Category Archives: My (largely correct) political views

Chicken and hate

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I am not, repeat not, a biblical scholar.  In fact, my sum total of Bible-reading consists of (1) Christmas with the in-laws,* and (2) being stuck in a hotel room without a novel to read myself to sleep.  I do feel qualified to opine on fast food chicken, though, because I love junk food.  The best fast-food chicken is — objectively and indisputably — Popeye’s.  Why?  Grease and flavor.  Sure the Colonel’s chicken is good because it is thoroughly battered and bathed in grease.  But Popeye’s has that plus a tasty, spicy flavor that puts it over the top.  All this is to say that my total boycott of Chick-Fil-A** for their hate-based policies will  have precisely zero effect on their bottom line.

This woman, however, sounds like she could require an extra line on their next annual report.  Plus she knows her Bible.

The long and short of it– on 8/1 (the day Mike Huckabee wants Chick-Fil-A supporters to patronize the restaurant) go to Chick-Fil-A. Ask for a large water and nothing else. See if they adhere to Proverbs 25:21[***] and give it to you. If they do, yay! You took a few cents from their hate fund! If they don’t, well…I guess they’re proving their principals aren’t so “biblical.”

My favorite comment was:

The point is CHRISTIANS are ONLY under the NT not the OT! So her point was invalid on bringing up the OT when that law was abolished 2,000+ years ago.

So, I’m confused:  the Ten Commandments don’t apply to Christians?  That actually explains a lot, for example, the fact that the murder rate and the rate of both divorce and teen (presumably out-of-wedlock) birth is higher in more conservative states.  Scholars have attributed the latter to economic, historical, and other scholarly factors, but perhaps it’s simply that God repealed the Ten Commandments and the Blue States didn’t get the memo.

Balloon Juice also had this excellent photo:

Though again, for the record, KFC is only the second-best batter-dipped, grease-soaked chicken.  Popeye’s is the way to go.

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* Sorry, guys, but you knew I was a heathen**** when I started dating Tim.

** When I first saw a Chick-Fil-A sign sometime in the 80s or 90s, I seriously thought it was pronounced “chick filla” — rhymes with Godzilla — because I could not believe anyone would be so backward as to be unable to say or spell “filet.”

*** “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink”

**** OK, not total heathen.  I’ve summarized/made light of my own religious views elsewhere on the blog.

Headline: White Conservative Gadfly Goes to Jail; Dislikes Gravy

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That’s how the headline should have read in the center, front, above-the-fold article in today’s Denver Post.  I wish I were kidding.

Douglas Bruce went to jail for 104 days and faced cruel and unusual punishment:  the rolls were cold and the gravy tasted funny.  And he’s gonna sue.

I don’t know who to be more furious with:  Bruce for being a selfish jerk, or the Denver Post for devoting so much space on its front page to a middle class white guy who goes to jail for just over three months and fails to receive gourmet-level cooking.

Denver Post, Mr. Bruce, I’d like you to meet Troy Anderson.  Mr. Anderson has been in solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary for 12 years.  In those 12 years, he has not been allowed to exercise outdoors.

I’d have loved to introduce you to Shawn Vigil but, sorry to say, he’s dead.  He committed suicide at the Denver County Jail in 2005 — after being locked up for a month in solitary without a sign language interpreter.  You see, Mr. Vigil was deaf.  He was in solitary with no way to communicate with his jailers.  Wonder what he thought of the gravy?  Perhaps the Denver Post will write a front page story about that.

Actually, the Denver Post did write about Mr. Vigil’s case when we filed.  This many words.   Though I don’t have the print edition, I’m confident it wasn’t on page one.  Former Post columnist Susan Greene* also wrote about it in more detail, but of course she’s not there any more.  Can’t have someone providing nuanced coverage of marginalized people.

Back in the day, Spy Magazine had an equation for how many column inches a story would get in the New York Times based primarily on the number of people killed and the distance of the event from Times Square.**  Although I’m not a math major, there has to be some sort of equation at work here:  R x C x L x G where R = race, C = class, L = length of sentence, and G = quality of gravy.  In the newspaper world, being white (r = 100) and middle class (c=100) will completely outweigh the length of your sentence and other conditions.

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* Full disclosure:  Susie is a friend.  And also a kick-ass journalist.  The lack of her voice (and other recent departures) in the Post makes it not much more than People Magazine:  Denver Edition.

** Yes, of course it’s on the internet:  the November 1989 issue of Spy Magazine.    The equation is on page 56.  Check out page 55 for proof that Donald Trump has been annoying us for a long, long time.  And generally peruse the issue to take yourself back to a time when being a smart-ass, sarcastic, irony-appreciating young law grad felt fresh and new.  Or maybe that was just me.

[June 2:  Edited for accuracy.]

“Fail.” You keep using that word . . .

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Since my brother and I appear to be communicating by blog these days (::waving::  Hi, Bruce!), I’d like to respond to this post* by paraphrasing my second favorite movie line:**  “‘Fail.’  You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Republicans are fond of saying that Obama is a failed president, that his policies have failed, and that there’s just a whole lot of fail going on.  The only possible definition they could have in mind for the word “fail” is “not doing what Republicans would like a president to do.”  Because by any reasonable, apolitical, measure Obama is a resounding success.  I’d really like to know how the definition of “fail” accounts for:

  1. Killing bin Laden.
  2. Saving the US auto industry.
  3. Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” ending defense of DOMA in court, and supporting marriage equality.
  4. Supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi.
  5. Signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
  6. Getting us out of an expensive and destructive war we should never have started.
  7. Appointing two righteous women to the Supreme Court.
  8. Passing Obamacare.
  9. Passing the Stimulus.
  10. Passing Wall Street Reform — not enough, but it’s better than nothing.

This is just sort of Amy’s top ten; there are a number of websites devoted to listing the President’s accomplishments, including

There are, in fact, several very business-oriented metrics that suggest President Obama is a success.  For example, the Dow was at about 8,000 when Bush left office; it closed at 12,820 on Friday.  (This continues the general trend that the Dow likes Democratic presidents much more than Republicans.) And Corporate profits are way up under Obama.   So, um, “socialist” doesn’t mean what they think it means either.

I think that leaves for the definition of “failed” when used as an adjective in the Republican mantra “failed president” such things as

  • Failing to cut taxes for millionaires.
  • Failing to appoint Federalist Society members to the Supreme Court.
  • Failing to leave the health of our citizens to the mercies of the perverse incentives of the insurance industry.
  • Failing to continue the war in Iraq.
  • Failing to not be concerned about bin Laden.

Ultimately, it is perfectly reasonable for Republicans like my brother to disagree with Obama.  But calling his administration “failed” seems like a weirdly transparent but ultimately content-free branding campaign.

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* The upshot of Bruce’s post is that all teen-age boys do cruel things, so we should not judge Mitt Romney by his decision to assault a classmate to cut off his hair or physically trick a blind teacher into walking into a door.   I don’t think any of my brother’s escapades (he takes the fifth but I’m aware of at least some small percentage of them) rise to the level of cruelty the Washington Post article describes of Romney.  But if in fact all boys do these things, perhaps it’s time to elect a girl to the presidency.

** My favorite is “Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna.  Never will.”  Don’t ask me why.  I have actually used this quote on opposing counsel, though not to his face.  We have an opposing counsel who has, on his voice mail, a pompous quote-of-the-day, which you have to listen to, all the way through, before leaving him a voicemail.  It’s generally something from Gandhi, or the Buddha, or a Hallmark card, and it’s often very long, with no option to push # and just skip it.  After several years of superhuman effort exerted toward not saying, “Dude, you are working your ass off to deny the civil rights of people with disabilities; stop it with the quotes, already,” I finally left him two quotes of my own.  The first was this one; the second was “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.”   No reaction to either one from him, but I cracked myself up!

Romney’s disability bullying

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Anyone who has made his or her way to this backwater in the blogosphere must have seen the Washington Post article on Mitt Romney’s history of cruelty and bullying at his prep school.  The event that has gotten the most attention is Romney’s bullying of a nonconformist classmate — a kid with dyed blond hair — that had overtones of gay bashing and homophobia.  But what about this incident:

One venerable English teacher, Carl G. Wonn­berger, nicknamed “the Bat” for his diminished eyesight, was known to walk into the trophy case and apologize, step into wastepaper baskets and stare blindly as students slipped out the back of the room to smoke by the open windows. Once, several students remembered the time pranksters propped up the back axle of Wonnberger’s Volkswagen Beetle with two-by-fours and watched, laughing from the windows, as the unwitting teacher slammed the gas pedal with his wheels spinning in the air.

As an underclassman, Romney accompanied Wonnberger and Pierce Getsinger, another student, from the second floor of the main academic building to the library to retrieve a book the two boys needed. According to Getsinger, Romney opened a first set of doors for Wonnberger, but then at the next set, with other students around, he swept his hand forward, bidding the teacher into a closed door. Wonnberger walked right into it and Getsinger said Romney giggled hysterically as the teacher shrugged it off as another of life’s indignities.

How does this speak to Romney’s views on people with disabilities?   There are many measures of how far the Republican party has sunk — from William F. Buckley to Sarah Palin, say — but in my neck of the woods, it couldn’t be sharper than the contrast between the man who signed the ADA and someone with so little respect for people with disabilities that he would humiliate his own blind teacher.

Would any of us be elected if judged by our adolescences?  Perhaps not, though mostly due to lingering squeamishness with recreational drug and alcohol use.  I cannot think of any friends or classmates who did anything close to the cruelty of assaulting a fellow student to cut his hair simply because he was different or physically ridiculing a disabled teacher.

Two other things strike me.  First of all, of course, the homophobic bullying has received far more attention than the disabiliphobic bullying.  Part of that has to do with the fact that the article was published within a day of both North Carolina’s shameful vote enshrining marriage discrimination in its constitution and President Obama’s declaration of his support for marriage equality.  But I’m concerned that that casual tone of the quote above indicates a greater societal acceptance of disability-related “pranks” than homophobic “bullying.”

I’m also struck by just how uncivilized Romney’s behavior was.  And not just once, but apparently over and over.   We Democrats are supposed to be the party of the uncouth, unwashed hippies, and the GOP the party of Brooks Brothers, using the proper wine glass, and not wearing white after Labor Day.  But the behavior described in this article is deeply uncivilized, and the fact that it was laughed off at an elite prep school speaks volumes.

How on earth could we trust this man to run our country?

Thank you, President Obama & a re-run

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Thank you for supporting marriage equality!  Keep moving us forward.   If you agree that this was an important step forward and that politicians, like puppies, should be rewarded for good behavior, throw some money toward keeping us moving forward.

And in honor of this step forward in civil rights, in response to the benighted state of North Carolina, and in recognition of the fact that I’ve been in trial prep and trial for the last month or so and have not had the time to come up with a new post, I’m rerunning a post from July 2010:

If we’re going to defend hetero marriage, let’s do it right. 

Folks opposed to marriage equality argue that if gays and lesbians are permitted that state-sanctioned status, it will have the effect of destroying heterosexual marriages.  In response, they promote legislation ostensibly designed to protect this venerable institution.  Most liberals campaign against these measures, on the grounds that they are unfair (what part of “equal protection of the laws” is unclear?) and irrational (straights have done a pretty good job of marriage destruction all on their own).

My view is:  if we’re going to use the legislative process to protect heterosexual marriages, let’s pass laws that might actually reduce stress and promote harmony in those marriages.  These measures would “save” those marriages in the sense that the people in them would remain happy with one another and therefore married, rather than in the way that opponents of gay marriage think it works:  that we’ll only stay together if we can smugly monopolize the legal label for our relationships.

Warning:  what follows traffics in the basest of gender stereotypes, derived directly from my own 16-year experience with heterosexual marriage.

The Bathroom Separation Act.  Men and women were not meant to share bathrooms.  The vast genetic differences in cleanliness perception and many practical differences in paraphernalia make sharing facilities a source of stress in 55% of heterosexual marriages.*  Under this proposed legislation, all new homes will be required to have two completely separate bathrooms adjacent to the master bedroom and money will be allocated from the federal budget to retrofit houses of married heteros with one extra master bath.

The Laundry Technology Act.  All new washers and dryers will be equipped with control panels of equal or greater complexity to a sound system of comparable price.  In addition, federal regulations will require garment labels to include one of the following two statements, as appropriate:  “This Goes In the Light Wash,” or “This Goes In the Dark Wash.”  At least 43%* of the bickering in hetero marriages concerns lack of laundry participation by one of the two genders commonly found in those unions.  This measure will not only promote increased participation, but will ensure that the result is not uniformly pink.

Music Parity Regulations.  FCC regulations will require at least one station in each broadcast area to play folk rock and heavy metal tunes on a strictly alternating basis.  Imagine the heterosexual marriages — not to mention lives — saved by not having driver and passenger switching constantly among stations in search of (to take a completely random example) Boston or The Indigo Girls.

Quality Motion Picture Act.  At least five movies each year will be required to have both exciting action sequences (car chases; explosions; zombies) and a plot with believable, grown-up dialog and characters.  Hetero marriages will flourish when husbands and wives not only attend but enjoy the same movies.

Full Funding for Public Education, Universal Health Care and Assisted Living Act.  Approximately 95%* of the fights in heterosexual marriages concern the kids’ schools, the doctor’s bills, and how to care for the in-laws without having them actually move in.  The FFPEUHCALA will ensure high quality public education, availability of heath care without forgoing food and heat, and a comfortable, safe old age for your in-laws** somewhere other than your home.  This legislation will avoid at least 3.2 million* heterosexual divorces each year.  In addition, just imagine all the quality time hetero couples will have in lieu of the hundreds of hours they now spend filling out insurance forms, fighting with insurance companies, filling out more forms, waiting on hold to insurance companies, and figuring out how to pay for things they already bought insurance to pay for.

Let’s see if those anti-marriage-equality folks really want to protect hetero marriage — let’s see if they’ll support all this crucial legislation.

* All statistics in this post are invented out of whole cloth.  They sure sound about right, though, don’t they?

** Love ya, Denver & Nora!

Yes, we have a voting problem, Part Deux

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Just last month I was being cynical about Republican efforts to prevent voting fraud by making sure that students and poor people don’t vote.  But thank goodness the Republicans are on the ball, so we could catch poor student Charlie White and punish him for his voting transgressions.

Oh.  Wait.

Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges

Do you love that his name is Charlie White as much as I do?   And it’s really a Republican hypocrisy two-fer, because it turned out that his vote fraud, er, “confusion” was, well, I’ll let IndyStar.com break it to you gently:

The charges stemmed from confusion over where White lived when he campaigned for secretary of state in late 2009 and 2010. White claimed that he lived at his ex-wife’s home on the east side of Fishers. But the jury convicted him based on allegations that he actually lived in a townhouse on the opposite side of town that he bought for him and his then-fiancé. The townhouse was outside his Fishers Town Council district.

Note that it’s “confusion” when a conservative politician bails on his wife, shacks up with his fiancé, and fails to notify the secretary of state so he can stay on the city council of the city in which he no longer lives, but potential “fraud” when an 84-year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1948 doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in 1927.

Why are some atheists such a**holes?

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From a billboard in Boulder:

Billboard with text "God is an Imaginary Friend. Choose Reality. It will be better for all of us. Colorado Coalition of Reason."

Right, because making fun of other people’s beliefs has done so much — throughout history — to promote peace and understanding.

How about “Choose Mutual Respect:  It Will Be Better for All of Us.”

It shouldn’t be about choice; it should be about respect.

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Cynthia Nixon has spurred an interesting dialog by embracing the concept that being gay or lesbian can be a choice.  In the civil rights world,the it’s-not-a-choice-it’s-an-inborn-trait position is an attempt to connect being gay with other protected classes defined by immutable characteristics, such as race, gender, and disability.   It’s also embraced as a counter to the common homophobic position* that if you can choose to love people of your own gender, you can equally easily — like choosing a different flavor of ice cream — choose to love people of the other gender.   Or perhaps choose to live a celibate life.

But Nixon makes I think the precise right point:

I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. . . .  It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.

It has always seemed bizarre to me that religious folks stress that this protected class — gays and lesbians — is based on choice, when the most mutable, chosen-not-born protected class is religion.  You don’t choose your race, disability, or national origin, and most people don’t choose their gender.  But if you can choose to be Christian, you can just as easily choose to be Jewish or Muslim, right?  Why on earth should we protect Christians against all that discrimination** they face when they could simply elect to be Jewish or Muslim and get away scot-free?***

Seriously, we shouldn’t be discussing choice vs. innate; we should be discussing respect.   And in the discrimination context, relevance.  What on earth relevance does it have to someone’s ability to do their job who they sleep with?  What faith they practice?  Their gender?  Their race?

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* Did you know there is something called Conservapedia?  Me neither.  It’s precisely as informative as the name suggests.  For example, this is the only substantive information it provides on the ADA:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a broad federal law that requires places of public accommodation to comply with numerous regulations relating to access by persons having disabilities. The Act encourages lawsuits against restaurants, schools, retail stores, hospitals and other small businesses by providing for the recovery of attorneys fees by successful plaintiffs.

Go forth and be informed, young conservatives with homework projects!

** Clearly Conservapedia is going to be my go-to source for links to straw-man conservative arguments.  They make it so easy!

*** Can I say that?  Does that discriminate against Scottish people?  Or is it OK because I’m a Jewish-Scottish-American?

Yes, we have a voting problem.

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Republicans spend a lot of time these days trying to protect the vote against nonexistent threats and potential non-Republican voters, like students and poor people.  But if you gave Michael Moore psychedelic drugs he couldn’t have parodied the GOP’s voting problems better than they have on their own.

For example, you thought Romney won Iowa, right? At least that’s what Fox News announced the next day.

Hold on!

The certified numbers: 29,839 for Santorum and 29,805 for Romney.

Oh, then Santorum won by 34 votes, right?   Um . . .

THE RESULTS: Santorum finished ahead by 34 votes
MISSING DATA: 8 precincts’ numbers will never be certified
PARTY VERDICT: GOP official says, ‘It’s a split decision’

Except the 8 precincts’ votes that the GOP regards as “missing” are online for non-Republicans with ordinary math skills to analyze.

If those results are added to the certified results, Santorum’s 29,839 votes would become 29,920, and Romney’ 29,805 would become 29,851 — for a “final” result of Santorum winning the caucuses, by a margin of 69 votes.

And then there’s the very democratic process by which a bunch of evangelicals got together and decided to endorse Santorum.

It was not until the third ballot, after some of Gingrich’s supporters left, that Santorum cleared the three-quarters threshold, receiving 85 votes, to Gingrich’s 29.   . . . [A]ll the participants had been bound by an agreement not to speak for 24 hours.  . . . “It wasn’t a consensus and it wasn’t an endorsement,” added former representative J.C. Watts (R-Okla.), who was also at the session and also expressed concern at how the outcome was being portrayed.

And these guys are asking us to trust them to run the country?

Profiling Muslims at airport security is stupid and unAmerican

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For the past few days, I’ve been a bystander in a ridiculous email discussion about airport security and decided that, once I’d spent the entire drive up University Boulevard from County Line to Evans composing a rant in my head, that rant needed to be freed from my head and posted on the blog.

Airport security is a pain in the ass.  But that’s all it is.  Buck up, folks.  I always choose the pat-down because the nude photo thingy creeps me out.  It’s not fun, but it’s not, say, dental surgery.  Hell, it’s not even flossing.  Yup, I’d rather go through airport security than floss.  Life is full of annoying things.  Get over it.

And the thought that — to avoid this mild pain in the ass — we would sacrifice core American values is just beyond me.  I am constantly baffled by what it is conservatives love when they say they love America. It was the question addressed at fabulous verbose length by this guy.

What I really wanted to ask is this: Proud American? Really? What is it exactly that you’re proud of?  You say you love your country? You say you love the United States? Really? Which part? What is it that you love about it? Specifically, what exactly do you love about America?

Because, see, so far as I can tell, people like you seem to hate just about everything that makes the United States what it is.

And so on for like 45 paragraphs or so.  It really is hilarious, but I recommend skimming.

I’ll tell you what I love:  I love the Constitution.  I love the 14th Amendment, the one that promises equal protection of the laws.  Do we really want to violate one of the most fundamental American principles to save 15 minutes at the airport?  Really?

Oh and another thing:  it doesn’t work.  If we start profiling, we would be sacrificing our values for nothing.

[P]rofiling creates two paths through security: one with less scrutiny and one with more. And once you do that, you invite the terrorists to take the path with less scrutiny. That is, a terrorist group can safely probe any profiling system and figure out how to beat the profile. And once they do, they’re going to get through airport security with the minimum level of screening every time.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we’re all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn’t needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we’re going to be more secure against terrorism.

But more than that, how would it work?  As another security expert noted,

But what do we go by? Name? Appearance? The vast majority of Arab Americans, for instance, are not only innocent of sympathy for terrorism, they’re actually Christian. To profile Muslims you’d have to target blacks, Asians, whites and Hispanics (remember Jose Padilla?). How could that work, and would it really help identify those who are intending harm or would it simply divert resources that could be better used on investigations?

So we set out to profile Muslims, but we can’t use name or appearance. What then?  Seriously, profiling advocates, if you want to target Muslims, you have to figure out a way to do it.  Religious identity cards?  A quick religious catechism with the TSA dudes?  I’m loving the idea of small-government conservatives authorizing the Federales to investigate individual religious beliefs to determine whether you get groped in the security line.

But ultimately, of course, it’s not just Muslims who commit terrorism:

The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11—the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing—was carried out by a white ex-Marine with a crew cut. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era—the 2001 anthrax mailings—was apparently the handiwork of a white, Christian microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. And who stormed the Holocaust Museum last year, killing a security guard? Ayman-al Zawahiri? No, neo-Nazi octogenarian nutcase James Wenneker von Brunn.

I have to wait in line to take off my shoes, start up my computer, and step through a metal detector every time I go to court because Christians like to shoot at, blow up, and threaten federal buildings and officials.  That’s right, Christians.  Oh, right, of course, not Christians like you.  Bad Christians.  Maybe people calling themselves Christians who do not remotely have the values you would call Christian.

Exactly my point.