Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Supine vessels for government spin

A Daily Dish reader asks about Hannity’s technique:

No one should be surprised or upset that he didn’t ask Cheney whether Iraq is becoming the next Vietnam (there’s plenty of other folks asking those questions anyway). But a journalist of the right should ask him the questions to which conservatives would like some answers. Ask him, e.g., about the administration’s spending habits. He asked him about immigration, but when Cheney said illegal immigrants perform an important function in our economy by doing jobs no one else will do, Hannity should have jumped on him. Why does he think Americans won’t do those jobs?

Meanwhile, more from Brian Wilson. Last week he lost his temper. This week he gushes giddily as he asks porn star Mary Cary is Karl Rove is sexy?

Conservative Gays in Spain threaten to ‘out’ party members

Reuters:

MADRID (Reuters) - Gays in Spain’s main opposition party could reveal the names of homosexuals in its ranks unless the party backs down from its opposition to gay marriage…

Gay members of the [right-of-center opposition Popular Party] PP who continue to oppose gay marriage run the risk of being “outed”—or forced out the closet—by the party’s Gay Platform, the platform’s president told state radio on Tuesday.

“We are willing to say, you, so-and-so, are a hypocrite ... because you are voting to impede a law that we believe is just and will mean more democracy, more equality, more tolerance and more greatness for the Kingdom of Spain,” Carlos Biendicho said.

Arnold asks, Do the Log Cabin Republicans know about this? Me, I’m all for it.

Via Atrios.

PPP defeated again

The recently reintroduced Parents Permission to Participate requirement, defeated today, was re-written eight times:

The Georgia Board of Education overwhelmingly rejected a measure today from state School Superintendent Kathy Cox that proposed requiring school districts to provide parents with a list of extracurricular clubs available to students, giving parents the option to withhold their children from particular clubs.

The board voted 10-3 against the proposal, which critics argued was an attack on gay-straight student alliances on a handful of Georgia’s high school campuses, most of them in metro Atlanta.

Keep up the good work Georgia Equality.

Defining hate speech down

The other day a commenter called me a bigot for my defense of Howard Dean.

Clif Burns has the definitive retort.

Lynching apology not unanimous

The last time I wrote about Lynching it was reported the Senate would pass a resolution of apology in March.

They finally did it last night. Why last night?

So they can hide the 12 or so Senators who apparently think it’s bad politics back home to sign onto a resolution that apologizes for not passing anti-lynching legislation sooner. Apparently, southern Senators fillibustered efforts to pass such legislation for years.

I don’t care if they’re Democrats or Republicans, I want to know who isn’t supporting this legislation. We have a right to know, and to know why anybody in either party would permit the basically-secret vote to take place this evening in order to his who these bigots really are.

Crooks and Liars is shocked to find lynching was allowed until 1968:

...from History Matters In the following testimony to a House subcommittee, four Southern Congressmen discussed their reasons for opposing what they deemed federal interference in state judicial responsibilities and defend segregation and the “peaceful relations now existing between white man and Negro” in the South. Congressman Charles E. Bennett (Florida) also offered his historical explanation for lynching.  read the full transcript.

I have very complicated, nuanced and still developing opinions on race and the South; they’re not what might be expected and will come out here over time. But I must note the creepy irony that the day of the apology was also the day that an otherwise educated white person used the term “nigger” to my face. For the third time since I moved here I am profoundly unsettled and disturbed.

UPDATE: John’s got an explanation and a list.

UPDATE: AJC says it was Frist who refused the roll call…

Screwball

I saw The Chris Matthews Show this weekend and was struck by how skewed it was. (Topics: Are Howard Dean’s insults doing his party good? Thought Kerry was smarter than Bush? Guess again! Chris’s thoughts on Australian heroes in Hollywood.)

Most particularly striking was the partisan vehemence of Vogue magazine senior writer Julia Reed, who I had never heard of before. From Media Matters:

In the course of criticizing Dean, Reed referred to Republicans as “our side.” Reed has written a profile of President Bush’s daughters for the August 2004 issue of Vogue and has described herself as an “acquaintance of the family”:

REED: I think, when he said this is just a diversion to keep from talking about the issues, but he’s making himself a diversion. No one in America knows who Ken Mehlman is—he’s chairman of the RNC—because he’s quietly running around raising money. Howard Dean is going to raise money for the Republicans if he keeps on talking like this—I mean, he’s igniting the base on our side—I mean, on the Republican side.

And about those college grades?

In addition, Matthews focused the panel’s attention on Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) recently released college record which shows that Kerry earned a slightly lower cumulative grade-point average than President Bush in four years at Yale. But Matthews did not mention that the grades were simply a part of a larger document release that included Kerry’s full military record, which definitively proves that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s allegations against Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign were baseless.