The Republic of T.

It’s said that these things happen in threes. First, Ike Turner dies of a cocaine overdose. Then Heath Ledger died of a possible drug overdose, and got an instant Brokeback-themed CNN retrospective. So, who’s next? Well, AP has Britney’s obituary ready to run (just in case), and Amy Winehouse may even O.D. on camera or on the street. Personally, I’d rather have more movies from Heath, and more music from Amy, or even Britney and Ike.

It’s inevitable that, since the poisonous parenting series started, someone who drops into the the middle of it without reading the previous posts (or perhaps without reading any of it) completely misunderstands the point of it. That’s what seems to have happened with one commenter on the previous post.

I am a black hetrosexual woman who reads your blog often. It is really bothersome that you choose to highlight the worst of the worst of hetrosexual parenting. How can we have meaningful dialogue about our differing views when all you do is degrade and mock hetrosexual parents?????

Of course, the point is not to “degrade and mock heterosexual parents.”
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When you’ve got a newborn in the house (and you’re still trying to get work done) you miss a lot. In fact, it’s took me the better part of a day to write this blog post (and that’s just the part above the fold), and another couple of days to get it posted. So, I didn’t know about the Tom Cruise Scientology indoctrination video until I read about on Gawker after the furor died down.

You have to watch this video. It shows Tom Cruise, with all the wide-eyed fervor that he brings to the promotion of a movie, making the argument for Scientology, the bizarre 20th-century religion. Making the argument is an understatement. The Hollywood actor, star of movies such as Mission Impossible, is a complete fanatic. “When you’re a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one who can really help… We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures.” There’s much much more. Let me put it this way: if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.

Well, I watched the video and even though I’ve made fun of Tom Cruise in the past, I’m starting to see him and his beliefs in a whole new light.
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I gotta hand it to the ACLU, they take all comers. Just about. And usually I understand that. By protecting the civil liberties of groups many people despise, they’re protecting all of our civil liberties. By defending Rush Limbaugh, they are also protecting me in some way. By defending Fred Phelps and family, they are in some way protecting me and my family. By defending the fights of convicted sex offenders, they are in some ways defending mine.

But now they’re defending Larry Craig?

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This is just sad. Watching the video of what appears to be Amy Winehouse smoking crack leads me to ask some questions. Where did she get the damn stuff, and who the hell gave it to her? I guess that’s one of the dangers of being famous. You can eventually find yourself surrounded by people who just won’t say “no” to you, even for your own good. I can’t imagine why anyone filmed this or why it was leaked to press, except as an extreme effort to get this young woman the help she needs before she kills herself. If so, I hope it works. At this point, an arrest might be a life-saver.

Is there anybody still out there listening? Just thought I’d ask. It’s been four days or so since I’ve done any actual writing, or at least what I’d call doing my own writing, and it’s been making me a little crazy. That’s partly because I’m always a little concerned that falling silent in the blogosphere for too long is the same as disappearing altogether.

Granted, with a new baby in the house, I might be forgiven for blogging less than I usually do. It’s definitely not easy. I suppose I could take a leave of absence for a while, at least until Dylan starts sleeping through the night, because it’s mighty difficult to keep yo with what’s going on and to string together even a coherent thought or two when you’re suffering from lack of sleep.

And when I do get around to writing, I’m just catching up and writing about stuff that was news four days earlier. I’ve got about three posts in various stages of completion, and as I sit writing this post on Sunday night, to be posted on Monday, Dylan is here in the office with me, sleeping. Before to long, I’ll “top him off” with a diaper change and a bottle before heading to bed myself, in hopes that he’ll sleep a little longer before it’s time for another bottle, etc. In the meantime, I’m sitting here trying to decide which of my unfinished posts is even worth finishing. All the while, I’m trying to keep from nodding off.

And it’s brought to a realization that kind of alluded to in an earlier post.
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Lemme get this straight. This may be the lack of sleep talking, but did these folks really go to school for years and years, and all they can tell me is something that I already know? Like, I need to sleep?

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

…The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue, while decisions leading to the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill can be partly linked to people drained of rest by round-the-clock work schedules. Weary doctors make more serious medical errors, while sleepy airport baggage screeners make more security mistakes, researchers reported at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

All told, the frayed tempers, short attention spans and fuzzy thinking caused by sleep deprivation may cost $15 billion a year in reduced productivity, the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated.

I have an excuse for not getting any sleep in the next couple of months. What’s keeping everybody else awake?

What I have learned as an adult with ADD and a working parent.

I have to become my mother.

I have to become my father.

I have to learn what they learned.

It does not matter what I want.

It does not matter how I feel.

It does not matter if I am happy.

It does not matter that I am unhappy.

It matters that it does not show.

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Score one more near miss for a progressive candidate After being shut out of the ABC debate, Dennis Kucinich won his court battle to be included in the MSNBC Democratic presidential debate. Then the Nevada state Supreme Court ruled that the debate could go on without Dennis.

I think this opinion piece from The Nation about NBC’s desire to exclude Kucinich from the debate is intended to be satirical.

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I can’t be entirely certain, but I’m pretty sure that kicking a photographer for taking a picture during a prayer is not what Jesus would do.

Carrying a family Bible, a state representative-elect kicked a photographer who took a picture of him during a statehouse prayer — then was sworn into office.

Douglas Bruce went to the House floor Monday morning as a guest of Rep. Kent Lambert, a fellow Colorado Springs Republican.

When Rocky Mountain News photographer Javier Manzano took his photo during the traditional morning prayer, Bruce, who was standing, brought the sole of his shoe down hard on the photographer’s bent knee.

“Don’t do that again,” Bruce told him.

Later, Bruce refused to apologize.

“I think that’s the most offensive thing I’ve seen a photographer do in 21 years,” he said. “If people are going to cause a disruption during a public prayer, they should be called for it. He owes an apology to the House and the public.”

Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple said the photographer had a right to take Bruce’s picture. Temple said he would speak with House leadership.

Well, if that’s the way it’s gonna be, then Hindu cleric Rajan Zed would have been within his rights to deck the whole group of protesters who disrupted his delivery of the morning invocation in the Senate last year.

Or maybe it’s only Christian prayers that should never be disrupted, and the sanctity of which is to be defended with a swift kick. In that case, the photographer is lucky Bruce didn’t clobber him with his family bible.

I took a swipe at Robert Johnson yesterday, but a couple more people scored direct hits.

Chris, at AfroNetizen, put it politely.

The answer isn’t for us to all act like Tiger Woods or Barack Obama and then racism would disappear. It’s a far more complicated problem than that and besides we shouldn’t be required to be clean cut Harvard grads, world class golfers or multiracial citizens in order to be incorporated into the American dream. But it also isn’t the case that Bob Johnson (who is responsible for the proliferation of some of the most oppressive images of Black women in the 20th century) or Al Sharpton should be assumed to speak for the majority. They too have exceptional and privileged experiences vis a vis the majority of black people and it should not be assumed they “know” what black people think” especially given that we think a lot of different things.

Meanwhile The Angry Independent put thins more bluntly at Mirror on America.

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I held forth earlier about the creeping of “states’ rights” into Democratic campaigns, but I didn’t put it quite the way Amanda did.

It’s important to have long memories, because the language about “small government” and “states rights” is with us today, and there’s no reason to think the basic meaning has changed significantly from the days when it was about stopping black people from voting. “States rights” dresses itself up as anti-tyrannical language, but it’s actually pro-tyranny. It’s about crafting a nation that makes it the easiest to use government power to override individual rights. Remember this picture every time you hear someone waxing on about the inherent nobility of “leaving it to the states”, because odds are they’re beating the same drum they have since the South lost their war to preserve slavery.

I’ll say it again. In the history of this country, states rights have never been invoked in the service of extending rights and protections to more people, but has always been invoked in the service of restricting the rights of and denying protections to—or restricting rights to and preserving protections for—particular groups of citizens.

Put another way, “states’ rights” has never been a means to advance equality, but has always been a tool for preserving inequality.

Back to blogging meta, I guess. I don’t know what’s going on up there at the pinnacle of blogging. From where I sit, it’s impossible to see beyond the clouds to the peak. But something’s going on. First there was blog related stress and heart attacks at GigaOm. Now the New York Times is again covering the travails of top tier bloggers, this time with an article suggesting that Gawker may have “jumped the shark.”

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

“And it’s 100 words long.

“200 max.

“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”

A few weeks later on Gawker.com, the news-media gossip Web site that is the flagship of Mr. Denton’s online publishing empire, he spent 339 words explaining changes at the site, including his decision to take over as managing editor after three senior bloggers had quit, and the hiring of Richard Morgan to cover television.

One day later, on Jan. 3, Mr. Morgan also quit. In an interview, he said that Mr. Denton, in his fixation with attracting new readers, was letting the site degenerate.

The next day a new Gawker blogger assigned to cover pop culture posted 406 words summarizing some of the most popular scatological sex videos on the Web, with links.

Within minutes, some longtime readers were posting comments asking, in a reference to the cliché that has come to mean something or someone has lost touch with its roots and has no more cultural relevance, whether Gawker had jumped the shark.

100 words? Well, that just one more reason I’ll never write for Gawker. But if you read beyond the first 200 words the article gets really interesting when it suggests that Gawker slipped into “Perez Hilton mode” and thus began it’s decline.

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