How to Turn a Demonstration Into a Broad-Based Movement (Updated)

Send in your brown shirts. Trump really screwed up this one:

First there was a Wall of Moms united to protect the peaceful Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland. The footage was absolutely amazing.

Now there is a "Wall of Vets" providing further backup. The group of military veterans joined the Moms and other groups on Friday night, standing united and in full force with signs showing support for the BLM movement. These veterans ranged in age from 20's to senior citizens to disabled.

This is what it's like in Portland, as of last night:

Portland right now. Stunning. pic.twitter.com/g2U5B8aFI3

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) July 25, 2020

Those are not Proud Boys with tiki torches. Those are the good guys.

A short history:

Feds started abducting protesters and a wall of moms formed.

They gassed the moms, so dads brought leaf blowers.

They beat a Navy veteran who just wanted to speak with them, then a wall of vets came together.

They attacked volunteer medics, so nurses showed up in scrubs. https://t.co/cQBCjojxq2

— ACLU (@ACLU) July 25, 2020

And he wants to try the same thing in Chicago?

Update:

Via Digby, an article on a very interesting survey done in early June. This paragraph is pretty revealing:

The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op.”

Trump is playing to maybe 30% of the populace -- the same 30% that's been against everything since Independence. (They were probably against independence, as well.) The rest of the country is leaving him behind.

Tweet du Jour

pic.twitter.com/GMzPbguGKK

— Curly J (@CurlyJ86) February 17, 2019

With thanks to commenter Lazycrockett at Joe.My.God.

Today in Really, Really, Really Stupid Ideas

The Moron-in-Chief has outdone himself this time:

The New York Daily News reports:

President Trump doesn’t think the U.S. military is large enough — so he announced during a bizarre press conference Tuesday that it will expand beyond planet Earth.

“My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,” Trump told a crowd of Marines at the Miramar military base in California. “We have the air force. We will have a space force. We will call it the space force.”

The most cogent reaction:

1/ Please don’t fall for the “Space Force” jokes. Trump making the militarization of space our national policy literally pits the US against the entire world.

Let’s go into some background. https://t.co/HWZiYzZ9VA

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) March 13, 2018

2/ In 1966, the US and Soviet Union signed a peace treaty for space, agreeing not to place nuclear weapons there. The reason is straightforward, because it poses a huge threat to human life.

This treaty led to decades of peaceful scientific collaboration in space.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) March 13, 2018

3/ By 2006, the 1966 treaty had expired. The UN created a new peace treaty forbidding the militarization of space - again forbidding nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration opposed it, making the US the only nation on earth to vote no, though Israel abstained.

It was ratified.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) March 13, 2018

4/ With Trump deciding to break this treaty on the militarization of space, this means other nations could be forced to develop space-based weapons for nuclear deterrent.

This could start a new era of nuclear proliferation - literally the last thing we need right now.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) March 13, 2018

The man is really sick -- he'd have to be, to see everything -- and I mean everything -- in terms of war.

Kelly should just give him a box of toy soldiers and park him in a corner someplace -- out of reach of his "nuclear button."

For Sure, We Should Arm Teachers

One of Trump's (actually, the NRA's) more insane ideas: let's arm the teachers so they can . . . what? Well, here's one scenario:

A Georgia high school teacher is facing a number of charges after he barricaded himself inside an empty classroom and fired a handgun while students stood outside the door, authorities said Wednesday.

The shooting, which took place around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, led to a frantic lockdown at Dalton High School. One student suffered a minor ankle injury while running down the halls, police said at a press conference.

Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier said the teacher, identified as social studies teacher Jesse Randal Davidson, 53, locked himself inside of the room and refused to allow students inside.

“When the principal put a key in the door to try to unlock the classroom, Mr. Davidson apparently fired a shot from a handgun through an exterior window of the classroom. It does not appear that it was aimed at anybody,” Frazier said at a press conference.

It doesn't take much imagination to transpose the teacher's actions to a classroom full of students.

Needless to say, teachers are vehemently opposed to the idea, as are school administrators and just about everyone else who has any experience with, for example, being in a combat situation. It's not a popular idea -- except, of course, with the NRA and their wholly-owned subsidiaries in Congress and various state governments.

Via Hullabaloo.

Idiot du Jour

Remember Lou Dobbs? Yeah, vaguely -- some Fox News "personality" or something.

Well, he's really outdone himself this time. From WaPo:

Someone asked Obama about recent comments made by his wife, Michelle, in Toronto: The former first lady said it was never a good idea to “tweet from bed,” a not-so-subtle commentary on Trump’s early-morning social media habits.

In New Delhi, her husband agreed.

“Michelle was giving the general idea. … Don’t say the first thing that pops in your head. Have a little bit of an edit function,” he said. “Think before you speak. Think before you tweet.”

Not such a stretch, and applicable to just about everyone at every time -- especially sitting presidents: Think before you open your mouth.

Well, not as far as Dobbs is concerned:

Call it an unwritten rule — a matter of decorum among the small fraternity of men who once held the title “leader of the free world.”

Before he left office, Barack Obama said his goal was to steer clear of the political spotlight — as George W. Bush had done when he left the White House — giving the new president room to govern without Obama's shouldering into every debate with the megaphone that being a former commander in chief affords.

But a Fox Business commentator said Obama violated that unwritten rule with a recent comment about Trump’s tweets. What’s more, according to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, that violation should merit arrest.

“I think U.S. marshals should follow [Obama], and anytime he wants to go follow the president like he is and behave [like that],” Dobbs said on his show Friday. “I mean, this is just bad manners. It’s boorish and it’s absurd and he doesn’t realize how foolish he looks.”

“I mean, he should be brought back by the marshals. Isn’t there some law that says presidents shouldn’t be attacking sitting presidents?”

The irony here is that Trump is the one who insists on dragging Obama into everything he does by his unremitting attempts to wipe the Obama administration from history.

As for Dobbs -- he's an idiot. He's always been an idiot. He always will be an idiot.

Via Digby.

Today's Must-Read: No Secrets

Between our president and our enemies, at least. Here's a really scary article by Howard Blum at Vanity Fair on Trump blowing the Israelis' cover.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on May 10th, 2017.

By Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images.

On a dark night at the tail end of last winter, just a month after the inauguration of the new American president, an evening when only a sickle moon hung in the Levantine sky, two Israeli Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters flew low across Jordan and then, staying under the radar, veered north toward the twisting ribbon of shadows that was the Euphrates River. On board, waiting with a professional stillness as they headed into the hostile heart of Syria, were Sayeret Matkal commandos, the Jewish state’s elite counterterrorism force, along with members of the technological unit of the Mossad, its foreign-espionage agency. Their target: an ISIS cell that was racing to get a deadly new weapon thought to have been devised by Ibrahim al-Asiri, the Saudi national who was al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker in Yemen.

It was a covert mission whose details were reconstructed for Vanity Fair by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations. It would lead to the unnerving discovery that ISIS terrorists were working on transforming laptop computers into bombs that could pass undetected through airport security. U.S. Homeland Security officials—quickly followed by British authorities—banned passengers traveling from an accusatory list of Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptops and other portable electronic devices larger than a cell phone on arriving planes. It would not be until four tense months later, as foreign airports began to comply with new, stringent American security directives, that the ban would be lifted on an airport-by-airport basis.

In the secretive corridors of the American espionage community, the Israeli mission was praised by knowledgeable officials as a casebook example of a valued ally’s hard-won field intelligence being put to good, arguably even lifesaving, use.

Yet this triumph would be overshadowed by an astonishing conversation in the Oval Office in May, when an intemperate President Trump revealed details about the classified mission to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Along with the tempest of far-reaching geopolitical consequences that raged as a result of the president’s disclosure, fresh blood was spilled in his long-running combative relationship with the nation’s clandestine services. Israel—as well as America’s other allies—would rethink its willingness to share raw intelligence, and pretty much the entire Free World was left shaking its collective head in bewilderment as it wondered, not for the first time, what was going on with Trump and Russia. (In fact, Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia, both before and after the election.) In the hand-wringing aftermath, the entire event became, as is so often the case with spy stories, a tale about trust and betrayal.

Since I'm feeling charitable this morning, I'll just note that I don't believe Trump was purposely undermining Israeli (and Western) intelligence efforts in the Middle East (although he's repeatedly shown that he has no love for the intelligence community). It's that he's a show off ("Looky what I got!"), pathologically insecure, completely ignorant of foreign affairs, has no concept of consequences -- that there even are such things -- and fairly stupid.

And he's managed to do incalculable damage to our intelligence efforts.

Read the whole thing. It's appalling.

Via Balloon Juice.

In Other News

Donald Trump is

a) incompetent

b) an idiot

c) a national embarrassment

d) all of the above.

Little People In Uniforms

I'm borrowing Digby's title with a little modification: her post deals with ICE agents, who are predominantly men, but it describes a pattern I've seen in TSA agents, who are often women (or for that matter "security" personnel in general). She starts off with a quote from this article at NYT, but I think the article's opening is illustrative:

In Virginia, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents waited outside a church shelter where undocumented immigrants had gone to stay warm. In Texas and in Colorado, agents went into courthouses, looking for foreigners who had arrived for hearings on other matters.

At Kennedy International Airport in New York, passengers arriving after a five-hour flight from San Francisco were asked to show their documents before they were allowed to get off the plane.

The Trump administration’s far-reaching plan to arrest and deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants has been introduced in dramatic fashion over the past month. And much of that task has fallen to thousands of ICE officers who are newly emboldened, newly empowered and already getting to work.

Gone are the Obama-era rules that required them to focus only on serious criminals. In Southern California, in one of the first major roundups during the Trump administration, officers detained 161 people with a wide range of felony and misdemeanor convictions, and 10 who had no criminal history at all.

The gloves are off, and it ain't pretty. The episode of the San Francisco-New York Delta flight has gotten a lot of play, and it should. ICE's excuse was that they were looking for someone who was to be deported, who turned out not to be on the plane. As one commentator noted, they could have looked at the passenger manifest.

These are customs agents forcibly checking the ID of every passenger deplaning from Delta flight 1583 tonight at JFK. A domestic flight. pic.twitter.com/fHMgyzCjo5

— Britton Taylor (@brittontaylor) February 23, 2017

I'd love it if one of the churches whose shelter had been raided filed a suit claiming a violation of religious freedom -- show some of these "Christians" what it's about.

Digby focuses on the attitude shift among ICE and Border Patrol agents after Trump's executive orders on immigrants were issued:

Interviews with 17 agents and officials across the country, including in Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, Washington and California, demonstrated how quickly a new atmosphere in the agency had taken hold. Since they are forbidden to talk to the press, they requested anonymity out of concern for losing their jobs.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Tuesday that the president wanted to “take the shackles off” of agents, an expression the officers themselves used time and again in interviews to describe their newfound freedom.

“Morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially since the signing of the orders,” the unions representing ICE and Border Patrol agents said in a joint statement after President Trump issued the executive orders on immigration late last month.

Two memos released this past week by the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and the Border Patrol, provided more details about how it would carry out its plan, which includes Mr. Trump’s signature campaign pledge — a wall along the entire southern border — as well as speedier deportations and greater reliance on local police officers.

But for those with ICE badges, perhaps the biggest change was the erasing of the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities, which forced agents to concentrate on deporting gang members and other violent and serious criminals, and mostly leave everyone else alone.

Quite honestly, I favor the Obama administration's priorities on this. (And a side note for those who are worried about jobs: undocumented immigrants are not taking jobs away from Americans; jobs are being shipped overseas by the "job creators," who are creating thousands of jobs in China, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines -- and Ethiopia, which is where Ivana Trump's line of shoes in now manufactured, because labor costs are cheaper. . . .)

And if we could count on ICE and Border Patrol agents to use some judgment in the field, I wouldn't be so concerned: they are hedged in by rules and regs because they do things like this:

The son of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali was detained for hours by immigration officials earlier this month at a Florida airport, according to a family friend.

Muhammad Ali Jr., 44, and his mother, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, the second wife of Muhammad Ali, were arriving at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Feb. 7 after returning from speaking at a Black History Month event in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They were pulled aside while going through customs because of their Arabic-sounding names, according to family friend and lawyer Chris Mancini.

Immigration officials let Camacho-Ali go after she showed them a photo of herself with her ex-husband, but her son did not have such a photo and wasn't as lucky.

Mancini said officials held and questioned Ali Jr. for nearly two hours, repeatedly asking him, "Where did you get your name from?" and "Are you Muslim?"

As Digby points out:

I don't know how stupid you have to be to not know that or realize that if you just let his mother, the former wife of the most famous American Muslim in the world go through, that means he is the son of the most famous American Muslim in the world, but apparently it's not so stupid that you can't be given a uniform and told to guard our borders.

Fasten your seat belts: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Coda: You don't have to be a person of color or even have a "foreign-sounding" name.

A 70-year-old children’s book author claims she was held for over two hours and insulted as she attempted to visit the U.S. from Australia earlier this month.

According to The Guardian, author Mem Fox says she has visited the U.S. over 100 times before but has never received the treatment she was subjected to when she flew into Los Angeles International Airport en route to a conference in Milwaukee.

“I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness,” Fox explained, saying she was held in a room and questioned before a group of people at the airport

.

Making America great again.

Today's Must-Read: Willful Ignorance

This piece by Brody Levesque at NCRM lays out something that others seem to be missing. The meat:

“He just doesn't get it. Every action he takes, every tweet he sends, every public pronouncement he makes has a direct impact on more than just foreign policies and U.S. interests. He is displaying willing effort to remain ignorant about matters than change in mere hours or even minutes – that impact not just national security but global stability.”

Famed journalist Dan Rather took the President-elect to task too, saying, “Forget talking about the Trump Administration. The question now is whether this will be a Trump Putin Administration or a Putin Trump Administration.”

It's beyond Trump claiming he doesn't need intelligence briefings because he's a "smart person" -- it's a determination to remain ignorant of critically important information.

And it's beyond Russia putting him in office (which, of course, is something we should be really pissed off about): there are other players that Trump seems to be going out of his way to offend, starting with China.

It's been a long time since this country could operate as though it's the only country that matters. This idiot could really screw everything up royally.

Read the whole thing.

Footnote: And this.

Rep. Chris Collins has some advice for us. Just move on, give it up, nothing to see here.

"I don't think we should continue investigations because at the end, what do we really accomplish," Collins said. "We need to unite the country."

I'm not going to bother with comparisons to Benghazi!!1! or E-Mails!!1! (and thank you, James Comey, for doing your part to saddle us with this nightmare). But I seem to remember someone, maybe about eight years ago, a little less, refusing to investigate members of the previous administration for war crimes, saying "We need to move on and unite the country."

Things like that have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass. Especially when you've established a precedent of "No consequences."

Today's Must-Read

If you're wondering where The Hairpiece's slurs against the judge in the Trump U case could lead, read this. This part deals with a similar stunt by Larry Klayman, whom Ed Brayton calls "the dumbest lawyer in America not named Mat Staver":

Eventually, Chin dismissed Klayman’s client’s case with a few choice words for the way counsel had conducted it. Not long after, the judge got a letter from Klayman and his co-counsel, Paul Orfanedes, asking a few “questions” about the judge’s Asian American background and mentioning another case they had brought against the Clinton administration. They then filed a brief questioning the judge’s impartiality:

Mr. Klayman and Mr. Orfanedes became concerned that because the Court was a recent appointee of President Clinton … and Mr. Klayman had been prominently mentioned in the media for his role in the Commerce Department case, which focused in part on the White House, the Democratic National Committee, John Huang, Melinda Yee, and other persons in the Asian and Asian–American communities, and because the lawsuit had elicited such angry responses from the White House, Democrats and the Asian–American community, that the Court might be angry at them and unable to be fair and impartial ...

In a written response, Chin noted that he hadn’t been aware of Klayman’s other lawsuit. As for the questions about his race, he said, “This sentiment is absurd and demeans me individually and the Court as a whole.”

He then lowered the boom. Klayman and Orfanedes were required to withdraw as counsel from the case and would not be permitted to appear in Chin’s court on any matter ever again. They would be required to show his opinion to any other judge in the district in any future case. The court clerk would also report the sanctions to every court where they held bar membership.

It's not real smart to screw around with a federal judge.

Today In "Christian" Self-Absorption

OneMilion(minus 999,000)Moms is outraged at a Guinness ad because it uses a Christian hymn as background. Via Joe.My.God.:

Guinness & Co. is currently airing a commercial for its beer with a popular gospel hymn as background music. The song "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" is played during the entire ad and even though there are no lyrics it is unmistakably the beloved hymn Christians know and love. The cherished "Everlasting Arms" hymn has no place in a beer commercial. Christian music should not be associated with an advertisement promoting drinking. The choice of including this hymn in the ad disrespects the Christian faith.

If you actually watch the ad, you get a very different -- and arguably very Christian -- message. (Although I don't know that it's specifically Christian -- it's very human, and approaches the very best of very human.) Maybe if the OMM could realize that the universe does not revolve around them, they wouldn't have so much trouble keeping their blood pressure down. (I use the plural only as a matter of grammar -- I had heard that their membership is something like 40,000, but I remain convinced that the active arm is composed of one intern with an Internet connection.)

Judge for yourself:

I confess to getting a bit misty-eyed at this one.

And thanks to commenter "b" at Joe.My.God., I was reminded of this one:

Do you suppose OMM missed it somehow?

NSA Data-Trolling Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

From Digby. It's long, and difficult to excerpt, so here's the set-up, from McClatchy:

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

It gets worse. It gets much worse. Here's Digby's summation:

Maybe this is just another way of reducing the federal workforce. Nobody normal should want to work there.

When the Department of Education is searching for "insider threats" something's gone very wrong.

I'm starting to wish Iceland didn't have such long winters. They're the only ones who seem to be doing things right.

Dear Rep. Boehner:

This is choice -- or would be if it weren't so ubiquitous:

Based on that statement, CBSNews.com contacted Boehner's office to find out if the minority leader opposes all hate crimes legislation. The law as it now stands offers protections based on race, color, religion and national origin.

In an email, Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Boehner "supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc) based on immutable characteristics."

It should be noted that the current law does not include gender, though the expanded legislation would cover gender as well as sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

"He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes," Smith continued.

Boehner's position, then, appears to be grounded in the notion that immutable characteristics should be protected under hate crimes laws. And while religion is an immutable characteristic, his office suggests, sexual orientation is not.

Uh, Rep. Boehner? Religion is not an immutable characteristic. Stupidity is an immutable characteristic.

Note: The article is good -- it actually does something besides stenography. Like, actual journalism. The comments, however -- well, let's just say the Republican noise machine has once again successfully fuzzed the discusson.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'm going to put it in terms even Andrew Sullivan can understand. (I single out Sullivan because his views on hate crimes legislation are ridiculous and completely wrong-headed.):

Hate crimes, by their result if not their intention (and frankly, I'd say as often as not by intention as well) are acts of terrorism. Their effect is to send a message to members of a group: You could be next, because we don't like you, you uppity (fill in favorite target here).

So, using the approved logic of the right wing, Boehner, et al., support terrorism.

Follow-Up on "Criminalizing Normalcy"

An update on this post about sex offender registries and teenagers.

One of Sullivan's readers makes a good point in relation to Classically Liberal's original post:

I do think, however, that "cls" could've served his/her readers... his/her own credibility... and the blogosphere in general, a lot better, had (s)he taken a day or two to conduct more research on sexual abuse, pedophilia, and so forth.

Whenever you have a sexual situation involving young people, it's important to consider the age differences between the parties involved. If the age difference is less than three years, you're most likely dealing with innocent exploration; if the age difference is three years or more, there's a good chance that some sort of coercion is involved.

"Coercion" in this context is a tricky word -- the implication in most people's minds is the use of force, and that's not necessarily the case. I suspect in a lot of the "coercion" cases, it's much more a matter of the younger child following the older child's lead. Is that "child sexual abuse"? That's iffy. It's much clearer in the case of an adult and a child -- the adult is able to make reasoned decisions and has the responsibility of looking out for the welfare of the child. It's much closer to black and white, as much as anything ever is. (Just to make it crystal clear, I am not excusing those instances in which coercion does mean forcing someone -- that's something that's unacceptable under any cirumstances, at any age.)

In the instance related by Sullivan's reader, he was the victim of abuse by an older child -- he was 8, the older boy 14. There's no question in my mind that the older boy was way over the line.

But the issue of placing a child on a sex offender registry for the rest of his/her life is a separate one. The Economist took a hard look at some of the consequences of our sex offender laws. And "sex offender" becomes a very loose term indeed:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Some of these laws are, as you can see, ludicrous. And getting off those registries is almost impossible. Read the piece in The Economist -- it's pretty thoroughly depressing, and brings up the point I mentioned above: most of the people on these registries pose no threat to children or anyone else. To some extent, Sullivan's reader is correct: in some cases, registration is reasonable. But in 65% of them it's not.

So my outrage and disgust remain unchanged: is it justice to place an eighteen-year-old on a sex offender registry for life because he had consensual sex with his sixteen-yer-old boyfriend? Give me a break.

Priorities

I'm with Jim Burroway on this one:

Gay philanthropist Bruce Bastian of Utah has donated $70,000 to the National Equality March in D.C. and plans to contribute another $30,000 for the event because he strongly believes it will jump-start the LGBT rights movement.

Jump-start the LGBT rights movement? Nothing will jump-start it like two victories in Maine and Washington, and nothing will deflate it like two more defeats in November. Remember the huge letdown after Prop 8? Or are our attention spans really that short?

I appreciate the passion for the March but it is being foolishly misdirected. Not only are its goals ill-concieved and not thought through, but it’s slated for October 11 when Congress will not be in recess and President Obama will be out of town.

Frankly, this whole March idea may be a great ego boost for the organizers, but it’s incredibly selfish considering the needs of LGBT people who face ballot initiatives right now aimed at stripping them and their families of basic rights. That $130,000 can make a huge difference in those fights, not on the grassy lawn of the Mall while everyone else is out of town.

You know what this is? This is another "initiative" by the very people who lost on Prop 8 and have done nothing to move repeal of DOMA and DADT in the past fifteen years. It's the same people who have hired "political consultants" who adivised them to wait on another California marriage referendum until 2012, just the way they advised them not to include any gay people in their ads or ever mention the phrase "gay marriage." (I realize Jerrold Nadler has introduced legislation to repeal DOMA -- about half and hour ago, if my clock is right -- and I'm sure HRC will be crowing about it. Unless they start off by gnashing their teeth and screaming "too soon!" the way Barney Frank is doing. Remember what I've said before: you can't sit back and wait -- you have to keep pushing.)

As far as the "Equality March" is concerned, it will be seen as empty posturing -- which it is. Anyone with any sense of history will probably come to the same conclusion I came to a while ago: the time for this kind of massive, organized demonstration is past. We don't do that any more in this country. Even the teabaggers couldn't pull it off, and their ranks are beyond crazy enough to do it. Even in the mass protest heyday of the 1970s and '80s, our effectiveness was based on smaller, localized actions. That's still where we're most effective -- just take a look at some of the places that have gay-inclusive civil rights laws -- I men, Cincinnati? Peoria? If we keep moving on those front, the federal government will eventually catch up. Eventually.

But marching on Washington on everyone's day off? Why?

The "F" Bomb

An excellent column by Jeff McGregor at ESPN on language as a weapon and how difficult we find it to deal with. A must read.

The Kindle Fiasco

The irony here is the two books that were pulled. From NYT:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

Now, this story has hit the blogosphere big-time, but it seems that Amazon had a legitimate reason for the recall:

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

First, I find it strange that anyone can add a book to the Kindle inventory without it being vetted by Amazon -- given the fluster over copyrights that we've been subjected to since the advent of file-sharing and the like, that would seem to be one of the first concerns for anyone developing such a system. So, dumb move number 1.

Second, to remove the books remotely and unilaterally, without notification, is just a little bit arrogant, done't we think? Apparently, that sentiment got back to Amazon:

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Dumb move number 2. Tell people what you're going to do and why you have to do it, FTLOP.

And it appears that Amazon has violated its own terms of service:

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Frankly, I never had any intention of buying a Kindle anyway. I spend enough time reading from a screen, and these old eyes get really tired. And I like books. I like the physical feel of a book in my hands, I like turning pages, I like the whole experience of reading a book. And I like the fact that once I buy it, it's mine. Forever. No matter what.

Does anyone really think I'm going to spend a few hundred dollars on a reading device that remains under their control? I don't think so.

Chalk one up for tradition.

Conscience

Barbara O'Brien does a slam on the new Bush rules allowing any medical practitioner, pharmacist, bedpan emptier, you-name-it, to refuse to do their jobs for reasons of "conscience."

Shall we just mention in passing that using the word "conscience" in this context is itself a perversion?

She also manages to drag in Dennis Prager, who has once again shown himself to be a complete idiot -- she links to a piece he recently published (oops -- bad link on her blog; I'll see if I can find a good one. Update: found it -- at Townhall, of course -- where else?) that is, as usual with Prager, more notable for what it avoids than what it addresses. I mean, I, who have no investment whatsoever in male-female relationships, couldn't stop laughing; I imagine anyone who's actually married to someone of the opposite sex would have an aneurysm.

The regs, of course, are disgusting and probably unconsitutional. Time to sue the gov, people.

You Only Need to Look in The Corner

To find an idiot. Jonah Goldberg:

If opposition to gay marriage is morally indistinguishable from Jim Crow racism, anti-Semitism and the like (as so many of you say), why on earth aren't you screaming bloody murder at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and the other Democratic politicians who run the US governmemt? Surely, they matter more than a few Mormon donors. Why aren't they bigots even though they hold the same fundamental position as Mormons?

Gads -- where to start? First off, the people Goldberg names haven't been running the government, in case no one noticed. I doubt they would have made such a mess of things even trying. Second, they all opposed Prop 8. A "few Mormon donors" gave over half the funding for the campaign to strip gay Californians (and actually, when it comes right down to it, the rest of us) of fundamental rights.

And of course, Obama, Biden, Clinton, et al. don't hold the same fundamental position as Mormons. There's a big difference in thinking that marriage should be between a man and a woman as a religious doctrine and expending major efforts to impose that religious doctrine on others.

As a thinker, Goldberg's a great . . . gee, I don't really want to insult anyone by comparing them to Jonah Goldberg.

Here's the editorial Goldberg mentions. It's an amazing study in false equivalents, straw men, buzz words, and just plain ol' everyday arrogance. It's a fairly appalling piece of tripe, demonstrating that the right doesn't know how this country was designed to work, thinks mob rule is "democracy," will say anything as long as it suits their agenda, and thinks that only they and those who agree with them (for the time being) should have access to guarantees of basic rights. I mean, that "editorial" is so full of holes it would take a couple of days to parse. I realize it's an opinion piece, but doesn't that demonstrate to you the idea that some people should just keep their opinions to themselves? What's that old line about opening your mouth and proving you're an idiot?

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan (I think). And here's Sullivan with more on Goldberg:

Jonah, moreover, does not mention the fact that the Mormon hierarchy planned this campaign for eleven years, that their decision to make this a public issue is unprecedented in the history of the LDS church, and that their donations made up a huge proportion of the Prop 8 forces. He doesn't mention that their public bluff that they only care about the m-word and favor rights for gay couples has been called in Utah, where gay rights advocates are demanding the LDS church back strong civil union laws (and the LDS church is resisting). He cites no instance in which any Mormon anywhere has had any right removed or threatened by marriage equality.

It's called "cherrypicking."

The Prop 8 Suits (Updated)

From one of Andrew Sullivan's readers, a succinct summary of what it's about:

So, just to help you think about this a little more clearly: Prop 8 stands for the idea that we could put on the ballot tomorrow the question of whether Catholics could marry. We could also put on the ballot the question of whether someone with HIV could vote or own property. We could put on the ballot the question of whether mexican catholics can be discriminated against in housing or employment.

This, of course, is the "Christian" right's goal: to put everyone else's rights up for popular referenda. I've been saying it all along: the people do not have unlimited sovereignty in this country, never did, and unless the Christianist alliance is successful, never will. This is the fundamental lie being spread by those who keep nattering on about "the will of the people": the will of the people is subject to the limitations imposed by the Constitution. That's the whole point of judicial review, which of course is one the first things the right wants to do away with, but only on those decisions they don't like. Regrettably for them, it's difficult to predict those ahead of time.

I'm not going to go into how stupid and short-sighted this is, because the Dobson Gang, while shrewd, is not, as a group, very intelligent, and they are most definitely short-sighted. They're banking on having a permanent majority of wingnuts, which any fool could tell you is a pipe dream. There's no such thing as a permanent majority in this country -- thanks to the will of the people, which is as fickle as anything else in this life.

The right is already making threats about what they will do if the court overturns Prop 8. It's up to us to pull their teeth.

Footnote: This is the AFA's idea of a Christmas decoration, which seems terribly appropriate. It does look like it's burning, doesn't it?