Month: October 2006

I partied late into the night Philadephia last night, and I’ll be a late night partier tonight in New York. What that means is that I won’t have had the amount of time I should have had for blogging, much less thinking. (As the last post shows, there are too many things I’d rather not…

I started this post yesterday with the unnecessarily provocative title of “Why Activists Win, Part III” (to supplement the needlessly provocative Part I and Part II) but I never finished it, because frankly I wanted the issue to go away. It hasn’t. Well, the elephants are going away (because the Philadelphia Zoo is getting rid…

Well, that didn’t take long. Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer features a front page story — headlined “Official vouched for sex offender” — which I think is a perfect example of more to come: Republican State Rep. Eugene McGill urged a judge in 2003 to show leniency for a friend who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and…

While I’ll probably be writing about it again because it’s a scandal that doesn’t appear likely to go away, I think I’ve devoted enough time to the sordid Mark Foley affair, and I’d like to change the subject to something less controversial. Cannibalism. By numerous accounts, former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was one. But some…

When I wrote about “outing” yesterday I hadn’t read this post, which has a very different view of what the word means. While I thought the term involved disclosing the homosexuality of someone who was trying to be discrete and wouldn’t want it disclosed, here it seems to involve disclosing the identity of a 21…

Did we learn nothing from Rathergate? An anonymous commenter left that rather good (if rather perplexing) question after I went to bed last night. If I recall correctly, “Rathergate” involved damning material of questionable provenance which was being used in the midst of an election. It was intended to attack the character of President Bush,…

That’s pretty much what’s left if the damning instant message exchange turns out to be a joke. And Foley has resigned, hasn’t he? That leaves the dangling moral question(s) for the voters to ponder. I think at this point they’re entitled to know the truth. And whether they are or not, I’d like to know…

For the umpteenth time, I think Foley is an indefensible jerk and an asshole who betrayed the public trust and resigned as he should have. But if it’s true that the young men were cynically playing with him… While that might not change the nature of what went on in Foley’s mind, it hardly puts…

Why, the ACLU, says Donald Sensing. Seriously, Reverend Sensing is inviting the ACLU to call him. Franklin, Tennessee has declared that some flags may not be flown, while others must be flown, and that the First Amendment only applies to a small portion of the town which it designates to be a “First Amendment area”:…

Via Pajamas Media, I read of another outrage in Great Britain, in which a Muslim police officer was allowed to refuse for “religious reasons” to guard the Israeli embassy. Asks Marc, the post author: Are Muslim police going to refuse to protect shops that sell alcohol or butchers that sell pork, next? I suppose they…

The Carnival of the RINOs is a bit late this week, as is my link to it, but who’s counting the days when you’re dealing with RINOs? There’s not a conforming one in the non-herd, including the RINO who apparently was non-conforming about the deadline (no big deal to me), so Digger raised his horn…

Maybe this is a correction, and maybe it’s a partial correction, but Justin pointed out earlier that in a number of posts in which I referred to “emails,” I was actually talking about instant messaging — which isn’t email at all, but a sort of text-oriented conversation, much like a phone call but accomplished by…

Is the “closet” something to be ashamed of, or is it a one-way political portal? And what is a “closet”? I’m so damned frustrated by the national debate that I don’t know the answer. I may have never known. I don’t think I was ever allowed to have a closet, and now mine is so…

Pajamas Media links the Weekly Standard’s analysis of conservatives who are rooting for Republican defeat. Considering that all politics is local, I’m wondering how the defeat plan might be implemented in my congressional district where incumbent Republican Jim Gerlach is being opposed by Democrat Lois Murphy. Am I supposed to sit the election out to…

Or has he been rather big on an ongoing basis? In his discussion of “The List” (apparently consisting of gay Republicans who are traitors to their penises or something) David Corn says something about Rick Santorum I can’t resist: Santorum in a 2003 AP interview compared homosexuality to bestiality, incest and polygamy. It would be…

it is hard to deny the sweet, sweet justice of Republicans being politically damaged by a lurid sex scandal in Washington. — Glenn Greenwald. Yeah, and it’s also hard to deny the irresistible nature of the Foley “pedophile sex scandal.” Were I working for Bob Casey, I’d advise him to scour the record for every…

In a comment to an earlier post, I asked if I was allowed to ask a question: Am I allowed to ask whether God put the Republicans in charge of morality? I guess there’s no rule against my asking such a question, because it seems to be the question of the day. Unless I am…

As the evidence emerges, it’s appearing that Charles Carl Roberts IV was a deeply repressed pedophile who never told anyone — not even his wife — about his evil secret. The fact that there are such people ought not to surprise anyone, nor should it be a judgment against society. But when someone like Roberts…

I’m puzzled by something. With all the talk about hypocrisy and double standards, I’m wondering whether the Foley case would be treated any differently had the page been female instead of male. Unless homosexuality is inherently immoral, I don’t see any real distinction, but I think some people do, and I think this will become…

Much as I hate stereotypes, I grudgingly recognize that they fill a human need. Sometimes it seems that the absence of a stereotype can be worse than the worst stereotypes, and this is especially true when something awful happens. When I heard about the school shooting yesterday, my initial reaction was to hope that the…