Keep It Classy, Nashville

Today, corner of Gale Lane and Granny White Pike:




I still don't get the message here. Obama's a Socialist? So where does the Joker fit in? Or Heath Ledger as the Joker? Can anyone explain this?

It’s Official: You Can’t Pray Away The Gay

At dinner Tuesday night the guy at the next table was speaking extremely loud, the kind of loud that you can’t help but overhear, much as you wish you could. And I really wished I could, because what he was saying was standard-issue evangelical Christianese.

Yuck. Reminded me of the time my mother and I went to Tony Roma’s and the couple at the next table waxed enthusiastically through the entire meal about how great God is to have created such awesome barbecue.

Anyway, such things wouldn’t be noteworthy here in the buckle of the Bible belt except Tuesday’s dinner yakker set off my gaydar big time. In fact, the disparity between the evangelical religious-speak and the clanging gaydar made it difficult for me to concentrate on my food, which I needed to do because we were using chopsticks, which I’ve never mastered. I just wanted to go over and ask the guy if he was aware he was gay and I hoped his church was okay with that, because if they weren’t, there are plenty of churches in Nashville that are.

Now of course I don’t know this person or what kind of church they are part of, so it’s very possible they’ve found a welcoming and affirming congregation, though there are precious few of those of the evangelical flavor.

But it’s really sad that so many religious folks have this completely messed up attitude toward gays and lesbians, even promoting these totally abusive “therapy” programs that the APA has now officially concluded don’t work:

There is no evidence to support the claims of some practitioners that sexual orientation can be changed through therapy, a special committee of the American Psychological Assn. reported today. Mental health professionals should not tell patients that they can change their sexual orientation and instead should help them "explore possible life paths that address the reality of their sexual orientation," according to the report, which was released at a Toronto meeting of the association and online.

I wonder if the American Family Assn.’s Charlie Butts will be all over this story like he was the APA’s statement on the "gay gene" that he misconstrued and redacted to say what he wanted it to. That lie ricocheted around the right wing media, including WingNut Daily.

It seems to me it’s better for everyone all around if we just accept people for who they are and be done with it, and avoid such tragic experiences as the ones "ex-gay therapy" survivor Patrick McAlvey relates here:

Bush's Cash For Clunkers

Bush had a Cash For Clunkers program, too:

Here is the Cash for Clunkers program that was in place during the Bush Administration. The bonus depreciation provisions put in place after 9/11 provided a 50% immediate tax deduction for the purchase of Large SUV’s. So when my boss purchased a $100,000 Range Rover he wrote off $50,000 on his taxes. Assuming a 35% federal tax bracket – this resulted in an immediate tax refund of $17,500 on the purchase of the Range Rover (even though the down payment may have been $10,000). $17,500 cash for the purchase of a 12 mpg Range Rover.

OMG. That looks suspiciously like a tax break to the wealthiest Americans to encourage them to slurp more gas to profit the world’s wealthiest corporations--ExxonMobil, for instance.

I guess you'd call that "cash for wealthy energy sucking, polluting, global warming enducing Republicans." Now those are some real clunkers.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Epic Fail, Birther Style

Oh goodie. Now you, too, can have your own Kenyan birth certificate thanks to the handy-dandy Republic of Kenya birth certificate generator.

You kids on the intertubes. You crack me up!
-------------------------------
Birthers get pwned:

DINA ROSENDORFF: It's believed computer hackers found Mr Bomford's birth certificate on his family's genealogy website. 

They used it as the basis for a forgery in an attempt to prove President Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii.

Only people born in the USA can be president.

The fake Kenyan birth document has been circulated by political opponents of Obama's, called the Birthers, who are out to unseat him.


[...]

DINA ROSENDORFF: Looking over the documents in question Mr Bomford still can't quite believe his eyes. 


DAVID JEFFREY BOMFORD: It's little old me and my mum and everything else up there. Oh I definitely confirm that the birth certificate was mine. That was quite easy to see - my address, even the style of the birth certificate was an old South Australian one. 

So it's quite easy to identify that it's mine. 



DINA ROSENDORFF: And looking at the fake Kenyan birth certificate what do you make of it? 


DAVID JEFFREY BOMFORD: It's definitely a copy of my certificate. It's so laughable it's ridiculous.

So the Kenyan birth certificate was a forgery, the third (I think?) of these things the birthers have trotted out. And that’s that. In other news, the sun rose in the east today.

But while David Jeffrey Bomford might understandably be freaked out to find himself involved in a conspiracy theory concerning the American president, it’s really not all that ridiculous. Conspiracy theories have been out there since forever. What is ridiculous is the reaction of the media.

We can point fingers and laugh all we want at a right-wing partisan outfit like WingNut Daily claiming it had a “journalistic responsibility” to post the faked birth certificate. Dave Weigel writes:

WND has a deeply amusing idea of what “journalism” is supposed to be.

Indeed. But what’s CNN's and MSNBC’s excuse? David Shuster and Tamron Hall did this shameful excuse for an interview with Orly Taitz last week. My liberal friends have been cheering at the “meltdown” Shuster provoked but really it just made me sad. I refuse to cheer when a legitimate cable news outlet like MSNBC lowers itself to WorldNet Daily standards.

This morning I posted a short YouTube video from a nut job who claims George Soros is backing liberal bloggers who are out to destroy America. Is David Shuster going to interview that guy about his theory?

The whole thing just depresses me.

You're All Gonna Die

At the hands of liberal bloggers, no less. Liberal bloggers with funny, "foreign" sounding names. Muslim-y names. I'd laugh at this video, except it doesn't take much to push some right wing nutters over the edge.

Yes, You're Viral

This parody of those lame "Mouthpiece Theater" videos the Washington Post's Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza do was just priceless. I mean, trenchant. H/T to Aunt B.

This Is The Republican’s Idea Of Failure?

Honestly, I’m not getting the argument over “Cash for Clunkers.” Conservatives are calling it a failure because it ran out of money right away but doesn’t that mean it was a success? Wouldn’t it be a failure if no one participated?

Instead, it seems to have done what it was intended to do:

Cash for Clunkers lifts auto sales

Ford ended 19 straight months of sales declines with a 2% increase in July. Other automakers also got a much-needed boost from government trade-in program.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Most major automakers reported better-than-expected sales in July thanks to a boost in demand sparked by the government's Cash for Clunkers trade-in program.

Ford Motor Co. said Monday that sales rose 2% compared to a year earlier. This was the first increase from any U.S.-based automaker since November 2007. Sales tracker Edmunds.com was expecting a 4% decline in sales for Ford (F, Fortune 500).

General Motors, Toyota Motor (TM) Chrysler Group, Honda Motor (HMC) and Nissan (NSANY) all reported drops in sales compared to a year ago, but sales rose sharply from June. That allowed industrywide sales to reach nearly 1 million vehicles in July.

Even though that was down 12% from a year ago, it was the best sales total since last August, right before the crisis in the financial markets caused a credit crunch and a jump in job losses.

All the companies said they were helped by the popular Cash for Clunkers program, which gives car buyers up to $4,500 for trading in older, gas-guzzling vehicles if they're buying more fuel efficient cars.

So, this is a failure?

I’m seeing all sorts of ads on TV from car dealerships advertising the program, recyclers who deal with the “clunker” part of the program are benefiting, we’re getting polluting gas guzzlers off the road, and this is a failure?

It’s even helping steel manufacturers:

But the steelmaker now says shipments to the auto industry could be up 40 percent in the second half of the year. And Alcoa, which sells aluminum to carmakers, expects to see an increase in sales, too.

but this is a failure?

C’mon. I mean fine, I get it if you don’t think government money should be used for a program like this, but at least have the honesty to say that you have philosophical differences. Don’t call it a failure. The program is a huge success; you can argue whether it’s a good idea to begin with but don’t start that alternate reality shit with me because that just pisses me off.

But no, they’re saying it proves the government can’t run healthcare and let’s have cash for everything. That’s just stupid. For one thing, the government is not going to run healthcare. That’s a ludicrous distortion of the public option that Democrats want in the final healthcare bill. And as for why not have cash for everything, the point of Cash for Clunkers was also to get inefficient, polluting cars off the road, not just stimulate sales.

Republicans know this of course, but they can’t pass up an opportunity to score a political point. This one, though, is incredibly lame. I wonder how well that message resonates with the folks participating in the program?

I’ve got my own concerns about Cash For Clunkers. Our economy has been built on buying too much extraneous stuff, and Cash for Clunkers seems to encourage these materialistic inclinations. Of course, I’m as materialistic as the next person, so I recognize the futility of that argument. It would be nice if our economic barometers were job-based, not consumption based, but that’s not how we determine the health of the economy.

Mostly I worry if it’s expanded, where will the money come from? (Because unlike George W. Bush who never budgeted his wars, Democrats like to pay for things.)

I agree with this FastCompany writer that it shouldn’t be at the expense of renewable energy loans. The long term benefits of a steady transition to renewable energy will reap important rewards far into the future.

Cash For Clunkers was intended to be a temporary program and it needs to remain a temporary program. But while the economy is steadily growing stronger, we are not out of the woods yet. So since it was supposed to last three months, I say we fund it for three months.

And let the Republicans make fools of themselves complaining how a successful government program proves that the government can’t run anything.

“Clean Coal” Lobby Hired Bonner & Associates

Well, knock me over with a feather! It seems that it was none other than the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) who hired the lying lobby firm Bonner & Associates. And they are shocked, SHOCKED to find lies and astroturfing going on, such as faked constituent letters, to defeat the cap and trade legislation.

Yeah. Okie dokie.

Our Media Is Failing Us, Chpt. 1,047

Via Frank Rich comes an astonishingly frank admission from MSNBC’s political/financial reporter Dylan Ratigan. It explains how, in the middle of a national debate on healthcare reform, we were presented an opportunity to have a national conversation about race, and instead got distracted by a conversation over which brand of beer is sufficiently manly for the POTUS to quaff:

“Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor.

This of course will surprise absolutely no one. But I’d like to ask our American news media to consider how it helps them in the long run to continue dumbing down the national discourse.

Here’s another example. Over the weekend the birthers claim to have obtained Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. This is like the third one of these things that has popped up and, like the rest, it appears to be a forgery (read the debunking here.) I’d like to remind our news media that one of the chief “birther” mouthpieces is Jerome Corsi, the man behind such smears as “Unfit For Command” and conspiracy theories about a plan to use NAFTA to merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico. This is crazy stuff, way-out-there stuff, yet Corsi continues to be treated as if he has some legitimate points--not just by Fox News, which books Corsi as a guest with regularity, but by the New York Times:

In an October 7 article on author Jerome Corsi's detention in Kenya that day, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman wrote that Corsi's recent book smearing Sen. Barack Obama, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, "raises pointed questions about Mr. Obama's history of drug use, his 'extensive connections' to Islam and his relationships with Kenyan politicians, among other things -- allegations that Mr. Obama's campaign and others have widely disputed." However, the Times did not point out that The Obama Nation in fact contains numerous proven falsehoods -- not simply "widely disputed" allegations -- as Media Matters for America has documented and as the Times itself has noted.

You know, the left has its share of far-out there folks, too. Seems like during the Bush years, six months out from every election day I’d hear that Bush was going to declare martial law and cancel the election.

You know, I don’t remember any of those people being quoted in the New York Times or getting booked on MSNBC. Just sayin’.

And thank God, too. We don't need more of this wackadoodle crap getting on the news. There's enough of it as it is.

I also don’t remember people on the left who had fact-based concerns about the real estate bubble, our fragile banking system, or Iraq’s lack of WMD’s getting any airtime, either. Again, just sayin’. It seems even reality-based concerns from the left are ignored by our media, whereas the craziest hairball the right wing can cough up is deemed newsworthy.

This is how the media fails us. Someone needs to be the grown-up and be able to distinguish between crazy-assed conspiracy theories and real issues that we need to be concerned about. If Jerome Corsi and Orly Taitz want to peddle their crazy theories on talk radio and at Amazon, that's great. But I see no reason why our mainstream media needs to pretend their views are credible or worth our attention. Do they air every crackpot theory about asteroids destroying the earth or the latest news about when the Rapture will occur? Of course not. Maybe that's just not good for ratings.

Do you want another example? Okay here’s one: on Sunday, George Stephanopoulos hosted Michelle Malkin as a panelist on ABC’s This Week where she promptly made a fool of herself railing against government cheese.

Really, George? The nutcase who promoted the Iraq surge with pompons and a cheerleading outfit, who supports the Japanese internment camps of World War II, who flogs ACORN conspiracy theories and trashed the homeless for having cell phones? The same idiot who stalked the home of Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old boy who gave the Democratic radio address in 2007 when expanding SCHIP was on the table?

This is who you consider a credible source of information to discuss things like healthcare? Not a partisan hack? But I bet it was good for ratings, eh ABC? Feh.

It seems the American media needs to get its own head out of the trash. The people of this country are not mushrooms, you cannot keep us in the dark and feed us shit to boost your ratings before those chickens eventually come home to roost. An uneducated, disengaged public does not serve the news media’s long term interests and it does not serve the country’s long term interests.

I say to anyone who can hear: stop hurting America. You are only hurting yourselves.

Ordinary Miracles

Things have been very busy around here, so it’s nice to have some time to reflect on the ordinary miracles of the past week.

First off is this piece of history we uncovered during the demo of our kitchen. Behind the drywall we found this:


I love tearing apart an old house (if 1947 can be considered old) and coming across fun things like this border! A previous owner just put drywall over it, and I’m glad he did because uncovering it was a fun surprise. I try to imagine the woman who wanted this on her kitchen wall (we are not gingham-and-geese types) and am reminded that she cooked her family dinners in very same room where Mr. Beale and I do our cooking now. I think of how she worried over a roast getting too dry, how she yelled at her kids to “close the fridge door!” or pulled out the good china for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a neat connection to someone I’ll never know, but with whom I share something very personal.

The other ordinary miracle is my garden, which flourishes in the cool, wet summer we’re experiencing in Nashville this year. This is the first time I’ve planted tomatoes and peppers. It always amazes me that one can just add water and get ... food!