The Republic of T.

I probably shouldn’t be giving you advice, but maybe because I’m a progressive, I can’t see someone in crisis without having a desire to help if I can. Besides, a couple of you guys have offered advice and suggestions to one Democratic candidate — not to mention asking questions I assume were designed to be helpful.

So, in the tradition of one good turn deserving another, I’m going to give you guys some advice. Blaming Democrats for the trouble you’re in now doesn’t pass the laugh test, for a number of reasons. Keep pushing that meme, and it will prove as laughable as your new slogan turned out to be.

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Are you kidding me with this shit?

Nope. I guess not. Now, this guy gets handled with kid gloves while spouting this kind of garbage, while Jeremiah Wright gets … well, we all know what he got.

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Not exactly.

The California Supreme Court ruling has brought Bob Barr — presidential candidate and sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act — out from under his rock to make the following statement.

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I’ve got a few posts in the hopper related to the California Supreme Court marriage ruling, but this one moved to the top of the pile as soon as it was brought to my attention. Of all the conservative responses to the California ruling this one takes the cake. I’ve written about the procreative imperative, which the right wing has tried to establish as the basis of marriage. I’ve written an entire (and ongoing) series challenging the rightwing notion that marriage is only for making babies and only for people who can (or possibly could, if miraculously cured of infertility) makes babies. (But not for people who can raise well-rounded, developmentally normal children they didn’t conceive together in loving, safe, supportive homes.)

This, however, makes all of that seem almost logical. Forget about making babies. Forget about raising happy, healthy children. In their increasingly desperate question to narrow marriage down to something two queers can’t possibly accomplish together, they’ve boiled it down to this: in order for a marriage to be valid a penis must go into a vagina.

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And you appease because you’re an appeaser. That’s what appeasers do. They appease. Because they’re appeasers.

I realize I’m all kinds of late with this, but this is just spectacular.

And yet it all sounds vaguely familiar.

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Living in D.C., you can’t help; crossing paths wiht some famous political names. In fact, you get used to it. But, as with most things, you never forget your first. And Ted Kennedy was my first.

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Ugh. It’s late, and I’m only just now getting around to catching up on my blog reading? What happened to the times when I’d check in at least once a day? Oh yeah. Right. I’m reading stuff going back to May 6th, sitting in my reader. (At that point I just mark everything read.)

These days, I do most of my blog reading on the train, which means I do it offline. Google Reader is still my reader of choice, and thanks to Google Gears I can catch up on things in offline mode. But that’s still kind of limiting. I’d been looking, lately for a desktop reader that synched with Google Reader. Enter ReadAir.

It’s powered by Adobe Air, and it’s not a bad little app. It’s still in development, so it doesn’t have all the functions of Google Reader, but it’s worth keeping an eye on if you’re looking for the Google Reader experience in a desktop app.

[Via Lifehacker.]

I knew as soon as the California Supreme Court marriage ruling was posted, that I would read the whole thing. I started reading it at my desk, after it was posted, but stopped once got to the “bottom line” of the ruling — and, truly, because as I realized what I was reading, and what the California Supreme Court had said, the emotion was too much.

I wasn’t born when the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was handed down, so I don’t know what it was like for those Black Americans who heard it or read it and realized what the court had done. But I think I have an idea, based on what I felt yesterday after reading the decision.

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  The California Supreme Court Says same-sex couples have the right to marry.
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By now, it’s not news, I’m sure. But equality won a victory in California today.

The California Supreme Court has overturned a gay marriage ban in a ruling that would make the nation’s most populous state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings.

The justices’ 4-3 decision Thursday says domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage. Chief Justice Ron George wrote the opinion.

The city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples and gay rights groups sued in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco’s monthlong same-sex wedding march.

The case before the court involved a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn a voter-approved law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

With the ruling, California could become the second state after Massachusetts where gay and lesbian residents can marry.

There’s more, of course. I’m going to try and get through as much of it as I can, but at some point I’m going to have to find a quiet spot in the office, to cry. (I called the hubby to tell him, but we couldn’t talk for long, because both of us wanted to retain some composure.)

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I don’t even want to think about it, but the California Supreme Court’s marriage decision will be coming down today.

The California Supreme Court will rule Thursday on the legality of the state’s ban on gay marriage.

The justices today posted a notation (PDF) on the court’s Web site that the ruling in the civil rights challenge to the same-sex marriage ban will be posted at 10 a.m. Thursday. The Supreme Court heard arguments in five consolidated legal challenges in March, and had until early June to rule on the issue.

The long-awaited ruling is a crucial test of the simmering public, social and legal debate over gay marriage, triggered in 2004 when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed thousands of gay and lesbian couples to wed before the courts put a halt to the marriage licenses.

San Francisco city officials and civil rights groups then challenged a state family code law that restricts marriage to a man and a woman, as well as a 2000 voter-approved ballot initiative that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. A San Francisco trial judge declared the ban unconstitutional, but a divided state appeals court in 2006 upheld the law, concluding that it is up to the voters or Legislature to legalize same-sex marriage, not judges.

The state Supreme Court is reviewing that ruling.

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I never got around to addressing the whole Obama/Wright foolishness diversionsary tactic discussion. But it’s interesting to see that some white reverends are coming under closer scrutiny. John McCain’s buddy John Hagee — you know, the guy who want’s to base U.S. foreign policy on the Book of Revelations — has finally been called of at least one of his more extreme statements.

The (very) wrong reverend recently rendered his regrets to the Catholic church, in what I like to call the “No Mo’ Great Ho’” declaration.

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I never got around to addressing the whole Obama/Wright foolishness diversionsary tactic discussion. But it’s interesting to see that some white reverends are coming under closer scrutiny. John McCain’s buddy John Hagee — you know, the guy who want’s to base U.S. foreign policy on the Book of Revelations — has finally been called of at least one of his more extreme statements.

The (very) wrong reverend recently rendered his regrets to the Catholic church, in what I like to call the “No Mo’ Great Ho’” declaration.

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The Josef/Elisabeth Fritzl story I mentioned in the previous post is becoming something like a horrific automobile accident. At first you don’t want to look, and then when you do you can’t tear your eyes away. There seems to be no end of news stories about it, and as I’ve been reading them it’s occurred to me how easy it is to forget what we’re looking at and what we’re not.

I’m not a lawyer, but if I were and I had Josef Fritzl for a client, I’d advise him to stop talking. I’d muzzle him if I could. But Fritzl can’t stop talking, and no one seems to be able to stop him either.

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I’ve written about this before, but I was reminded of it yesterday in a kind of metaphorical way.

I worked from home yesterday, because the hubby was dropping the kids off early yesterday, before going off to a night job he has every other week. Just before the rest of the family left, my cable internet connection went dead. I called tech support and was told there was a service outage in our area, related to the previous night’s storm.

So began a day’s worth of frustration.

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It took me an entire weekend to absorb Hillary Clinton’s most recent bit of “dog whistling.” Not because I didn’t understand it, but because I couldn’t quite believe it. That is, I couldn’t believe how unbelievably stupid a move it was for any Democrat.

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Clinton’s blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.

I have just a couple of things to say to the Clinton campaign.

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Sometimes you have to take people by the scruff of their necks and stick their noses in the big pile of shit in the middle of the room before they can see it, let alone smell it.

You might wonder why I posted that slideshow. Well, it started gelling in my mind while I was catching up on my blog reading during my commute to work. (Hey, when you have a five-year-old and an infant, you read when you can.) I came across this on the Air America blog.

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