more than this

As I am descended from Norwegians, I believe I share with my fellow Norwegians a historical perspective on the Larry Craig matter. See, thanks to my Norwegian heritage, I believe I have a clear and hardheaded, realpolitik kind of way to think about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons who remain members of the Republican party in this degraded era. We know a thing or two about people like this, see, we call them quislings. Because that's exactly how they're playing the game, and exactly the kind of persons they're playing with vis a vis their own sexual orientation.

If you're queer and a republican, you're first an idiot who can't read writing on the wall no matter how high and bloody the letters are; a traitor second; and and pretty much utterly doomed third. If you think you're not, you are fooling yourself about what your party wants to do to us...to you and people like you. Give them so much as an angry inch, and they'll gleefully cut it the fuck off. Then feed it to you and tell you how they're saving everyone while they're doing it. Quislings. Think about it.

A thought for web folks on a Sunday night. If you're an independent web person, or any kind of web strategy/management/services company, and you're not using Google Analytics, you're basically just wasting your clients' money.

SURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGE!

So here's something funny, if by funny I mean horribly depressing, and by that logic a big f'ing surprise: the same dumb shits we know got us into this shit through their imperialistic madness and ruined the work of our soldiers thanks to their mindblowing incompetence have, like a junky, concocted a madcap one more fix scenario that's sure to end up about the same as Renton's trip to the hospital at the bottom of that carpet pit in Trainspotting because, sadly (and by sadly I actually mean sadly) the plan is already fucked up. Yes, the same incompetents who can't run a country, couldn't run a "war on terra" and can't seem to stop themselves, have devised a war plan that has, wait for it... two command structures in the same operation. To put this in terms all of us (myself included) can better apprehend and get our minds around, that's like me ordering an entree from one waiter and a pizza from the hostess. Then when the two arrive together, I stick the guy at the next table for the bill.
( more rant behind cut )
Drive boy dog boy dirty numb angel boy in the doorway boy she was a lipstick boy she was a beautiful boy and tears boy and all in your innerspace boy you had hands girl boy and steel boy you had chemicals boy I've grown so close to you... boy....

...urrrrge!

What the crap is a nonbinding resolution? I know you think it will help but it won't. You are the Senate, you are 100 of the most powerful men and women in the world. You have the power to make something happen! It's in the constitution, what's left of it, anyway! ( see relevant sections of Article 1 behind this cut )

See? You get to call the shots you weak-willed idiot children! Not only that, your constituents voted for something a little bit firmer than a ridiculous "Non Binding Resolution." Come on! Napoleon Chimpface and Shoot Em Up Dick are used to getting their way just about no matter what. Nonbinding Resolutions are exactly as difficult for them to ignore as wet toilet tissue in the white house crapper. I didn't campaign for you to write dipshit resolutions. Go write a fucking law, you morons! Go. Write. A. Bill. And put in it how you're not going to pay for any more of this nonsense. Here, I'll write it for you. Why not? The Current Occupant's running dogs and various lobbies like Big Oil have been writing legislation for you for years.

The Omnibus War Halting Bill of 2007
1. Congress won't pay for any more adventures and war bullshit in the Middle East.
2. The troops will pack up and come the hell home. Congress will pay for that.
3. Cheney can eat it.
3.a.1 Cheney must answer a series of difficult trivia questions.
3.a.2 Cheney must answer a series of difficult questions about his relationship to defense contractors.
3.a.3 Cheney must answer a series of difficult questions about his relationship to extraction industries.
3.b.1 Cheney must describe in clear detail the events of February 11, 2006.
3.b.2 Cheney must turn in his badge and his gun.
3.c.1 Cheney shall be prohibited from holding any more offices, elected or appointed.
3.d.1 Cheney must give 1/10th of his net wealth to homeless shelters upon completion of his term.
4. $77 million earmarked for federal construction of a bridge between Alaska and the Kamchatka peninsula.
5. $4 million earmarked for tea cozies to be hand knit and delivered to Alaskan families.

Okay, I only threw in numbers 4 and 5 because Ted Stevens called me while I was making this journal entry and said I had to.

See how easy that was?! Wow. I guess I should run for office. Yes. Olsen in 2008, bitches.

Dear Republican Party Members of Congress,

It has recently come to the attention of the majority of American voters that for the last 12 years you have been abusing power and balkanizing the Democrats in the House and Senate with absurd rules and outrageous shams of leadership and madness in the development and passage of legislation. You excused your own behavior with a pair of rhetorical stunts centered on two locii: 1) Democrats did it to you under Tip O'Neill; and 2) you and Good Christians Everywhere(tm) are actually a persecuted minority who has suffered long and hard times under the yoke of secular humanist oppression.

It has now been established that you are 2/3 correct: Tip O'Neill was a right sharp ol' machine politician who mistreated you; and you are a minority. The comparisons between your political party and the struggles of Asian, African, lower-class European, Arabic, Semitic, Latin American, non-heteronormative, female, and Native persons pretty much end there. You are a minority party, a political group whose platform is recognized as meaningful to a smaller number of voters than the parties which do not share your views; and who do not want you to create policies that promote those views. Since this is America, your voices will be heard, no doubt continuously, comparing yourselves to the same people from whom you and your ilk have spent a good 500 years working very hard to distinguish yourselves. In response to this hypocrisy we, the voters, have a certain degree of impatience and have thus tacitly agreed to permit the Democrats a certain amount of latitude in their treatment of your requests for participation in the process taking place now in Washington.

To wit, suck it, motherfuckers.

Sincerely,
The New American Majority
together with
People For Letting The Dems Have At Least Their Hundred Hours
and
Society of People Who Recognize Reality When They See It

This has been a Sick Of Your Southern Strategy Bullshit production.

EDIT: Since she's the most powerful woman in the U.S., and the U.S. is the most powerful single nation state that has yet been, does this make Nancy Pelosi the most powerful woman in world history? Arguments for or against this theory are plausible.

I found that I really liked John Kerry in the last months leading up to 2004's election. i thought he seemed like an affable, intelligent, and serious guy. He had an interesting life and one very cool hobby (dude, he windboarded for like 75 miles one time!). But gawd!! What a doooooofus. I really think what he said Tuesday was way overhyped by a desperate GOP on the eve of their humiliating defeat. But not only is his sense of the punchline absolutely DUMB, his timing is completely foolish! Why risk throwing off the momentum even a tiny little bit? The current talking point is "Kerry botched a punchline, Bush botched a war" which is, essentially, true. It's a good little soundbite response to asinine trumpeting of the aging elephants. But as the ever intriguing Joan Walsh said in Salon today, "Yes, Kerry only botched a joke, while Bush has botched a war, and yes, Republicans were despicable in their intentional misreading of his words -- but Kerry should never have given them an opening. I have a deal to make with Kerry -- if I say I believe you simply blew a punch line, rather than slurred the troops, will you go away? For good? Done." Please big J, just shut the fuck up and disappear for a while. We'll give you some seniority on a committee after the changeover, but you gotta keep your hands off the pendulum until it is done swinging!

Meanwhile, I heartily commend you to read Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article about Congress. In a long, profanity-laden piece Taibbi summarizes some of the very good reasons we have to be utterly disgusted by this new Do Nothing (Unless You Can Fuck It Up) Congress. Believe me, they find a way. One choice passage:

It is clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence: "As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."

How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean? This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!

This is Congress in the Bush years, in a nutshell -- a guy who takes $2 million in bribes from a contractor, whooping it up in turtlenecks and pajama bottoms with young women on a contractor-provided yacht named after himself (the "Duke-Stir"), and not only is he shocked when he's caught, he's too dumb to even understand that he's been guilty of anything.

I know some folks reading this today are 3rd party, not-particularly-Dem-backing, and that's fine. But I'm a Democrat and we're going to kick the shit out of those rat finks on Tuesday. Maybe you'd like to party along. When you're in the booth, ask yourself if, in the national elections, the situation is going to really truly be the very same no matter who is in control of congress. If you can honestly say that, that this class of GOP is morally and legislatively the equivalent of this year's class of Democrats, by all means, vote for a third party. But I'm asking you, as your friend, to vote for a Democrat. Please vote specifically for Democrats. I'll eat a big plate of crow, with all the fixins of my words and my hat, if the Democrats don't make a better Congress than what we've had the last 6 years. If you doubt me, you can mark this entry in your memories. Hell, I'll tag it and everything. We'll drag it up in 2008 and 2010 and you can make me swallow bite after bite. Please vote for Democrats Tuesday.

Just don't think about John Kerry when you do it.

So I'm taking "the ethics of MLK" at school and the more you study the man, the more admirable he is, truly. One of the greatest Americans. After a while, our jaded minds kind of let King fade into the background and someone occasionally trots out a snippet of his speech. But that's sad because he's so much more than the cliches people have tried to attach to him; really, he just towers. But standing in his enormous shadow is one of my new heroes:

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was awesome. He was a singer, even performing in John Henry with Paul Robeson (Paul freakin Robeson! I believe "freakin" is actually Paul's middle name...). He was an academic and athletic star in school. He attended Wilberforce University and Cheyney State. He was a former communist who left the CPUSA when Stalin dropped the integration of the military issue and called on communists to start working on getting America into the war. He worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and helped launch the Congress on Racial Equality. As a Quaker and pacifist, he refused military service and went to jail. He organized protests against segregated dining hall seating in prison for crying out loud! He organized the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947. You may recognize that particular action by the fact that it was the template for the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides. He and A. Philip Randolph were already planning a march on Washington in 1941 but pulled back when FDR made a gesture (executive order 8802).

He was a very close advisor to Dr. King, some have called Bayard his main advisor. It was Rustin who counseled Martin on nonviolence, and kept Gandhi's writings and principles in front of King during their struggles. Rustin was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Equality. A few leaders opposed Rustin's role in organizing the action, including Minnesota's Roy Wilkins (yes, THAT Roy Wilkins). Their reasons? Rustin was a former communist, Rustin had been arrested too many times, Rustin would be controversial, oh yeah, and

Rustin was as gay as a whistle! God bless us Minnesotans, we're always willing to take pride in our civil rights. But gay ones? Well... have you heard the stuff from last week's hearings at the capitol? Like how all these white ministers keep rolling out the quotes of a few black ministers and other black people and so they could be able to say "gay rights are NOTHING like African American rights" and "Dr. King's legacy should not also stand for homosexual acts" and "I'm scared because I'm a stupid bigot and I need the blessing of a black person to pretend I'm not"

Okay nobody said that last one and the other two are kind of paraphrases. But you get the idea! I prayed, thanking GOD that the Senate subcommittee struck down the amendment last week. Dammit, America! Dammit, Minnesota! We have better things to do with our prayers! You are wasting our valuable prayer time with Senate subcommittees and prayer against things! Let us get back to praying FOR things, praying for positive change. I'm interested in praying for marital equity, not praying that someone vote no on a subcommittee proposal in a state senate! Give relationship equity to all people now! Then we can go back to praying for regime change in Iran.

Wait.

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

Look at that photo on the right. Tell me you're going to look in that awesome face and say, "Sorry Bayard, you still have to wait. You guys got your black rights though, right? Isn't that enough? Buck up, it's only been 43 years. These things take time." They are co-opting King and the modern followers of King to provide cover for their dehumanizing agenda. But King didn't let them dehumanize Bayard Rustin. He didn't speak at the March, but Rustin made it happen and King stuck by him.

They want to use drones for domestic spying (article linked from Slashdot)

The pilots association is worried? What happens to the airspace? These are the wrong freaking concerns! These are the wrong freaking questions! Or at least they're questions about practical things which should be a little further down the list of priorities right now. Concerns that totally ignore the far far more disturbing fact that the government would like to spy upon and menace citizens and dissenters using any and all available means. Trees, meet forest!

Nothing comes of the president's revelations about illegal wiretapping. Nothing comes of revelations about external prisons and detention camps. Nothing comes of any of this crap! David Cross was right, what does this guy have to do, eat a Jewish baby on live tv or something? My fellow americans, I'd like ot talk with you about civil rights and the constitution... rrarrr...MMM...that's good Jew baby...

I guess this is what is meant by "We've earned political capital in this election and I intend to spend it." Spending political capital means running the whole bloody country straight into the bowels of hell, apparently. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

Look, we have a reputation for being milquetoasts, but come on! When Garrison Keillor calls for congress to impeach Bush in no uncertain words (exact quote: "Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.") it's gotten pretty bad. This guy depends on basically moderate-to-conservative people in the heartland for his bread and butter. Probably a very significant body of Keillor listeners voted for Bush in droves. If he's willing to risk all those listeners to write "Impeach Bush" in the national press, you know times are getting wild. I completely agree with him; impeach the right wing christofascist and throw him in the docket to stand trial for war crimes. EVERYBODY hates the guy. His poll numbers are in the crapper. He's an arrogant prick who pretends not to understand the question when someone criticizes him. He talks like a 9th grader. He's more worried about picking off the weak or lame in the name of stopping horrendous manimal experiments and he thinks women should be broodmares for the war machine. He thinks freedom is slavery. We really should beg congress to impeach. Or I know. Maybe we could just get him to go hunting with Cheney.

I think in some ways this interview with Richard Stallman represents my views on a number of things. If we could just build escapes, parallel realms where thought is free, well... what's to stop us?

Also, I like how he responded to the criticism like why isn't he fighting for other 'real' freedoms or against injustice or whatever. And he basically says that software freedom is very real and well, his skills are in software so that's where he can do the most good. You can still be for justice and against facism while focusing your efforts in those areas that you have the highest chance to make an impact.

What also interests me is that there's lots of parallels to other freedom and justice movements. Like my company. We work in diversity training for business. This is an incremental, business-driven way to change the world. It's aligned with equality, affirmative action, equal opportunity, etc. But it's incremental and uses business drivers with a backing of law. It's very effective. But that's not the only way that works.

I have been learning about and am working with a group to start an anti-racism initiative at the seminary. Anti-racism is not incremental, it's tranformative (see MCARI for what I'm talking about. I'll be taking one of their anti-racism seminars this spring). Both are worthwhile processes and both succeed. But they're not identical and they befit different organizations differently. Ultimately they have the same goal. I think too, the open source movement and free software movements have similar goals, but with different drivers. The FSF is much more about transformative experience: build software to escape into freedom.

Then I think there's another story, those movements who foundered or were co-opted or corrupted by evil. Surely in the idealized words of a WTO, there is or was once this vision of uplifting everyone. I mean consider their statement: "A system based on rules rather than power makes life easier for all." That sure sounds good. But on the other hand, the WTO appears to be corrupted by eeevil. (Probably because they choose to believe that "easier = better", but that's another rant for another day).

It's like, we need people to hold up these transformative lights, or we're only ever going to be incremental. And if we're always incremental, evil, which in my experience moves very quickly, might triumph.

I got the above going thru the archives of get your war on and I must say I completely agree. The F word is the LEAST OF OUR FUCKING PROBLEMS. Which reminded me that there are many people I know, even some who only occasionally read these posts, who still wince at the f word. This post is not about any of you, nor is it any kind of 'secret message' telling you what I really think about you. I don't actually think about you and your opinions of the f word very much at all! I'm certainly not out to combat loved ones over my vocabulary. I'm very comfortable with my vocabulary as it is. Me, I feel most comfortable in an environment where the f word is ready at hand, like punctuation. It's too good a word to extinguish. Not only that. But this reminded me (this cartoon, moreso than conversations about saying 'fuck' or not) that our national debate has utterly sunken beyond repair. It's like we should reboot and start over. Nobody can talk about anything to do with business, politics, media, science, or relations (personal or geopolitical) without either driving themselves nuts or sounding like they're nuts. We've really been debased and distracted by woah a really pretty girl just walked by my office window seriously we've been deranged, deluded, debased, distracted by a 'world more full of weeping than we can understand'. I can't believe there's an honest to God shouting match going on in the media and the fucking political fishbowl (oops there's that word again) about wishing Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas. Shut UP! It's so much more complicated than that! I think what especially stings about that situation is that the debate is into it's second or third round this year. And that's after many rounds through history (see this article from Salon about that matter.) Yee. Argh. So I'm back to working on my book, my complicationist manifesto More is More: A primer for the complicated life but I think it'll be years before i finish it. If my head don't asplode before I do.

Breathless text in my inbox: JOHN KERRY JOINS CHRIS COLEMAN IN MINNESOTA! Well no shit. If you're Randy Kelly, the incumbent mayor, also a democrat, and you campaign for George Bush in 2004 I'm thinking it's going to be hard to win the endorsement of Dem leadership for your candidacy.Tool. God love the people of St. Paul but how could they elect such a TOOL?

By way of Dadahead and Atrios: pssst,Tom Cruise is God, tell no one.

The Bird Flu is mutating. So yeah. That was a nice run while it lasted. Amid hurricanes, tornados and superstorms, global warming, fucked up leadership, wars on two continents, silent and loud weapons deployed in quiet wars on four others, peak oil (right before your eyes!!), here comes the mutant bird flu. oh yeah, and firefighters, what's up with THAT? Something something, white horse, something something rider's name was death something something hell followed with him. Hello 16th century! FNORD. I open up my wallet and it's full of blood. memo to Danger: let's get started on those after the plague scripts, we should be able to shoot right here in minneapolis once everybody dies!