Thursday, February 17, 2005

Some of us think it’s a choice

At least this one of us does:

Yep. I said, “choose.” And yes. I think that our sexual orientation is a choice...I am thrilled to have chosen lesbianhood. I consider myself a gay activist. I feel like I am privileged to be gay. But gay men and lesbians still get upset when I start talking about choice, and I believe it’s because they think I’m saying that everyone is straight and some people choose to be gay. Not at all. I think everyone is bisexual, and people choose to be gay or straight.

She essentially confines her examples to women, even as she applies it to both genders. I’m inclined to agree with those who imply sexuality is more fluid among women than men, and that for more and more of us it is a choice. But I promise you, for this one of us, there was no choice.

Yea Maureen Dowd!

Read the whole column. She was rejected for a press pass:

I’m still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the “Barberini Faun” [A TRIFECTA!] is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I’d been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986 [SINCE ‘86!] no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he’d renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months. [BACKGROUND CHECKS TAKE MONTHS!]

Was “Jeff Gannon” cleared by the same people who cleared Bernard Kerik?

I know the F.B.I. computers don’t work, but this is ridiculous. After getting gobsmacked by the louche sagas of Mr. Guckert and Bernard Kerik, the White House vetters should consider adding someone with some blogging experience.

Just a suggestion.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was not a fan of her years as a Clinton-basher.

Sidebars, blogrolls & why I blog

This site is a work in progress; I’m pleased with the progress. Most recently I’ve been working on sidebars. On the left is my ”Blogroll," powered by Blogrolling. It could use some arranging and sorting, but each and every one of them is a blog I’ve enjoyed. I urge you to visit all of them. On the right, sites I visit regularly, people who have influenced me, organizations I respect, or things I’ve found interesting. One day soon I’ll add advertising; on both sides.

A section I’m particularly pleased with is “On Blogging” over on the lower right (and detailed below). There you’ll find a collection of links to resources that have helped me build this blog, and inform how I conceive this blog. I recommend them to anyone who wants to put together a blog of their own.

I look at my blog as a garden; the sidebars are two flower beds. Now that they are seeded, I must tend to them, cultivate them and prune them from time to time to ensure that they will bloom, blossom and grow. Thank you Basil of Basil’s Blog for working out my alignment issue; and Harry of Kudzu Files for solving my blogrolling problem.

I’ve also added a post here on why I blog. It’s lifted unedited from my old blog where it was originally posted when I first started blogging on December 7, 2004. If you’re interested, check it out.

Read the rest of "Sidebars, blogrolls & why I blog" in the extended entry.

Yea Frank Rich!

Read the whole column. He knows what the story is here:

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. “Jeff” has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour “escort.” If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like “Kerry Could Become First Gay President,” is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that’s not without interest. But it shouldn’t distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. [EXACTLY!] Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn’t know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that “if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.” (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.) [SECURITY BREACH!]

By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth [6!] “journalist” (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s “marriage” initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,” went the script) pretending to “sort through the details” of the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such “reports,” some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country [50 NEWS BROADCASTS AROUND THE COUNTRY!] and have now been deemed illegal “covert propaganda” by the Government Accountability Office.