculating 3 times a week is critical for prostate health?

Any one of these ideas may be bullshit, mistated, or a false correlation, but taken as a whole it starts to form an idea that being a little dirty (hygenically and sexually), being in the sun, indulging a little, and embracing the full range of the human experience can be fantastically good for your health.

So forget trying to sterilize your world. Have a drink, get a tan, get laid, and we can talk about addiction some other time...

(link via digg)

It doesn't stop with banning gay marriage

There's a clear progression that reactionaries are taking in order to roll back gay rights: ban marriage, ban adoption, remove gays from schools, then re-criminalize sodomy. That opens the door to the wholesale harassment and arrest that existed for much of the last century.

Step two in the plan is progressing well:

Currently, Florida, Mississippi, and Utah have laws that ban gay adoption explicitly, although a few other states - including Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and New Hampshire - have de facto policies or laws restricting gays from adopting or becoming foster parents.

Seven states introduced bills last year that would prevent gays or lesbians from adopting, and a few states - Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, among others - have indicated a willingness to introduce constitutional amendments in future years. A bill in Arizona would force the state to give priority to married couples adopting. Ohio is considering a bill that would ban gays from being either adoptive or foster parents.

Let's be clear: to align with any step in this progression is associate with people who want gays and lesbians in prison. Don't fool yourself.

(via drudge)

Chavez tied to Iran? Impeccable timing.

The Washington Times reports on rumors that Venezuala has made a pact to sell uranium to Iran:

The deal was part of a package of agreements, most of which were announced during a visit last month to Caracas and Cuba by Iranian parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel. [snip] Public details are vague, but Venezuelan opposition figures and press reports have said the deal on minerals could involve the production and transfer to Iran [...] of Venezuelan uranium taken from known deposits located in the dense jungle states of Amazonas and Bolivar.

Pretty impeccable timing, coming close on the heels of administration PR groundwork for an Iran invasion. And where do these rumors come from? Of course! The right-wing opposition and un-cited press reports.

Back home, the professionals say it's BS:

In Washington, a State Department official said, "We are aware of reports of possible Iranian exploitation of Venezuelan uranium, but we see no commercial uranium activities in Venezuela."

They don't mine uranium at all? That's funny.

So: right wingers spreading rumours, failed coup, enemy of the administration, Niger-style smears, party mouthpiece newspaper -- anyone smell CIA?

(via Josh Marshall)

Working software, what a concept...

Linux user tries mac, shocked that things work, have help systems:

The second thing that struck me was that every Apple software application worked as advertised. OSX ships with 50 or so applications that not only work, but are extensively documented. The help system was quite useful. Most Linux distributions ship with 1000+ applications, many with overlapping features, about half of which work as advertised, and about quarter of which are adequately documented.

(via digg)