Last Call For Rainbow-Colored Glasses (Of Beer)

Sam Adams Brewery is making a hell of a statement by pulling out of Boston's Southie St. Patty's Day parade over LGBTQ equality issues:

We have been participating in the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade for nearly a decade and have also supported the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast year after year. We’ve done so because of the rich history of the event and to support veterans who have done so much for this country.

We were hopeful that both sides of this issue would be able to come to an agreement that would allow everyone, regardless of orientation, to participate in the parade. But given the current status of the negotiations, we realize this may not be possible.

We share these sentiments with Mayor Walsh, Congressman Lynch and others and therefore we will not participate in this year’s parade. We will continue to support Senator Linda Dorcena Forry and her St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. We wish her all the best in her historic stewardship of this tradition.

The collapse in negotiations between advocacy group MassEquality and parade sponsor Allied War Veterans Council over allowing gay veterans to march in the parade has now triggered Sam Adams pulling out.  For Boston (and especially Southie) this is a hell of a big deal.

“Mayor Walsh obviously is disappointed that these two parties could not come to an agreement for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade,’’ said Lisa Pollack, communications chief for Walsh. He “will always hold out hope that we can find a way for everybody to be included.”

Parade organizer Philip J. Wuschke Jr. did not return calls for comments Wednesday. Lynch also could not be reached for comment. An aide to Lynch did not respond to questions about whether the congressman would march Sunday and continued to strike a hopeful tone.

“Talks regarding the parade are ongoing,” Meghan Aldridge, Lynch’s press secretary, said. “Congressman Lynch remains hopeful that a solution agreeable to all parties involved can be reached in time for Sunday’s parade.”

There's only 36 hours or so left at this point before the parade, and it's looking like Boston's most famous brew isn't going to be at Boston's most famous yearly event.  Looks like I underestimated Mayor Walsh.

Besides, it's 2014.  Get over it, Southie.

Flights Of Fancy

The mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now getting very, very weird.

Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.

Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.

This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.

The last plot on the military radar's tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India's Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

People just don't hijack planes anymore, but that appears to be what has happened.  Where the plane was flown to and why, we don't know.  But nobody seems to know where the flight went to, whether it landed safely or if it crashed, or what.  If it went way off course and then crashed without giving off any transponder signal, planet Earth is a pretty big place to lose something.

We'll see.

Vox In A Box

Ezra Klein's new media venture, Vox.com, is getting off the ground soon and he's managed to hire a number of talented people, including Matthew Yglesias, Sarah Kliff, and more.  Unfortunately, as the American Prospect's Gabe Arana points out, his newest hire on the LGBTQ beat is Brandon Ambrosino, arguably one of the worst self-hating gay hacks out there.

The problem with hiring Ambrosino is not that Klein isn't entitled to bring someone on board whose views the gay community finds distasteful. It's that Ambrosino's quick rise to notoriety—and now, his ticket aboard the profession’s hottest new upstart—is an object lesson in the way new media equates click-bait contrarianism with serious thought and gives hacks a platform in the name of ideological balance.

A 23-year-old graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University...

Well that right there explains everything you need to know about Ambrosino, yes?

Ambrosino has earned his name as a journalist—and his coveted spot at Vox Media—by being the gay writer who comes to the defense of gay-rights antagonists. He most recently stirred up a storm by proclaiming, at The New Republic, that homosexuality is a choice and that he has chosen to be gay. Time magazine gave him space to call gays the real bigots for piling on Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, who had equated homosexuality with bestiality and said gays weren't going to heaven (still, Ambrosino says he wouldn't mind going fishing with the guy). At The Atlantic, Ambrosino threw his hat in the ring for the founder of his alma mater, who blamed September 11 on gays and accused them of trying to "recruit" children; Ambrosino says liberals like Bill Maher have slandered the Moral Majority founder and says, in Falwell's defense, that the guy with the "big fat smile" probably wouldn't have had him stoned to death if he'd known about Ambrosino's sexuality. Ambrosino also defends the views of ex-gay therapists and same-sex marriage opponents, whom he says aren't motivated by bigotry. In The Baltimore Sun, Ambrosino went after the guys in "butt-less chaps and high-heels" at gay-pride marches who earn society's prejudice with their "hypersexual antics": “I think there is a subversive power in living out my gay life in a way that seeks to emphasize the common ground I share with straight communities,” he wrote. “I don't want to participate in an event that seeks to highlight how countercultural I am.” Unsurprisingly, the religious right has been thrilled to find an acolyte among the fallen.

Now, Ambrosino is a known quantity, and Vox knew exactly what they were doing when they hired him.  In Ezra Klein's defense, why should Slate, Salon, BuzzFeed, Politico and HuffPo make all the money off of regularly trolling liberals?  The guy apparently understands exactly how the game works, guys.

In other words, this is how Ezra rolls.  Our"new" liberal media is just as bad as the current bunch of clowns.

StupidiNews!

• A new Senate deal has enough Republican support to restore extended unemployment benefits to millions, but it may already be doomed in the House.
• Colorado law enforcement officials have launched a new campaign to stop people from driving while under the effects of newly legalized marijuana.
• Bank of America is back before a federal judge as the Department of Justice wants the company to pay $2.1 billion in penalties stemming from its Countrywide mortgage unit.
• The Obama administration has lifted the government contracting ban on energy giant BP enforced in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Food supplement maker Soylent is delaying shipments of its product due to shortages in filling the firm's protein needs, but the product should be on its way in April.