Utterly cool geek-project: the Galileoscope! 2009 is the official “International Year of Astronomy”. In support, the International Astronomical Union (major professional organization for astronomers) has designed and manufactured super-low-cost small refractor telescopes similar to Galileo’s original (but corrected for chromatic aberration - so even better!), for wide distribution to encourage interest in astronomy. The ’scopes are designed to be assemblable and usable by young children, but are more-than-decent quality. They have cheap but well-designed plastic tubes and good multi-element lenses - they’re not the crap spyglass ’scopes you find in toy stores. (Though, to be sure, there’s a limit to what you can expect from them.) They even have tripod mounts.

Cool thing is, you can not only buy one for yourself for $15 plus shipping, but you can also donate one at $12.50 and free shipping; IAU will bundle the donated ’scopes up and distribute them to places that can put them to good use, especially schools and third-world communities.

Great program. Great price. Check it out.

Herbert asks the most important question:

No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.

… The treatment of the young captive was so egregious that the decorated U.S. Army officer assigned to prosecute him — a man gung-ho to secure a conviction against a defendant he believed had committed a serious crime against the American military — ended up removing himself from the case and declaring that he could no longer “in good conscience” participate in the military commissions set up to try accused terrorists.

… In a sworn affidavit, Colonel Vandeveld said, “This abuse included the slapping of Mr. Jawad across the face while Mr. Jawad’s head was covered with a hood, as well as Mr. Jawad’s having been shoved down a stairwell while both hooded and shackled.”

Jawad’s account had the ring of truth. As Colonel Vandeveld said in the affidavit, the interviewer “later testified as a defense witness … that Mr. Jawad’s statement was completely consistent with the statements of other prisoners held at Bagram at the time and, more importantly, that dozens of the guards had admitted to abusing the prisoners in exactly the way described by Jawad.”

Proud of that, are you? Proud of the US torturing children and then keeping them locked away forever? Is that your idea of strength? Is that your idea of justice and the American way? If it is, then know yourself for the thumb-sucking, wetting-yourself coward that you most certainly are. Anyone who justify that kind of treatment is a coward, so afraid of the bogeymen they have built up in their own mind that they are willing to throw away American prestige, the rule of law, common sense and basic human decent. Bin Laden has already beaten those people. The Obama Administration should know better than to listen to them.

When you become a monster fight a monster, all you get is another monster.

Vinny:

anecdotal evidence : evidence that supports the other guy’s position

Ha!

By the way, if you’re not, you really should be reading Vinny’s blog. He blogs sporadically (not that we have much room to talk), but when he does, it’s almost always worth reading. Vinny, if you’re seeing this plug, please consider this a formal request for you to revive your “CNBC Dumbass of the Day” series.

I was just telling my wife how I’d like to go hike the Appalachian Trail one day, and she slapped me across the face! I had no idea why!

Oh, now I get it!

Seriously (or, as Barbie would say, Srsly!), what is up with these knuckleheads who can’t keep it in their pants? Especially people like Edwards and now Sanford who had at least an outside chance of getting their party’s nomination for president of the friggin United States!

Setting aside KTK’s previous point about whether or not it ought to be a big deal when politicos “hike the Appalachian Trail,” the fact remains that it is a big deal, and everyone knows this. It’s not some secret. The hubris is mind-boggling.

I’ve been admiring Ta-Nehisi Coates off and on for some time, but now he’s on my every-day list. I was just staggered by this post today, on the burden of self-justificatory myths.

I want to focus on . . . the South’s psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don’t mean defeat in the war, so much as I mean lagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.

I’ve actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. . . .

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior’s beard. His story is American–the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he’s noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.

Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry–too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK. . . .

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it’s painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn’t just “lost,” it’s barely a cause.

This is a beautiful piece of writing - and the long version is better. (He’s not just crapping on the South, much as they deserve it. He notes the experience of overcoming his own myths, and how liberating that can be.) Coates often sees right to the heart of things, and has a clean and pointed way of expressing that. And not rarely, he tees one up and hits it right out of the park. He needs to be read.

I’m also going to make a point of looking for the book he references, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.

Republican Senator John Ensign of Nevada has announced he had an extramarital affair in 2008 with one of his own staffers, but he “deeply regrets” it and is “very sorry”. His wife claims that, as a result, their “marriage has become stronger”. (Good work, John!)

I don’t really give a shit. People’s sex lives are their own business. Getting caught up in conniptions over who somebody sleeps with is for people who get caught up in conniptions over who people sleep with. As far as I’m concerned, he’s got nothing to explain; I don’t make it my business to judge other people’s sex lives.

Which is what’s so delicious about this. Ensign does make it his business to judge other people’s sex lives. He was a leading critic of Clinton for doing the same thing he’s been doing now, and in fact demanded Clinton’s resignation. He also announced that Senator Larry Craig was “a disgrace” after he was caught soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room; Ensign demanded Craig’s resignation at that time, also, just three months at most before Ensign himself began bonking one of his employees. Ensign, it goes without saying, has indicated he has no intention of resigning his own office.

And he is, of course, a complete asshole in every other respect as well - votes with the GOP 92% of the time, has 100% ratings from both anti-choice and anti-gay-rights organizations, supports Constitutional amendments against both flag “desecration” and marriage equality, promotes official mandatory prayer in schools, and on and on. One piece of extreme assholery I particular appreciate is this: he voted against adding coverage for more children under the SCHIP program, but in favor of providing SCHIP coverage to fetuses. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect illustration of Republican dipshit demagoguery.

So I’m torn between glee at seeing him twist in the wind and concern that this just perpetuates the tradition of making people’s private lives fodder for political posturing. Nobody needs to apologize to the public for an extramarital affair (his obligations to his wife are their business, and as she claims to believe it’s a net positive, well . . .). But assholes like Ensign need to apologize for being bluenose busybody prudes, and bigots, in general.

And so I propose the “Barney Frank Rule on Conservative Hypocrisy in General”. The “Frank Rule” is a rough consensus, proposed by Rep. Barney Frank, that many gay activists endorse regarding when it is appropriate to out gay conservatives who work against gay rights:

I think there’s a right to privacy. But the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy. And people who want to demonize other people shouldn’t then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves.

It can easily be generalized to criticism (not just the outing of perpetrators) of other forms of hypocrisy. And it provides a reasonable and fair way to respond to cases like Ensign’s. The issue isn’t whether he had an affair. It’s the fact that he uses his power to ruin lives and obstruct fundamental personal freedoms, and that he demands those same freedoms for himself while doing so.

The first is worse in impact, but the second both undermines his supposedly principled stance on the issues themselves, and ties him personally to the implicit position that such rules should not be imposed on “people who count”. The appropriate criticism of Ensign is not that he had an affair, and not even that he had an affair after criticizing others for having affairs, but that he signals, by his actions, that he regards his own policies as either meaningless political stunts or too harmful to be applied except to people he does not care about. One might also note that he apparently lacks the will to follow policies he seeks to impose on others by law or political pressure. This in no way lets non-hypocritical prudes and bigots off the hook, but it answers the question how to respond to the especially appalling spectacle of the use of other people’s private lives for political gain by people who indulge in the very behavior they punish in others.

The proper resolution - one that any decent person would have seen at once, and that Ensign now endorses by his own actions - is not to crack down harder on disapproved sex, but to leave other people’s sex lives the hell alone. And until prurient, finger-pointing conservative hypocrites are willing to extend the freedom and respect for privacy to everyone else that they demand in their own lives (their melodramatic public confessions notwithstanding), it’s fair game to make their lives the same tortured hunting ground of humiliation, exposure, and inquisition.

UPDATE: Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly ices the cake:

In 2004, the Nevada Republican lectured his colleagues, “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.”

And did I mention that Ensign is a longtime member of the Promise Keepers, a conservative evangelical group that promotes strong families and marriages?

TOTALLY HILARIOUS RANDOM OBSERVATION: The Washington Post lists Congressional voting records broken down by various categories (party, state, gender, etc.), including voting members’ astrological sign.

. . . rigid-hulled solar-powered blimps with bio-diesel jet engines that go 200 mph without using any fuel.

I shit you not:

Large airships have the expanse of hull needed to carry huge arrays of solar cells . . . . Solar generated electricity is fed directly to electric motors driving the airships’ propellors. To reduce the weight of the motors, advanced electric motors that substitute superconducting magnets in place of traditional copper wire are used. Excess electricity generated during daylight operations is used to divide water by electrolisis into oxygen and hydrogen; which is stored for use in fuel cells for flight during night or overcast sky conditions. . . . BIO-DIESEL powered electric generators are used as a back-up system to the solar cells and fuel cells. . . .

The nice thing about airships is….they float in the air. Which means that they do not need to rely upon thrust to fly. Which means that they do not need complex, expensive engines to produce thrust. Which means that they do not need the special aviation fuels used by airplanes. Which means that airships can save the world! . . .

It can do all this without using fuel at all. . . .

Although the Turtle airship has a lifting body shape, it is not a hybrid airship. The airship can operate using only aerostatic lift supplied though negative bouyancy. Additional, supplemental aerodynamic force is derived from the shape of the airship. . . .

Two lighter-than-air gasses are used to supply lift; these are contained within rigid walled compartments within the major portion of the airships’ hull. . . .

The top of the airships’ hull is covered with thin film photovoltaic solar cells which supply electricity to batteries; these battries in turn are used to power electric motors and propellors. Thrust can be directed directly perpendicular to the line of flight, or straight up or down as needed. . . .

The primary propulsion is derived from biofueled jets. This makes the airships reach speeds of up to 200 mph.

So, I count at least 5 powerplants and propulsion systems: direct-drive solar-powered electric motors; solar-charged batteries to power the electric motors; bio-diesel power generators for propulsion or battery charging; gaseous hydrogen (!) fuel-cell engines; and bio-diesel jet engines for going 200 mph. That ought to provide reliable backup. No excess weight in there, of course.

It’s the sound, cautious engineering principles that are going to guarantee success for this visionary venture. Gaseous hydrogen in dirigibles is certainly a well-known technology. And the lighter-than-air-lifting-body idea is not new, either, though I hope they’ve checked the patent situation on that. And electric motors with superconducting magnets - what could be simpler (and obviously lighter than a copper-wired magnet core - you just use one of those small, portable liquid helium pumps)? Jet-powered dirigibles are somewhat non-standard, of course, as is going 200 mph in a pillow-shaped object with approximately 40,000 30,000 sq. ft. of surface area - but that’s what makes it a breakthrough! Luckily, it saves a lot of weight on fuel because all of these power sources (except the hydrogen cells) operate “without using fuel at all”. Luckily, because they’re lighter than air, they do not need thrust to fly. (I’m not sure if that means they’re intended to only fly vertically up and down over one single spot, or if they are somehow magically drawn toward their destination whenever they leave the ground. Probably both.)

And it can save the world!

Man, I do love me some hippie-dippie environmentalist enthusiasm, but, Jesus, get a freakin’ grip, people. You see almost as much stupid, scientifically oblivious crap from New Agers as you would if a bus full of Republican economists crashed into a creationism tent meeting. This is embarrassing.

The right wing is flailing in angry confusion. The mere existence of a black President is driving them absolutely crazy. And they’re completely unable to keep the lid on.

It’s not just Obama, of course. The US, and much of the world, has left the right wing behind. Women, gays, non-whites are all ascendant, atheism is respectable if not popular, sex is no longer taboo, the groundless repressive social mores of the past have been casually shrugged off, and even the wingers’ fall-back positions (civil unions, “adopting” IVF embryos, prescription-based emergency contraception, marriage rights for interracial couples [but not for gays]) are the radically progressive positions of only a few years ago. Their centuries-long fight to keep the world as backward as they are, by force, has been lost, and there is just nothing left for them. And they can’t stand it. The unmistakable fact that the GOP is heading for a crackup, and the long-term prospects of the right look even worse - the only social group they command now is aging whites, which happens to be the one that’s fading fastest (evangelicals are a subset of that group, so that only makes things worse for them) - is driving the right to extremes across the board.

The Tiller killing, open promises of more anti-choice violence, the Holocaust museum killing, today’s story of increased military penetration by neo-Nazis with the explicit intention of preparing for “race war” . . . the wingers are increasingly desperate as they lose their grip on US society forever, and they are lashing out in a frenzy as their last chance for relevance slips past them. But Obama has them in full-gone whacko mode, and the past couple of days have shown the cracks in the badly strained levee that has been hiding the floodwaters of crazy race hate from a country that has been hoping the flood had already receded. It has not, and now the levees are crumbling.

Kevin has already posted on the senseless racist image of Obama circulated by Sherri Goforth, a staffer for a Republican Tennessee state legislator.

The very same weekend, South Carolina GOP campaign consultant Mike Green Twittered his version of humor to a wide list of people: Obama was going to impose a “tax on aspirin” because “it’s white and it works”.

The very same weekend, yet another South Carolina Republican, Rusty DePass (former county GOP chair and campaign operative), made funny in that peculiar Republican way when he claimed that a gorilla which had escaped from the local zoo was “one of Michelle[ Obama]’s ancestors”.

That’s just one weekend for the GOP. And of course they make it worse: Green at least apologized forthrightly, but Goforth repeatedly stated only that she was sorry that she had sent her racist picture to “the wrong list”. DePass gave the standard “if anyone was offended” non-apology, and then, bizarrely, tried to blame the whole thing on Michelle Obama, insisting that “the comment was hers, not mine” and that Obama had started it by saying something about humans evolving from apes (a statement which reporters were unable to locate after searching for it). (Glad to see the GOP is playing to form: he’s not a racist because he’s too busy being a creationist dipshit . . . ohhh-kaaayyyy . . . .) And, not to be churlish, but I’d be more likely to accept Green’s statement that he believes his remarks “were hurtful, wrong and have no place in civil discourse” if he hadn’t made them in the first place. I mean, I can’t believe he would actually say things he honestly believed were “wrong” and “have no place in civil discourse”, and I also think it’s unlikely that he so completely reversed his perspective on racial issues in 24 hours that he now believes that about the things that he himself formerly believed just that long ago; it seems too obvious that, although he apologized abjectly, he did so only because he got caught (he at first refused to even admit what was on his own Twitter page). So none of them seem to be very honest in taking back their own comments, and of course all of them are the sorts of people who would make those comments and jokes in the first place.

But it’s not just these three clowns. These are just the ones who got caught (in fact, they’re just the ones who got caught this weekend). As Goforth herself points out, she only got into trouble because she sent the picture to the wrong list of people (and Green, also, seems to have forgotten that his Twitter posts get displayed on a public Web page - he was also sending to a private list, and but for that oversight he too would not have been caught, and surely not have had his remarkable “epiphany”). There’s no telling what passes between these people on the days when they don’t get caught. And even when they are caught red-handed, they deny, obfuscate, and lie. This is not an aberration - this is what the right wing is like when they think no one is watching them.But why such an upsurge of stupidity, racism, anger, and violence, right now?

The wheels have come off the wagon. Reality is against them and they can’t cope. The “smooth” ones fall back on crass racism and graceless stupidities; the raging, deranged followers, having listened to the demonizing and violent rhetoric of their leaders for decades, simply shoot people. It’s a violent lashing-out of resentful privilege as their pedestal is undermined by the current of humanity and begins to topple. It’s going to get worse, and it’s going to take a long time. But for all that, better times are coming, day by day.

Holy crap! I knew Frank Schaeffer - son of widely-read drippy evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer - had publicly broken with the right-wing religious extremists, but I never expected to see him take a clue stick and beat the living shit out of them like he did today. Man, I don’t often find myself wishing I had gone as far as a prominent conservative evangelical, but, damn . . . brother drops some serious science!

As a former lifelong Republican from an influential family of religious right leaders, I look at the national village idiot that the Republican Party has become the way I’d contemplate a demented cousin pissing on the picnic basket at a family reunion. If it is fair to blame the years of Wahhabist hate that spewed from Saudi clerics for at least part of the 9/11 outcome (and it is) then it’s also going to be fair to blame their American equivalent when domestic terror ramps up here. . . .

No, I’m not saying [Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney] or anyone in the public eye is planning violence. I’m talking about the culpability of smart people knowingly or unknowingly playing to the lowest common denominator and stirring up trouble in a sort of scorched-earth policy since they lost out politically. I’m talking about creating a climate where violence seems “logical” and maybe inevitable when set against a backdrop of insane talk.

The leaderless Republican Party — or should I say the dwindling rabble of know-nothing reactionaries who still identify themselves as Republicans — is not just politically leaderless, they are also morally leaderless. . . .

[Their] “lynch mob” mentality is the context in which Dr. Tiller was murdered. A lot of this emerging domestic terror has to do with a larger story. It has to do with what becomes thinkable under a barrage of hateful words. . . .

The 20-year-plus agitation in and around Dr. Tiller’s Wichita clinic (egged on by evangelicals, Fox News and other commentators) eventually turned into a little pro-life industry with four groups raising funds and opening headquarters in that city attracted to Dr. Tiller’s clinic the way cheap motels spring up around Disneyland and feed off the crumbs. So today a whole far right industry, led by Fox News, Limbaugh, the evangelicals, right wing Roman Catholics, Palin, the former vice president and his daughter — etc. — is growing up and into a permanent, negative and profitable hate-Obama industry. It is catering to the deluded, the paranoid, the fearful and - let’s be frank - none too bright rube underbelly of white America.

There’s another thing too: President Obama allows closeted racists to be open racists again. His name is now code for the “other.” Because Obama is black, lived abroad and is educated, a professor and part of that hated world of higher learning that the right wing feels is a threat to their willful ignorance (and profitable misinformation campaigns), the mere utterance of his name alone by Limbaugh, Fox News etc., is the new “N” word. . . .

The moron class of Americans who stocked up on guns and ammunition when President Obama was elected, because of fears that he would “take our guns away;” the willful fools to whom Glenn Beck is a hero, are the same population that — right now - have their TV remotes set on Fox News 24/7. They are listening to Rush Limbaugh too as they rattle around in their pickup trucks driving to wherever they’re practicing on targets but fantasizing about putting the president, or other people they hate, in their scope’s cross hairs.

These are the same folks on the fringe of the “pro-life” movement who are waving huge signs wherein Obama’s name is plastered on the picture of a dead fetus’ and the word “murderer” is scrawled in bloody letters over our President’s picture. Read the signs that were being waved by pro-lifers at Dr. Tiller’s funeral. “God Sent the Killer!” Is it hard to imagine these people cheering if our president (who they all call “an abortionist”) was killed?

It is time to tell the loudmouth profiteers from hate that we ordinary Americans who voted for and love our President and our country know who they are and that we will not forget what they said and said again and again and again. When some fool’s fool takes them at their word and tries to do “God’s will” by taking a shot at our president we will remember who put them up to it.

Good on him. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks he’s said something smart with his vague and broad-brush claim that everything Obama does (including speak politely to people) is some sort of unnatural act that is bound to end in disaster. It’s lame and, in a way, kind of sad, but after my recent complaint about wingers’ persistent defiance of logic, I have to give an encouraging smile to one who at least thinks he’s playing the game.

Hanson takes the stance that Obama’s policies and decisions are bound to fail because they conflict with basic reality (working in, naturally, the kind of sneers at education that only a right-wing PhD in philology can really pull off):

Obama Versus the Way of the Universe

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back.. . .

So we all know the old rules, because the universe works according to time-honored precepts: we either must tax all of us . . . in insidious ways; OR simply cut government expenditures elsewhere to pay the annual interest payments, OR print money and screw the Chinese, European, etc. , debtors, inflating our way out via the late 1970s.

Sorry, there are no other real alternatives. . . .

Deficit Foreign Policy Too

So it is with foreign policy as well. Obama’s make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). . . .

But in the long run?

He hits against human nature. Most of you readers-in business, law, the professions-don’t continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., “Glad you got that job, Home Depot-we at Lowes didn’t really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons . . .

Sorry

The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say “Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn’t really up to the arena anymore, let’s move in on its Western region, etc.”

Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things. . . .

[snip lengthy pseudo-worldly anecdote about a dispute on his family farm]

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

Hmmm . . . bad news. It’s materially and logically impossible for Obama to succeed at what he’s doing! Better take that seriously, now, before it’s too late!

But, characteristically, Hanson’s self-congratulatory condescension only works as rhetoric, not as fact. As with most of the cherished beliefs of the right wing, it’s tenable only if you don’t take it seriously or ask honestly whether it might be true.

Here are the things Hanson thinks are laws of nature:

• that you cannot fund expenditures of $20 trillion over ten years out of an economy with a GDP of over $13 trillion per year, with decades to pay it back;
• that it’s a disaster to establish good relations with foreign countries because that would be like a company praising its competitors;
• . . . actually, that was it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Political discourse, as it were: Kevin notes that the recent official vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party refuses to describe religiously-motivated anti-choice murders and clinic bombings as terrorism. One of our resident wingers responds almost immediately with . . . a totally irrelevant rant about a completely different issue – because, between open rationalization of terrorist murder and your petulant fantasies about the “liberal media”, it’s obvious which is more important.

MSM . . . dared pursued and exposed . . . relationship and connection with the terrorist Bill Ayers . . . of course not! . . . attack Palin . . . blah, blah . . .

Humoring him, we might try to take this nonsense seriously. But, characteristically, and portentously, it can’t be done.

Read the rest of this entry »

A suspect was arrested only a few hours after the Tiller killing, and to absolutely no one’s surprise he’s a white male Christian with a long history of affiliation with the extreme fringe, anti-government and militia groups, and anti-abortion activism, including links to Operation Rescue.

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Operation Rescue itself issued a statement condemning the murder, but, as several people pointed out, it was posted on their Web site right next to a graphics block with a picture of Dr. Tiller, labeling him “America’s Doctor of Death”.

Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry issued a statement claiming to regret the murder of Dr. Tiller because “he did not have time to prepare his soul to face God”, but saying nothing about the actual murder.

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It’s interesting to recall the right wing’s panicked reaction to the recent “Homeland Security” report correctly noting that right-wing extremism is a common source of violence and terrorism in the US, and that single-issue extremists such as anti-choice fanatics are a particular danger. Right Wing Watch has a selection of choice quotes from Christian wingers condemning the report. It is presumed that none of them will issue statements noting that DHS was right all along.

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As for the issue of terrorism, it’s hard to be more stupid or mindless than Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom, but his is typical of right-wing commentary on the issue:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder.

OK . . . good start.

It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers.

Well, it was obviously much less “an act of political assassination” inasmuch as the Weather bombings didn’t actually kill anyone (other than the people preparing the bombs), and it’s clear that the bombs that were set were designed not to (though the one that went off accidentally may have been, the ones actually used were not). That would seem to be a fairly obvious point of distinction between compared “acts of political assassination” - the “assassinations” where somebody dies are worse than the ones not intended to kill anybody that do not in fact kill anybody. Am I going too fast for you, Dan?

It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation

Shooting a man to death in a terrorist act is “no more a violation of civil rights” than standing outside a polling place scowling while black? Exactly how entitled, oblivious, and ghoulishly indifferent to terrorism do you have to be to make a statement as maliciously stupid as that?

There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

I have no idea what this means, and neither does Dan Collins.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there?

Um, no. Does that help? “Hate crime” is legally defined as an ordinary crime motivated or heightened by prejudice. This was straightforward terrorism - it was political violence intended to deny women their rights and liberties by killing and intimidating those who work to guarantee them. It was the same sort of thing as killing schoolteachers in Afghanistan, or voter registrars in the US South. You can easily posit misogynist prejudice as a root cause, as it is in Afghanistan or as race prejudice was in the South, but the crime itself is simple terroristic murder.

If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes?

Leaving aside the fact that “Islamist” is a made-up word that is only applied by critics to people they disapprove of, not an objectively-definable category, whether or not any such person is guilty of a hate crime would obviously depend on what they did, and why. Since he offers no examples or discussion, the question is unanswerable, but this claim can’t possibly be true of all “Islamists” if such people even exist.

It’s certainly true that many religious fanatics use terroristic violence as a means of promoting their causes - the entire history of Christian anti-abortion violence makes that clear. Timothy McVeigh is another example, as is the Christian militia movement. That’s not the same as “hate crimes”, but clarity of thought doesn’t seem to be Collins’s forte, so maybe this is what he is thinking of.

Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments?

Well, not under US law, since it doesn’t apply to foreign countries.

Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Since they don’t constitute a crime at all, they can’t constitute a hate crime. Seriously, how can you be this stupid and be listened to? Or, more to the point I guess, where else but the American right wing could you do so?

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As for the impact of this act of terrorism, the most obvious and immediate is that America has lost one of the few doctors who would openly and regularly provide service - under continuous threat to his own life, and unremitting legal and personal harassment - to women facing the most critical and harrowing needs. Hilzoy has assembled the heart-wrenching statements of patients who were personally treated by Dr. Tiller at times of terrible crisis, as well as one who was forced to suffer endlessly, at risk to her life, because she was denied the same liberty.  It’s an absolute must-read, and a crushing indictment of the vicious misogyny that drives the anti-choice movement and its terrorist wing.

NB: Normally we tolerate a lot on this blog, but I’ve been deleting comments from our resident obnoxious anti-choice troll because, frankly, I’m not in the mood at this time.

UPDATE [tgirsch]: Added a link to the suspect ID, since at least one commenter questioned KTK’s classification.

The news today reports that Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, a long-time target of continual legal and terrorist harassment because of his refusal to deny legal and safe late-term abortions to patients who needed them, was shot to death by an apparent terrorist while serving as an usher at his family church in Wichita. A suspect has been arrested but his identity has not been released. Tiller was one of the few providers of late-term abortion in his part of the country, and for years had been the target of harassment by Christian anti-choice groups, as well as a campaign of legal harassment by anti-choice Kansas prosecutor Phil Kline, who lost a series of legal battles, and his own re-election campaign, while attempting to bring empty charges against Tiller and  penalize his patients by invasions of their privacy. Just two months ago Tiller was resoundingly acquitted of all charges in a case originally instigated by Kline in an attempt to have Tiller’s medical license revoked. Today he was murdered. Apparently the misogynists think of the rule of law as just a tactic, not a principle.

This was the 8th or 9th terrorist killing of abortion clinic workers, continuing a decades-long campaign that has seen over a dozen more people survive attempted murders, as well as over 1,200 hoax anthrax poisonings, hundreds of real bombings and arsons (some of them fatal), thousands of cases of death threats and threatening or libelous letters, constant harassment of clinic staff and patients, harassment of staff and their families at their private homes, and uncountable acts of vandalism and other crimes. Dr. Tiller himself had survived a previous shooting by another anti-choice terrorist, yet continued to provide service to patients at the risk of his life for another 15 years.

It has to be said that, at this time, we don’t know exactly what the murderer’s motivation was, or what groups he may be affiliated with. But there’s no reason to be coy about it. Tiller has been a target of the anti-choice crusaders literally for decades. They have tried everything possible, including harassment, public villification, abuse of the law, and even attempted murder, to stop him before. And, as with every anti-abortion murder or attempted murder in the past, the perpetrators have always been conservative Christians, convinced that their religious beliefs justify terrorism. If this most recent murder, of someone openly targeted by terrorists and their supporters year after year, should somehow prove to be down to some unrelated cause, it would be a staggering coincidence. Nobody believes that. Anti-abortion violence is and always has been the product of Christian terrorists, and it has received widespread support from networks - sometimes informal, often well-organized - of other right-wing Christians who operate Web sites targeting women’s rights supports for death; circulate written manuals giving explicit instructions for methods of terrorism and violence; recruit and encourage terrorists using religious inducements; publicize, defend, and praise, in Christian terms, terrorists who commit murders or violence; and actively provide, food, money, shelter, and other support to Christian terrorists on the run after their crimes. Even if, as is almost unimaginably unlikely, this particular murder turns out to be unrelated to the ongoing Christian terrorism campaign against women’s health and liberty rights, it will certainly feed and encourage the terrorism network that has long existed.

As Matthew Yglesis points out quite correctly, Christian anti-woman violence has proven itself to be “a kind of terrorism that works“. The chilling effect of anti-choice terrorism on abortion service providers is quite real, and significant. In addition to the many doctors killed or injured, scores were coerced by threats of death against themselves and their families to sign public statements vowing to abandon their patients and refuse to continue providing services. The total number of provicers nationwide has declined steadily, and terrorism is undoubtedly a large part of the reason why.

For years this violence was ignored by the government, and the FBI seemed uninterested in catching the people responsible. (Most of the terrorists were caught by accident, and to this day only a handful of their active supporters have been prosecuted, though eventually the FBI did get a little more active.) In fact, it was almost never named for what it was - terrorism - the use or threat of violence to coerce behavior by non-combatants for political ends.

There is one thing different, now, however. The most recent previous anti-choice murder was pre-9/11. Today, people are less inclined to take that kind of thing lightly. And, after years of silent acquiescence, mainstream Christian groups did finally begin issuing statements of disapproval regarding Christian terrorism; some have already done so regarding the Tiller murder. Just as they were getting a good hate on for Muslim terrorists, it’s inconvenient for Christians to be reminded of Christian terrorism. The debate over torture by US personnel makes the issue a bit dicey, too - the torturers have been arguing that what they did is not really torture, but shooting people to death in a church is clearly over the line, so they’ve got to distance themselves from this one as fast as possible in order to maintain the pretense that “real” terrorism is not something we do. So the Christian terrorists are going to find themselves somewhat less well supported this time around, at least on the open level.

The real question is what the government will do about this. A clear-cut, open, terrorist murder on US soil, by undoubtedly a homegrown US terrorist, virtually undobutedly a right-wing Christian terrorist acting on religious impulses, right at the height of a much-ballyhooed “war on terror” also aimed at religious terrorists: are they going to let this go? Or are they going to come down on it the way they would if this were a Muslim or non-American killer?

Are they going to call it terrorism?

Are they going to make the link to the ongoing terrorist campaign that has been underway for almost 30 years?

Are they going to pressure the instigators to stop the harassment and incitement?

Are they going to charge the suspect with terrorism and treat the trial as a domestic security issue?

Are they going to acknowledge that US women are the specific and explicit targets of religious terrorism, motivated by misogyny and aversion to women’s sexuality, justified by right-wing Christian ideology, and culminating in wide-spread, long-standing organized violence and murder?

Are they going to act as if an all-out terrorist campaign aimed directly at the specific and personal liberties, and explicit legal rights, of more than half the population, and their supporters, is something that matters?

Are they going to acknowledge that the right-wing Christian politicians who have consistently used the legal system to impose cynical and disingenuous barriers to women’s rights and freedom are in fact carrying water for the terrorists who seek the same goals by other means?

At long last, is the government of the United States going to engage the campaign of terror against US women, even as it fights a manufactured and aimless “war on terror” in distant parts of the globe, and finally take an open and direct stand against those who use terrorism and violence to constrain women’s freedom, against those who cheer, encourage, and support the terrorists, and against their fellow travelers inside the system?

UPDATE, and SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

RE-UPDATE: i was going to add the “random observations” here, but decided to move them to a separate post (above). Somehow the text wound up in both places. I blame the Republicans.

So some couple in San Diego, CA (a reasonably conservative town, by the way), has been hosting religious meetings in their home on a weekly basis for over 5 years, and was informed they were in violation of zoning laws for their neighborhood and would have to apply for a “Major Use Permit”. Naturally, whining about persecution was preferable, in their case, to obeying the same laws as everyone else, and so they called the compliant Fox News and announced that “I believe that our Founding Fathers would roll over in their grave” yada yada yada. Naturally also, Fox made no effort to describe what actually took place at the meetings, how many people were involved, or in what way they did or did not conform to zoning laws. And, again naturally, the winger media immediately reacted to this almost entirely content-free and one-sided story by declaring that “it’s not about the money, but about suppressing Christianity, which progressives see as an obstacle to their depraved objectives”, and that “in San Diego County your First Amendment right to freely exercise your religion may not go so far as hosting a small gathering”.

It should be noted that one obvious Google search takes you directly to the San Diego zoning board Web site, which helpfully explains that a “Major Use Permit” is a specifically-recognized addendum available for residential areas, which authorizes businesses, schools, churches, and similar non-residential operations involving large groups of people in such neighborhoods. All you have to do is apply for it.* Other stories make it clear these meetings involve an average of 15 people who park in the street and prompted complaints after one attendee hit a neighbor’s car while trying to maneuver in the crowded no-exit residential street. He’s basically running a small church in his home, and that’s exactly what the Major Use Permit is intended to regulate. If you check, I’m certain you’ll find that every regular church in the neighborhood already has one.

Now, let me say, briefly, that there is the potential for state encroachment on privacy here, including the freedom of religion, and that abuse of these kinds of regulations can be a mechanism for suppression of religion. (They have been, in places like China and Cuba, and that is a serious problem.) And let me state also that that’s horseshit in this case. America is filled with churches, most of them in residential neighborhoods. Nobody is putting up any barriers to being a right-wing preacher; they grow on trees. But just being a right-wing preacher doesn’t give you a free pass out of being a decent citizen. He’s inconveniencing his neighbors by doing something his neighborhood isn’t designed for and can’t easily accommodate. The city cannot prohibit religious exercise, but it can certainly require that anyone hosting an unusually large gathering - to say nothing of doing so, apparently, close to 300 times in succession over a period of years - takes steps to ensure that their neighbors can still reach their own houses and aren’t subject to property damage from one person’s refusal to comply with zoning laws. There is a recognized mechanism for this - he simply refuses to use it, and claims “being a Christian” as a get-out-of-zoning-board-free card.

And of course the wingers have found themselves another cause. They’re all martyrs to . . . the depraved objectives of the progressives of the San Diego Department of Public Land Use. Not one person on the right can bring themselves to just say “Yeah, we have zoning laws for a reason, and this guy’s pushing it. He ought to go before the board, find a way to work something out, and pay the same fee everyone else in his city has to pay to get a variance or open a public accommodation.” Taking other people into account, taking responsibility for the trouble you cause, obeying the law, and compromising are all somehow unthinkable, if you’re conservative, and especially if you’re religious. But why is anti-social behavior an issue of religious freedom? What does it say about the people, and their religion, who claim that it is?

It’s getting hard to keep track of all the imaginary right-wing suffering. If it’s not the War on Christmas, it’s the Attack of the Residential Zoning Variance Procedures. Crying over hangnails has become a point of pride on the religious right - and the less we take them seriously for it, the more injured they claim to be.

UPDATE: Apparently the county backed down, acknowledging that there is no clear line distinguishing private meetings from “religious assemblies” but that the latter category was intended more for actual church buildings, and agreeing to retract the zoning enforcement order and asking the pastor simply to find a way to ameliorate the parking issue. Predictably, the pastor and his lawyer continued to be assholes about it, refusing to make accommodations on parking and insisting that the county - which has issued hundreds of church permits and made no effort to enforce the zoning regulations on this one guy until complaints were received, as a result of a case in which one of his parishioners actually hit somebody’s car in the street - was merely making up the parking issue in an attempt to suppress religion. Another victory for the great and admirable contribution organized religion makes to our society.

* It’s not clear what the fees would be. The fee schedule is complicated, and there is little guidance as to what fees are required for specific projects. In this case, since they’re not doing construction, I would guess there would be a single fee for “Administrative Deviation” of $240, or “Minor Deviation” for $740. The “Standard Application” can be much higher, but it is obviously aimed at new construction projects. I will say the fees seem startlingly high.

The poll results from California’s special election are in, and not exactly unexpected, but still shocking.

My beloved home state, despite its liberal reputation, is actually two or three regions combined. The liberal counties are uniformly along the coastline (and even there you have exceptions like super-Republican Orange County, south of LA, and to some extent San Diego with its large military presence). East of the Pacific Coast Range are the desert farming communities of the central valley, and they are basically Oklahoma (in some cases, literally so - remember Grapes of Wrath?). Southern California along the coast is also different from northern CA, but they tend to vote similarly, except as noted. Because the coastal counties are more highly populated, the state tends to vote Democratic, but the vote tallies are closer than you’d think from just watching stories about LA and San Francisco in the media; when the state has one of its periodic spasms of reactionism, the results aren’t pretty. (Reagan, Nixon, Schwartzenegger, gay marriage . . . .)

The state’s unusual citizen-referendum process - whereby citizens can put issues up for direct vote by a relatively easy petition method - although originally intended as an anti-corruption measure, has proven to be a disaster. It is easily manipulated by well-funded business or activist groups, which gave the state the pointless gubernatorial recall election that put Schwartzenegger in power a few years ago, and also the gay-marriage debacle. (The state lottery also resulted from an initiative, written and funded by the Bally company, which makes lottery equipment and, under the terms of its own initiative, was the only company that could legally qualify for the state contract.) But the most destructive initiative was certainly the infamous “Proposition 13″ of 1978, which instigated a “taxpayers’ revolt” in numerous states: the initiative rolled back state property taxes (the main source of local public program funding) to an arbitrarily low figure and also imposed a requirement of a super-majority 60% vote for any future tax increases of any kind (thus also a 60% to approve the annual budget, which always includes adjustments to taxes). The result was the widespread decimation of public school funding and the virtual elimination of most other public programs, including pre-school, parks, libraries, and similar desiderata of a civilized society. As always, the measure was largely motivated by resentment among more-affluent property-holders at their taxes being used to provide services for the less-well-off, and who packaged their selfishness in disingenuous language.

Yesterday, the “Prop. 13 Revoution” reached its ultimate ideological peak.

Read the rest of this entry »

So there’s a lot of commentary, and no doubt there will be more, about the just-released Gallup poll showing that people self-identifying as “pro-life” outnumber those calling themselves “pro-choice”, for the first time on record, and by a considerable margin. No doubt the wingers will be beside themselves, given the moral significance they attach to slogans and labels. There are a few things to be said about this, however.

First off, it doesn’t matter who call themselves what - bodily autonomy is a fundamental part of women’s freedom and moral independence, and must be protected regardless of public opinion. Laws trampling women’s freedom are unjustified no matter how many people support them. To the extent that the political balance shifts - or is even seen to shift - the legislative practicalities of safeguarding women’s status as citizens and full moral persons becomes complicated, but that is only a measure of the misogyny of a political system that puts some citizens’ freedom at the hazard of other citizens’ whims and prejudices.

Second, it’s interesting to note that, while the supposed balance between self-identifying pro- and anti-choicers has shifted, the same poll of the very same respondents shows almost no change in opinion on the broad spectrum of options regarding the legality of abortion. (It does show that those holding the extreme anti-freedom position - no abortions ever for anyone - slightly outnumber those holding a full pro-freedom position - abortion legal under all circumstances - also for the first time, and that in general attitudes toward women’s freedom have harshened slightly across each category, but those shifts are only a few percentage points.) So, what has changed is the labels people apply to themselves, not so much what they actually think in practical terms.

Regarding that shift in labels, it strikes me as odd. Gallup is a reputable pollster, and this is a periodical survey they have been doing at intervals for some time. I would normally accept their findings, but this one is clearly anomalous. A shift from 50% pro-choice/44% anti-choice to a balance of 42/51 the other way is a relative shift of 16% in just one year (i.e., the pro-choice position went from up by 7% to down by 9%). It dwarfs the year-to-year shifts at any other point since at least 1995 (the range shown on their graph), and probably longer. That requires an explanation.

The situation becomes more intriguing when you note that, as Gallup discovered:

The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners. . . . [A]ll of the increase in pro-life sentiment is seen among self-identified conservatives and moderates; the abortion views of political liberals have not changed.

So: right-wingers have not greatly changed their views on abortion in practical terms, but have shifted considerably toward explicitly identifying themselves as anti-choice. Hmmm . . .

I’ll tentatively float two hypotheses:

First, this is part of the winger backlash. The same sort of thing that is driving gun nuts to stockpile firearms and ammunition so they’ll have something Obama can pry from their cold dead hands, and which is driving anti-government morons to protest the fact that Obama is giving them a tax cut, is also driving anti-sex misogynists to stake out seemingly more-extreme positions on women’s rights: they’re terrified that they’re about to lose the thing that defines them politically, and they are ratcheting up their rhetoric both out of fear and in order to remain relevant. With right-wing and religious groups in a panic over the Republicans’ loss of Congress and the White House, and responding with ever-more-extremist rhetoric on abortion, the public has become superficially polarized. (In a country where you can get thousands of low-tax advocates to join a protest against their own tax cut just by giving it an idiotic name,it’s not surprising you can get misogynists to call themselves “pro-life” if you scream it at them enough.)

Second, this is also part of long-standing winger hypocrisy on abortion. They want to be morally righteous hardliners, but they don’t want major changes in abortion rights because they also avail themselves of that service in considerable (for Catholics, greater than average) numbers. As with many other public policy issues, conservatives retain their far-right rhetoric while gradually accommodating themselves to modern reality. (Remember when “civil unions” was the progressive option for gay rights?*) Now, apparently, among the group that say they are anti-choice, more than half favor legal abortion “under certain circumstances”.

This is not to minimize the importance of these kinds of data, or of shifts, even if only nominal (in the literal sense), between the two broad categories of opinion on women’s freedom. It matters not only that women have a legal right to abortion, but also that it is not constantly under siege by disingenuous and insidious restrictions, and that women are supported in choosing and exercising the options that are right for them. Public opinion is important to all those issues. And this reported shift in opinion, even if it is more superficial than it seems, is evidence both of the continuing right-wing backlash and of the continuing negligible status of women and their moral and civil liberties. The “certain circumstances” the pro-choice misogynists deign to approve are likely only the most restrictive cases, and the ones they find politically untenable.

Continuing to engage the fight for women’s true freedom, and a reasonable understanding of moral personhood and the assignment of legal rights, is more vital than ever as the backlash grows. I remain optimistic in the long term - reality cannot be evaded forever - but this is not good news in the immediate term, there’s no question about that. Fundamentally, and especially given how thin the poll results are on practical issues, I think little has changed. Given where things stood already, though, that’s hardly reason to be satisfied.

* Obama certainly does!

NB: Crossposted to Sufficient Scruples, my bioethics blog.

We desperately need someone in the Obama administration to step up and do the right thing, because the President has allowed the Pentagon to cow him with their “supporting the troops” universal coverall cliche.

Obama has reversed his own decision to release some of the remaining Abu Ghraib torture photos. (Note that these are photos that were ordered released 4 years ago, photos of which Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said “we’re talking rape and murder”, Senator Ron Wyden said were “significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated. . . . Take the worst case and multiply it several times over”, and even Donald Rumsfeld said: ““I mean, I looked at them last night, and they’re hard to believe. [They show acts] that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane. If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”) The Pentagon is complaining that if people know how they behave, it will create a backlash against US troops - that it is actually unAmerican to tell the truth about US military’s moral and practical standards, because that would bring negative consequences, truth apparently being something the military and its behavior cannot withstand. It seems the only way to support the troops is to hide the facts about the things the troops do that no one will support.

The federal courts at every level have rejected this nonsense, and for a time it appeared that Obama was going to stand firm. Now he has caved. The real reason, of course, is that making the truth known and unmistakable will force Obama to hold at least some of the guilty accountable.

[O]ne congressional staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the photos, said the pictures are more graphic than those that have been made public from Abu Ghraib. “When they are released, there will be a major outcry for an investigation by a commission or some other vehicle,” the staff member said.

It is obvious that the truth will only be known if someone breaks the law.

It’s time for someone to break the law.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Muir is a right-wing cartoonist who is so achingly clueless that his strips are often completely incomprehensible. Add to that his transparently weird penchants for right-wing fantasy stereotype characters (hip black guys who hate Obama; women with ginormous melon-shaped boobs who are constantly laying around half-dressed spouting right-wing cliches), and his almost pathologically complete lack of qualities which are regarded as more or less prerequisites for normal cartoonists, including both a sense of humor and the ability to draw (his human characters commonly have disjointed or even missing body parts, and he has this weird habit of attaching word ballons to random locations). It’s a three-panel train wreck every day of the week. Naturally, the winger bloggers love him, largely, I think, because they don’t make any sense either but share the same fantasies. Lefty bloggers invented a parody game of re-writing his cartoons so they’ll make sense.

Even so, it must be Blind Pig Day in the right-wing oak lot, because this one’s funny:

And, yes, he still has the word balloons coming out of the wrong places. And the paranoia. And the boobs.

Yeah, OK, it’s fucked up. But marmot sex is funny.

Speeding the bandwagon of love that’s sweeping the nation, the New Hampshire legislature today voted to legalize gay marriage. The governor is being kind of dickish about it, but hopefully he’ll come around. As the linked story notes, this would be the fifth state in which marriage equality exists, three of them coming over in just the past month. (Who’ll be next?!)

It’s absolutely no accident that this occurred after the Democratic landslide, and that it is accelerating, as it seems to be. Obviously, bare numbers make a huge difference: in both Vermont and now New Hampshire, the two most-recent states to break for equality, the bills passed by one-vote margins in at least one house, and the Democrats were by far the bulk of the support (in New Hampshire, every Republican voted for marriage Jim Crow). Getting Democratic majorities into office, at the state and federal levels, is the indispensable key to equality and so many other improvements. (Can’t wait for Senator Franken to take his seat!) But there is more to the story, I think.

Legislators are learning that they can vote for equality and keep their seats. With Democratic majorities, they won’t be alone in doing so, and with the Democratic landslide and decisive repudiation of Republican scapegoating tactics, there is implicit support for the pro-equality position. (Obama’s cop-out in this regard is looking more shameful by the day, though it has to be remembered that a pro-”civil unions” position was the moral high ground just a few years ago. Few would have predicted things would be where they are today.) Every state that goes for equality proves that it can be done, without incident and without backlash. And with almost a full election cycle ahead and the Republicans circling the drain, now is a good time to do it, with the expectation that organized opposition in the next election is not going to hinge on this issue.

And, not only is it no accident that it was Democratic legislatures that did this, it was no accident that it was electorally secure judges, applying (state) Constitutional equality law, who preceded them. Having judges enforce the law created the “facts on the ground” that made it possible for legislators to see there was nothing to fear, and then screw up the courage to follow their lead. Once the first had done so, others followed, even against opposition (don’t forget the DC City Council voting to recognize gay marriages from the states - the same day that Vermont overrode it’s governor’s veto of the equality bill). Thus we see the value of both the judicial and legislative approaches to civil rights.

In short, though I’ve said this before and been proven partly wrong (California’s gay marriage debacle is still a painful wound), the handwriting is clearly on the wall for this issue, gay rights more broadly, and the general anti-bigotry trend overall. Even the California setback is not crippling - I think people are seeing that it was largely the product of massive out-of-state spending and false advertising that overwhelmed a fatally complacent local movement. That several states in quick succession would go for equality so soon after that outcome is only proof that the trend is unstoppable. (I suspect we’ll see California redeem itself soon.)

All the arguments and supposedly high-toned bigotry have been blasted away. Equality works and only makes things better. The shrieking panic of the religious wingers has no meaning and no force. Tens of thousands of data points refute their bizarre, paranoid fantasies, again and again each day, and the balance tips further and further. And this is due to the fact that some few states were courageous enough to go first and withstand the backlash and the assaults.

The broader lesson is that bigotry and anti-minority prejudice can be combatted, and that the strongest weapon they have is the fear they create that they can destroy those who dare to oppose them. Once the bigots are exposed as empty bullies, the fear recedes. To make it work, of course, it is necessary to deflate the bullies - vote the bigots and their parties out of office. But even then it requires resolution and daring to take the first steps toward liberty. I would like to think the legislators are selling their own constituents short in assuming they’ll be punished for championing minority groups, but I’m not sure that’s so. At any rate, they are learning they can do so now, and are doing so - a proud development for them and the citizens they represent.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo jumps on my bandwagon a full 6 hours late! I guess I’m one of the big bloggers now! Where’s my talk show contract?

UPDATE: Maine’s governor signed their state marriage equality bill! (5/6/2009) Maine beats New Hampshire to the title of 5th state (currently) with marriage equality. The governor had some good things to say about equality and non-discrimination, though he also had to be a jerk at the same time and implicitly encourage bigots to launch a state Constitutional amendment drive to reverse the law. But still, Maine ended discrimination and it’s almost undoubtedly going to stay that way!

The whackadoo gun community makes occasional efforts to appear non-crazy. But listening to gun nuts talk politics is like listening to “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” describe women’s breasts - you can tell (a) they’re faking, and (b) their experience with the issues is largely a product of their own weird fantasies. And I believe I’ve previously mentioned their (rather hilarious) penchant for savaging one another over trivial points of disagreement.

Now they’re after Rush Limbaugh. Seriously.

And what could they possibly find to object to in a raving, dishonest, far-right pro-gun blowhard? He likes animals.

Twenty-eight groups representing millions of hunters and sportsmen are demanding that the conservative radio commentator end his collaboration with the [Humane Society of the US] and stop “helping them to mainstream their image in the minds of reasonable people.”

Yes, the Humane Society - as seen through the nutternoculars - is far out on the fringes of society, desperately trying to win their way into the “mainstream” of “reasonable people”. Reasonable people who recognize that they have “a secret agenda to end all hunting in America”. That’s right - the Humane Society doesn’t really care about animals; that anti-cruelty stuff is all a plot to “mainstream their image”. They’re actually a secret political organization attempting to undermine America from within, using cute puppies. But reasonable people who happen to be whacky paranoids see through this deceptive ploy, and are mobilizing to put an end to it. They’re going to oppose opposition to cruelty to animals before that idea spreads too far and begins to infect mainstream society, which, apparently, currently favors cruelty to animals.

What, exactly, did Limbaugh do to get Ducks Unlimited on his ass? He made religiously-themed public-service commercials against animal cruelty and organized dogfighting.

Limbaugh does one decent thing and gets jumped by wingers whackier than himself. It’s just lucky you can laugh and cheer at the same time, or I’d be in a terrible bind. I wish they’d televise this - I’d make popcorn.

UPDATE: Added missing link to original article.