The Republic of T.

"I will restore honor and integrity to the White House."

George W. Bush

It’s low-hanging fruit, I know, but after reading yesterday’s news, I had to chuckle to myself. Not necessarily at the misfortunes of the people involved, but at the context.

Three scandals in one day is noteworthy even for the Bush administration. And I know that every White House — Republican and Democratic — has its share of scandals. The mix of money, power, and intrigue in Washington makes it inevitable, especially when you throw in a dash or two of temptation and human fallibility.

But three scandals breaking in one day is big news, or it ought to be, for a president and an administration (and a party, for that matter) pledging to "restore honor and integrity" to the White House, Washington, and government self. And, yes, when you recall that these people were self-appointed exemplars of morality who were going to "show us how it’s done" and set an example for the rest of us, it’s kind of funny.

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Bear Stearns has been rescued, and its shareholders have been placated. Wall Street has several invigorating injections of billions of tax-payer dollars. Now that a great deal of public wealth has gone to prop up private wealth, maybe some of that public wealth can be used to help, well, the public. But only if the free market fundamentalists in the Bush administration stay out of the way, or trip over themselves while hurrying to offer their idea of a remedy.

Clearly something’s up, because both the White House and Congress are racing to present plans to (finally) bail out homeowners stuck between impending forclosure. Congress is considering proposals. The Bush administration has ideas of its own. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to overhaul regulation of Wall Street is coming under particular scrutiny, because of how much it probably won’t accomplish.

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It’s interesting how a story takes on a life of it’s own. It’s been a couple of years since I started blogging about Zach, the kid in Tennessee who came out to his parents only to get sent to a “reparative therapy camp.” The story went from a handful of bloggers covering it to The New York Times covering it.

Investigations were launched. The camp was shut down for a while. Then there was as lawwsuit. Then a settlement. Then the camp closed. Sort of. I stopped following the story closely once Zach left the camp and returned home. But now and again I read about developments like the lates one, which I learned of via Box Turtle Bulletin.

John Smid, the guy who was running the place when Zach was there, has resigned.

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When it comes to blogging these days, when I come across something I want blog about days — even weeks or months — go by before I get around to actually blogging about it. Half the time, I let it go because it’s not news anymore, and I can just imagine people asking, “Why’s he blogging about that? It’s so, like, last week.” (As a result, I have tons of half-written draft posts sitting in queue, most of which will never see the light of day.)

The up side is that almost everything comes around again, and when it does I’ve got something partially written, and maybe even a few links already in hand. So, when I read Billy Wolfe’s story in The New York Times, and how he and his parents finally dealt with bullying, I knew exactly what wanted to say; even though I’m still a couple of days late in saying it.

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Sometimes it seems like being gay and having a husband means having to talk abou the kind of things that other people take for granted, even while doing something as mundane as rolling over a 401(k) It definitely means having to think about and talk about things that I bet a good number of married heterosexual couples don’t think about. In many cases, they don’t have to. Just being married protects them.

It’s something we faced when we finalized Parker’s adoption, and took the occasion to update our wills, as well as completing advance directives and medical powers of attorney. And it’s something we’ll have to think about again, as we update our wills and other documents when we finalize Dylan’s adoption. It was yesterday, after the social worker (who’d came over for one of the required home study visits before Dylan’s adoption is finalized), and after we had dinner that the hubby told me about the latest development in Maryland.

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Like some middle class kids in my generation, education was a high priority. In my house it was emphasized as the doorway to upward mobility. (The idea of learning for learning’s sake was something I discovered later.) If I wanted a "good job," I’d better — at least — get an undergraduate degree. It wasn’t a question of if I’d go to college, but where, as far as my parents were concerned.

"Where you’ll go," I recall my dad saying, "I don’t know. But you’re going to somebody’s university." My dad’s desire for me to go to college was probably due in part to his never having been. The son of sharecroppers, he left the far via the draft, and never looked back. Despite his lack of a college degree (he did earn technical school degree, as I recall), my dad managed to find a "good job" and make a "good living" to provide for his family. He believed getting a college education would help me do the same and do better.

My dad did well despite not going to college, and I believe I’ve benefited immensely because of the college education he helped me get. I doubt I’d be doing the kind of work I’m doing without it. But in the current economy, stories like my dad’s and mine may be fewer and far between.

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Imagine that you’ve come upon two people who have somehow fallen into a very deep hole, which neither of them can climb out of on their own. (Nor, for some reason, can they help one another climb out.) In the course of figuring out what to do, you learn how they each came to be in that hole.

One of them fell in because he either didn’t see the hole or should have seen it but wasn’t paying attention. OK, so he could have avoided falling into the hole if he’d been more careful. The other person, you find out, apparently dug the hole for the one who fell in first, and then fell in himself.

Which one do you help out of the hole? The careless one who fell in first? Or the one who dug the hole in the first place? Which one do you leave in the hole? Which one do you help out first?

Conservatism says you definitely help the guy who dug the hole in the first place climb out of it. Not only that but you give him a brand new shovel and send him on his way. Maybe you leave the other guy in the hole, and maybe you don’t. In the latter case, there are serious moral questions to consider.

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Nothing like a blog meme to get you back into gear when you’re recovering from a huge conference, like the one I worked at earlier this week. So I have Dana to thank for getting me back to blogging, by tagging me for this rather interesting meme.

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Well. I thought all this time that the Bush administration was so resoundingly disliked because of their long list of blunders in domestic policy, foreign policy, and pretty much everything else. Come to find out, that’s what they intended all along.

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I sat on the panel on “Blog Power: 2008 and Beyond” at the Take Back America conference yesterday, alongside Pam Spaulding, Digby, Tracy Russo, and Chris Bowers. Towards the end, someone in the audience asked a question that made me think about being a progressive means to me, and why I’m a progressive. The question, and I’m paraphrasing here, was “What will the progressive blogosphere do after the election,” when a Democratic president is sworn in and Democratic majorities secured in Congress?

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Ed. Note: I’m attending the Take Back America Conference this week — as part of my day job duties — and since I’m blogging the conference there, I thought I’d blog it here too. Since I’ve been blogging about health care lately, I thought I’d cover the health care panel session.

Starting with Monday’s panel, “Health Care For All: The Plan to Get There,” during Take Back America we’re talking about health care. Every day. It’s obvious why. Health care is a concern for every family in America — those with insurance and the 47 million Americans without it.

• It’s a top concern for young voters, who don’t have health insurance and aren’t sure they will be able to afford insurance in the future.
• It’s a concern for working Americans who must give up an ever-growing chunk of their paychecks to gain health insurance through their employers.
• It’ a concern for people with insurance, who face enormous bills for out-of-network medical services.
• It’s a concern for anyone who’s ill and discovers their insurer is more effective at setting up barriers to treatment than helping them get needed care.
• It’s a concern for the insured who are coping with chronic illness — their own or a family member’s — and are hitting the lifetime cost limit on their coverage.
• It’s a concern for anyone who’s had their coverage revoked in the middle of a major illness, by an insurer that rewards employees with bonuses for canceling policies.
• It’s a concern for anyone who decides against DNA testing that might reveal a genetic predisposition to disease (and lead to an early opportunity for early intervention), because the results may cause them to be denied health insurance.
• It’s a concern for every child without health insurance, and every school that spends more time finding medical care for students than educating them.
• It’s a concern for anyone bankrupted by a major illness, who — before the subprime mortgage crisis — accounted for almost half of bankruptcy filings.

Those are the stories behind some of the numbers presented by Prof. Jacob Hacker, author of “Health Care for America,” which has been adopted in one form or another by the remaining Democratic presidential candidates. Prof. Hacker shared that:

• three in ten of the non-elderly are underinsured
• four in ten put off home and car maintenance to pay for needed care
• six in ten postpone needed care due to difficulty paying
• one third dip into savings to pay for needed care
• more than 1 in five made job decisions based on health care

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore addressed healthcare as a civil rights issue, and noted the disparities of the current system, particularly where African Americans are concerned. Even the U.N. has noted and expressed concern about “wide racial disparities” in women’s health care in the U.S. (No surprise, since the U.S. comes in last — beaten out by first-place France — in providing effective and timely health care to citizens.)

Finally, Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of winning elections, and the imperative of winning enough seats in the Senate, if we’re going to achieve health care for all. Ezra also offered what was perhaps the most succinct and memorable advice for progressives moving forward on health care: Make health care for Republicans what they tried to made Iraq for Democrats.

Check out the video of the this panel for more details.

In a previous post last week I alluded to the news that right now Iraq has something we haven’t had in a while: a budget surplus. Apparently, oil revenues are so good that Iraq is rolling in oil money.

But even though that surplus isn’t going to pay for the basic needs of Iraq citizen — like clean drinking water — someone making use of it: the insurgents.

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I know I said I would not comment on the Eliot Spitzer affair. And I’m not, per se. But it does appear to have made prostitution — and whether or not it should be legalized — the subject of public debate again.

I wrote about the subject last year, focusing on three different cases that raised questions on both sides of of the debate, and I tended to come down on the side of legalization, but lately I’ve heard some arguments that make a convincing case, if not in favor of legalization, then not in favor of full decriminalization.

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I hadn’t really thought about it — in fact, I had to login to see when my I posted my last diary — but it’s been almost a year since I posted over at Daily Kos.

I didn’t make an announcement about it at the time. It was more of personal decision. After the Kathy Sierra saga. I didn’t particularly care for Kos’ response, but beyond that I didn’t particularly care for the general nastiness and callousness that seemed to have crept into progressive bogging. (Or perhaps it was already there and I finally had enough of it.)

Maybe I was still smarting from the Clinton blogger lunch debacle, and recovering from unwittingly resurrecting the great blogroll purge. But I’d become disillusioned with the much hyped “netroots.”

I was reminded of all that when I read this post about a writers’ strike at Dail Kos.

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One of the films that probably influenced me the most as a burgeoning gay boy back in the 80s was Bad Boys. I’m not sure how I saw it. I think I may have been changing channels, and came across it. I don’t remember whether I was at home or somewhere else, but I remember I stopped changing channels the minute Sean Penn appeared on the screen.

I was around 14 when it came out in 1983, and by then I’d already figured out that I liked other boys. I’d already come out to some of my high school classmates. So, when I saw Sean Penn swagger onto the screen, I was mesmerized. It didn’t hurt that he bore a strong resemblance to a (straight) classmate I was madly in love with. At the time, I was sure I wouldn’t mind at all being locked up with Sean Penn. I wouldn’t mind locking lips with him either.

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I don’t know if this counts as a trend or not, but I didn’t expect to see something like this so soon after the previous post. This time is the Lutheran Church, which still opposes marriage equality but expresses regret that "church teachings have been used to hurt gays and lesbians."

A task force drafting a statement on sexuality for the nation’s largest Lutheran group said Thursday that the church should continue defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

However, the panel did not condemn same-gender relationships. The committee expressed regret that historic Lutheran teachings have been used to hurt gays and lesbians, and acknowledged that some congregations already accept same-sex couples.

From there, it actually gets more interesting.

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When free market fundamentalists like those in the Bush administration start at federal government action, after two interest rate cuts didn’t do much to stall stop the economy sliding into recession, you know things have reached a crisis point. By the time they start taking baby steps towards a bailout, you can bet that — as with another disaster — many people are well underwater, some have drowned, and some aren’t so much saving themselves as letting the tide carry them.

In the past week, the Bush administration and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke have been making vague gestures that open the possibility an increased government intervention in the aftermath of the subprime debacle. That may be due to a trend which suggests some people caught in the crises spawned by the subprime disaster have found a outlet for their anger that, if number of those who chose that option reaches critical mass, could have consequences beyond what most of us could ever imagine.

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I’ve been so focused on other issues lately that I haven’t done much blogging about religionand politics. (With one exception.) But I’ve been filing away stories I thought I’d blog about at the time they happened. I didn’t the, but a couple of recent stories jogged my memory.

It’s something, I think, when Southern Baptists shift positions on global warming, considering how many objections to the idea of global warming are based on literal readings of the Bible. (Basically, global warming isn’t in the Bible, so it can’t be real.)

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So, say you’re the Bush administration. If you’ve invaded a country and launched an occupation that’s cost thousands of American lives, untold Iraqi lives, and shattered others, and left some damaged beyond repair, what do you do if — after pouring over 600,000 documents — you get a report saying there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda? One (more) of your reasons for going to war didn’t exist? If you’re the Bush administration, you just “lose” the report.

The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network.

Rather than posting the report online and making officials available to discuss it, as had been planned, the U.S. Joint Forces Command said it would mail copies of the document to reporters — if they asked for it. The report won’t be posted on the Internet.

In making their case for invading Iraq in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his top national security aides claimed that Saddam’s regime had ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

But the study, based on more than 600,000 captured documents, including audio and video files, found that while Saddam sponsored terrorism, particularly against opponents of his regime and against Israel, there was no evidence of an al Qaida link.

It’s a “no brainer”. Right?

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Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Nina Simone ~ “Mississippi Goddam”

I’ve been so wrapped up in another series that I’d totally forgotten about this one. But then I heard about Mississippi. Goddam.

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