Dinner With Schmucks

I'm not really sure what's more frightening, the Creation Museum itself, the idea of date night at the Creation Museum, or the idea of the Creation Museum rejecting a same-sex couple at date night.  But Barefoot and Progressive's Joe Sonka hit one out of the park with this one.

A Date Night event at the Creation Museum in Petersburg was disrupted when a same-sex couple was denied entry.

While accounts differ, what is clear is that a man who planned to enter the Feb. 11 event with a male friend was told the two would not be allowed to enter. Additionally, they did not receive a refund of the $71.90 cost for the two tickets they had purchased online.

"On the website, there was no mention of sexual orientation," said Jonathan Meador, who was involved in the situation.

Mark Looy, chief communications officer for the Creation Museum, said it was clear from the promotional material that the event was for heterosexual couples only.

The event included dinner, a talk from museum founder Ken Ham about love and the Biblical view of marriage and musical performances.

"The message was one of Christian marriage, which the Bible teaches is between a man and a woman," Looy said.

Meador attended the event with a female guest and a third man, who told security guards he was waiting for his date.

By Meador's account, when the male friend informed security personnel that the friend was also male they were told they would not be allowed to enter.

Meador and his date were allowed in.

And then it got nuts from there.  The museum is saying one thing,  Joe Sonka is saying another, and if anything the CM guys got punked.  Hard.  I laughed for a good five minutes.

Date Night at the Creation Museum.  I can hardly breathe.

Shutdown Countdown, Part 9

Republicans would probably have a much easier time convincing the country that their goal is not to shut the government down if they had, as Chuck Schumer said yesterday, actually taken the option off the table a month ago when asked.

Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York criticized Republican demands to cut spending in a short-term spending resolution that would continue funding the government while negotiations persist on a longer-term plan.

Appearing Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Schumer said compromise is necessary to avoid a government shutdown that will be bad for everyone.

"Here's the bottom line: we have said shutdown is off the table," Schumer said. "Speaker (John) Boehner, (Senate Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell, other Republican leaders have not taken it off the table when asked and there are lots of people on the hard right clamoring for a shutdown."  

Of course, they would also have a much easier time convincing the country that they don't want to shut down the government if, you know, they didn't want to actually shut down the government.  And passing a spending bill that cuts $61 billion from this year's budget and would cost thousands of jobs isn't exactly convincing people that the Republicans are even interested in compromise.  Wisely, Democrats are saying that they're ready to negotiate.

With 12 days left, the clock is ticking.  It seems pretty clear to me that there's a large percentage of House Republicans that are willing to turn John "Orange Julius" Boehner into Newt "Back of Air Force One" Gingrich.  I used to think that the GOP leadership would have gotten their house in order.  But the inmates are truly running this asylum now.

Zero To $3.5 Million In 17 Days

That's the kind of fundraising acceleration performance you can expect when you drive The All-New Reince Priebus.

The Republican National Committee raised $5.7 million in January, and new Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday that $3.5 million of the total came in after his election Jan. 14.

“We owe a lot of our success to major donors who helped us reach 180 percent of our monthly major donor goal, and we were able to accomplish that in the last two weeks of January,” Priebus said in a statement. “I am thankful for the outpouring of support I’ve seen over the past month, from both long-time and first-time donors, but we have a lot of work to do.”

Priebus has been working to restore confidence among major donors and dig out from under the debt created during the 2010 election cycle. The RNC had $21.4 million in debt and only $2.1 million on hand by the end of the month, according to disclosure forms filed Sunday to the Federal Election Commission.

Because the RNC is still receiving bills from vendors, Priebus said he expects the committee’s debt to be more than $22 million, including $15 million in loans and more than $7 million to vendors.

The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, raised $7.2 million in January and had $16.8 million in debt, including $15 million in loans taken out during the 2010 election cycle. It had $9.1 million on hand.

Granted, it's hard to do worse than Michael Steele did when your job consists of "Be Republican and have wealthy donors throw money at you without screwing things up" and as far as I can tell for the last month Priebus has completely stayed out of the news as far as "stupid controversies" go.  Already he's a success.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that in a post-Citizens United world, both the RNC and DNC are struggling badly with fundraising, are having to take out big loans, and have amassed some $35 million plus in debt between them.

Big donors don't have to deal with either anymore.  They can give directly to candidates now and can give as much as they want to in the final days of elections.  Both sides racked up quite a bit of debt during the 2008 elections too, but not quite as much as 2010, and 2008 was a Presidential election year to boot.

2012 is going to be pretty scary for both organizations, I think.

StupidiNews!

• In Libya, unrest has spread to the capital of Tripoli as Qaddafi's son and heir apparent warns of civil war amidst a brutal military crackdown.
• House Republicans have failed to repeal Davis-Bacon labor laws that allow government contractors to be paid fair wages.
• The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the bombing of an Afghan bank in the capital Kabul, killing 9 and injuring at least 70.
• Iceland's president has rejected a measure to pay $5 billion to Dutch and British investors, saying the people must decide by referendum.
• The completely mapped human genome turns 10 this week, marking a milestone in genetic knowledge.

Last Call

Meanwhile, let's not forget the European debt crisis is far from over, and German voters aren't going to pick up the tab for the euro any longer if today's election results are going to be typical of what's ahead.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suffered its worst defeat since World War II in Germany’s richest state, losing control of Hamburg in the first of seven state elections this year that threaten to limit her scope to tackle Europe’s debt crisis.

The result in Hamburg, the city-state of Merkel’s birth, underscores the challenge she faces trying to balance public opposition to bailouts for debt-wracked states against pressure from investors and fellow euro countries to lead the way in stemming the debt contagion. She faces three more state ballots next month on either side of a March 24-25 European Union summit called to form a comprehensive plan for the crisis.

“It’s a warning to Merkel,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Groep NV in Brussels. “If she has to draw any lesson, it probably will be to get tougher at the European level to show something to German voters,” he said. “There is no room for Merkel to come home from Brussels on March 25 with anything that could look or smell like a defeat.”

Portuguese government bonds declined for a second week before the vote, leading securities of high-deficit countries including Greece lower. Yields on Portuguese bonds rose to within five basis points of the most since the euro’s inception in 1999, while faster inflation risks unsettling German voters. Portugal’s 10-year yield has stayed above 7 percent the last 11 trading days. 

If German voters aren't going to play ball with the bailout plans for countries like Greece and Ireland, and as Portugal and Spain continue to teeter on the edge, it's going to get really bad, really fast.  Merkel's in bad shape here, and the German opposition is running on a platform to tell the rest of the European Union to stuff it where the sun don't shine.

Could we be seeing more demonstrations in Europe soon?  I think it's quite likely.

Re-Railing The Derailed Florida Rail Project

GOP Gov. Rick Scott has killed the high speed rail project in central Florida, but that doesn't mean it's dead.  House Republicans and Democrats from along the I-4 corridor are trying to do everything they can to get the money and create badly needed jobs in their districts.

Advocates for high-speed rail in Florida were hustling to keep it alive late Friday, cobbling plans to accept the federal money Gov. Rick Scott rejected this week.

U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Winter Park, floated a proposal to dramatically shrink the project to an Orlando International Airport to Walt Disney World link, cutting Tampa and Lakeland out of the mix, for now.

Mica, who chairs the House transportation committee, said an initial 21-mile starter train, with a stop at the Orange County Convention Center, shows the best ridership potential and could even turn a profit. Some portion of the $2.4 billion in federal grant money would flow to Orange and Osceola counties and the city of Orlando. The three governments would forge a compact to solicit bids and oversee construction of the project and other partner governments could be added later, he said.

The shorter distance likely would take much of the high speed out of high-speed rail in Florida. The trains have to travel several miles to reach speeds of 160 mph or more and slow down well in advance of stops.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, shared a legal opinion from Tampa City Attorney Chip Fletcher. It contends that there are a variety of ways local governments could team up to create an umbrella government to accept grant money and oversee the rail project. And Fletcher’s opinion states that either the Florida Department of Transportation or the Legislature could assign the federal grant money over to the newly created agency.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood gave state lawmakers a week to come up with a plan to keep the money from going to other states.

“And since Secretary LaHood gave us one week from today, everyone went to work today,” Castor said.

Needless to say, the jobs these Representatives want to save include their own.  GOP Rep. John Mica is especially vulnerable.  What's the point of being in charge of the House Transportation Committee if you can't deliver on infrastructure jobs?

Rick Scott might not give a damn about rail in Florida, but John Mica's been in Congress for almost 20 years and I'm betting he wants to still be in Congress after Scott has burned down Tallahassee.  Odds are pretty good that won't happen if they can't sell Ray LaHood on a new plan by Friday.

The bigger issue is that there's already bipartisan support for telling Rick Scott to go to hell.  Going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out.

What Wisconsin's Public Employees Are Fighting For

Josh Marshall parses Scott Walker's actions.

But there's another layer of the story that's only gotten cursory attention in the national media. Walker's proposal doesn't apply to all public sector unions in the state. Broadly speaking it targets unions that consistently support Democrats (teachers and other public employees) and exempts those that are often more friendly to Republican candidates (police and firefighters). Walker has been quick to point out that the statewide police and firefighters unions, as opposed to those in Milwaukee, both supported his opponent last year. He claims he makes the exception because the state can't afford any walk-outs from these public safety related employees.

But that doesn't really hold up.

It strains credulity to see this as anything but a political effort to destroy organizations that are critical foot soldiers for Democratic candidates at election time. 

This is why Republicans have been targeting unions, particularly teachers and state employees' unions, for some time now.  If unions are eliminated, Democrats at the state level will be severely weakened.  That's always what the end game was here, to rid the country of unions.  At the private sector level, unions have all but been eliminated in many states and replaced with "right-to-work" laws.

If public employee unions are eliminated, then the backbone of labor in this country will be broken for good, with American workers at the tender mercies of international corporations who simply do not see investment in the US middle class as a smart move when there's billions of Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian workers forming a market ten times the size of the United States.  And they will not have the best interests of American workers at heart.

The goal here is to remove the unions as the last obstacle for the corporate takeover of the US in a post-Citizens United world where they can simply buy the races they want to win and the candidates who will do what they say.

And then our Democracy really is over.

[UPDATE]  And now Walker is hinting that as many as 12,000 state employee jobs will be eliminated as part of his budget plan...putting them on state unemployment is a much better idea than actually employing them as far as taxpayers are concerned, right?

Preventing The Panda-Monium Of The Jasmine Rebellion

China has decided to get out well ahead of all this North Africa/Middle East freedom crap and is cracking down now before things get out of hand.  The first target:  the Chinese internet.

After Internet messages calling for demonstrations in 13 cities surfaced on Saturday, apparently from overseas sites used by Chinese living abroad, there were reports of activists being preemptively hauled away.

Very few Chinese responded, and in only a couple of cities, but Beijing’s authoritarian regime still mobilized large teams of police to ensure all remained quiet.

The heavy response by Chinese officials was a reminder of the government’s low tolerance for any hint of political discord. The country’s combination of surveillance, sophisticated management of information, and a willingness to deploy large numbers of security forces has so far allowed it to cut off even the most remote of challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.

After online messages spread on Saturday using the phrase “Jasmine Revolution,” a reference to the unrest in Tunisia that ousted the president there and inspired uprisings across the Arab world, Chinese police beefed up their presence. Users on Chinese messaging sites, and those able to access Twitter through special software, posted notes saying that university students were warned to stay away from trouble.

In the previous two days, state media had signaled that the government is looking to further exert its considerable capacity to maintain order.

On Friday, a key architect of the country’s Internet monitoring software told a state newspaper that the program, already regarded as among the most stringent in the world, should be strengthened.

The next day, President Hu Jintao urged a conference of officials in Beijing to improve “social management.” The state news service Xinhua said that “Hu stressed the importance of information network management, urging an improved management of the ‘virtual society’ and a better guidance of public opinions on Internet.”

When Sunday came, the protests fizzled into almost nothing. The overwhelming majority of Chinese residents probably had no idea they’d even been called for -- the websites used to advertise the protests are either blocked or heavily censored in China.

I'll give the Chinese this much, they're not stupid.  They see the unmanaged, raw internet as a direct threat to Communist Party rule and they damn well know it.  If there ever is a revolution in China, it's not going to be one that gets too much traction on Twitter.  The events of the last month have not been lost on Party officials there.

New Comments, Same Snark, Less Stupid

In the process of switching over to DisqUS comments system.  Hopefully it will process and import all the old comments and now I have a whole lot more control over the the whole process.

Let me know if you have trouble with the system.

Thanks, Kitteh.

I feel a whole lot better now.

What The Duck?

A fun article on Cracked.com shows five things that the Duck family (Scrooge or Donald especially) did well before our generation.  The plot to Inception and Indiana Jones are listed among others. 

No learning, nothing dark or mysterious here. Enjoy!

And Now Libya...

The BBC is reporting things are getting quite serious in the Libyan city of Benghazi, consisting of Libyan troops opening fire on protesters there amid massive armed crackdown by Qaddafi.

Benghazi, about 1,000 km (600 miles) from Tripoli, has been the main focus of the demonstrations against Col Gaddafi's 42-year rule.

Troops opened fire on people attending a funeral there on Saturday, killing 15, both the Associated Press news agency and al-Jazeera television said.

But an eyewitness told Reuters news agency that many more had actually died.

"Dozens were killed... not 15, dozens," the unnamed eyewitness said, adding that he had helped take victims to a local hospital.

A Benghazi resident told the BBC that security forces inside a government compound had fired on protesters with mortars and 14.5mm machine guns - a heavy machine gun typically produced in the former USSR.

They were, he said, machine-gunning cars and people indiscriminately. "A lot [of people] have fallen down today," he added.

Other witnesses spoke of snipers firing at protesters from rooftops and there were widespread reports of foreign mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa being brought in to attack protesters.

A doctor told the BBC that situation in the city was "like hell", saying he had been seeing people with gunshot wounds being carried into his hospital all day.

Conflicting reports are coming out of who controls the city, the military is said to be freely using violence and in full control, other reports say only the central military barracks are still in the military's hands.   Either way, in the last few weeks North Africa has fully spiraled out of control now.  If Qaddafi goes down like Mubarak and Ben Ali, all bets are off in the region.

Cutting Their Own Throats

Republicans went and passed some $60 billion in budget cuts from this year's budget, voting to gut dozens of programs and laying off hundreds of thousands of workers.  Not even the Blue Dogs went for this one, so the attack ads will write themselves.  Steve Benen:

Looking over the roll call, the drastic cuts received zero Democratic votes, and even Blue Dogs didn't break ranks. Three Republicans -- Walter Jones (N.C.), Reps. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), and John Campbell (Calif.) -- voted with the Dems in opposition, but two of three opposed the measure because they said it wasn't quite brutal enough. (Nine House members -- seven Democrats and two Republicans -- did not vote, but they obviously wouldn't have affected the outcome.)

The gavel came down around 4:30 a.m., making this one of those rare Friday-night/Saturday-morning votes.
The package, which is intended to finance the federal government though the end of the fiscal year, now heads to the Senate, where it stands absolutely no chance whatsoever of passing. Indeed, House Republicans knew this before the vote, and didn't care -- this isn't about governing; it's about right-wing lawmakers pounding their chests in order to impress their reactionary base. House leaders could have worked with Senate leaders on a spending compromise, but Republicans chose not to bother.

As we talked about yesterday, it's hard to overstate how brutal these cuts really are. Overnight, 235 House Republicans voted to slash education, job training, environmental protections, food safety, community health centers, nuclear security, energy efficiency programs, scientific research, FEMA, Planned Parenthood, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control, among other things.

The projected job losses from these cuts, we learned this week, could total 1 million American workers, all of whom would be forced into unemployment, on purpose, because Republicans think it'd be good for the economy.

As the House GOP sees it, we can't afford these expenditures because of the deficit they helped create. We can, however, afford massive tax breaks for people who don't need them, which cost a lot more, and which Republicans didn't even try to pay for.

The GOP proposal, in other words, is the sort of budget a caucus might put together if it was really angry with Americans, as if we'd done something to offend them. (Maybe, if we apologize, they'll stop trying to hurt so many people?)

Oddly enough, perhaps no one is happier with the vote than the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- this one measure will be exploited for hundreds of hours of campaign ads, questioning the misguided principles of vulnerable Republican incumbents who were misguided enough to vote for this monstrosity.

So yes, why do Republicans hate education, job training, environmental protections, food safety, community health centers, nuclear security, energy efficiency programs, scientific research, FEMA, Planned Parenthood, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control?

It's because they don't want government to work.  They want it to fail so they can privatize it as much as possible and reap the economic benefits for decades to come.

Seems to be working well so far, but I think when 2012 comes around, the backlash may surprise a lot of people.

Hallelujah, They Got One Right

The 2011 Cybersecurity Freedom Act -- proposed by senators Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent; Susan Collins of Maine; and Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat -- is almost identical to the legislation the senators introduced in June with two exceptions.

The bill adds language that forbids the president from shutting down the Internet during a national crisis. It also permits owners of major computer systems deemed as critical infrastructure, and therefore subject to Homeland Security Department regulations, to appeal their status in federal court.

I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume this was not ever intended to keep citizens from information.  I read about this today in several sources, some of which conflict, so keep that in mind if you read up on this.  It is my understanding that the power granted to "flip the switch" could have lasted from 30-90 days, which is way too long.  If we were under a major cyber attack, I could see an hour or two while our best and brightest did what they could, but a period of several days looks to me like an effort to keep us out of the loop for long enough to do something hideous and put a spin on it before we were allowed access to the information. 

This may have looked like a good idea to some, but with trust in government at an all-time low, this was not the time to introduce the power to restrict our access to a network that millions of Americans use daily.  If we had this policy in place, it would also be an invitation to black hatters everywhere.  I realize this doesn't mean that the risk of cyber attack is not there, it just means we need to address it in a different way.

No Need To Get Snippy About It

For a good part of our history, circumcision has been a process that we performed without  much thought.  It was a suggested process for cleanliness and health reasons, but without much scientific backing.  In the 1960s a trend began where parents did not circumcise their male children, and according to this article nearly half of male children born in the US are not circumcised.  The anti-circumcision group drew from the Center for Disease Control's neutrality on the subject.  Due to some recent findings, that neutrality has changed to leaning towards circumcision again, as a way to improve overall health and in particular sexually transmitted diseases. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, currently neutral on whether to circumcise, are drafting new policies in light of recent studies suggesting circumcision helps prevent transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The studies driving the new recommendations, based on clinical trials in sub-Saharan Africa and published in recent years in the Lancet medical journal, found that circumcised men had a 60 percent lower incidence of contracting HIV from heterosexual sex than their uncircumcised peers.

Another study, published in January in the Lancet, found that women with circumcised partners were 28 percent less likely to contract the human papillomavirus (HPV), a common STD that can cause cervical cancer, than women with uncircumcised partners.

The article does a good job of explaining both sides of the argument.  Both sides agree on the most important thing: this shouldn't be done without research and consideration.  It's up to the parents to decide whether or not to circumcise their children, but to do it without any reason beyond "I want him to match his father" isn't making a solid choice.

 

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Less that 48 hours after armed Bahraini troops forced protesters out of Manama's Pearl Roundabout, thousands of demonstrators have retaken the square.
• After Palestinians refused to circulate a compromise draft, the US has vetoed a UN Security Council measure that would have declared Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine illegal.
• Relations between Mexico and France have gone sour in the wake of a 36-year old Frenchwoman facing a 60-year kidnapping sentence in Mexican prison.
• The S&P 500 hit its highest level in almost three years this week as 4th quarter earnings for 2010 continue to impress institutional investors.
• The saga of hacker group Anonymous versus security firm HBGary revealed how the federal government shops for backdoor access into web sites.