It's That Time Again!

Today, Time reports that Santa has struck again in Joplin, Missouri.  Since 2004, an anonymous donor has deposited $50,000 each year in the Salvation Army kettles.  Last year and now, when times have been particularly tight, the donation doubled.  Camouflaged with $1 bills, the cashier's checks promise help for people who need it.

Joplin is most famous for its historical Route 66 and Bonnie and Clyde connection, but now it will also be remembered for a heartwarming kindness that repeats every year.

Manic Progressive Bear Theater

All the cool kids are doing it.  Also NOT EVEN REMOTELY safe for work.



Now with Bernie Sanders action figure with 8 hour filibuster action!

Back In The Day

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour keeps digging southern Republicans into a deeper and deeper hole with his steam shovel of a mouth.

Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), a potential Republican presidential candidate, has an interesting perspective on the tumults of the civil rights era that swept through his Deep South state.

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

Yeah, only one problem with the Citizens Council...they were the Klan, just without the robes and pointy sheets.

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

In 1998, American Conservative Union head David Keene barred the Citizens Council's modern incarnation, the Council of Conservative Citizens, from the annual CPAC conference: "we kicked [them] out of CPAC because they are racists."

Just your friendly, garden variety white supremacists. And Barbour is hoping to rewrite history so that nobody notices and the Republicans become the champions of civil rights or something.

The bad stuff in the civil rights movement?  Yeah, see, that was somebody else, see.  And they think you'll fall for it.

Throwing The Baby Out With The Bathwater

Another example of totally insane wingnut Republicans that got little play last week was that House Republicans killed a bill designed to protect girls from child marriages...after it got unanimous consent from Senate Republicans.

No, really.  The story goes like this:

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), was blindsided. After the Child Marriage Protection Act passed the Senate with zero objection on Dec. 1 -- a rare feat these days -- it didn't seem like there was much to worry about.

But just before the vote began, Republican leadership blasted out a "whip alert" to GOP staffers with a message: Vote no. The alert claimed the bill cost too much and that a competing bill, introduced just the day before, would be better.

"There are also concerns that funding will be directed to NGOs that promote and perform abortion and efforts to combat child marriage could be usurped as a way to overturn pro-life laws," the alert read.

And so the bill, which needed a two-thirds vote to pass under the suspended rules, failed. Even some congressmen who sponsored the bill voted no.

McCollum, along with human rights organizations and the State Department, believes that child marriage is a form of child abuse that includes sexual abuse, domestic violence and slavery.

The text of the bill does not mention abortion, contraception or family planning. Instead, it directs the president to make preventing child marriage a priority, especially in countries where more than 40 percent of girls under the age of 18 are married. The ways to do that, according to the bill: support educating communities on the dangers and health effects of child marriage, keep young girls in school, support female mentoring programs and make sure girls have access to health care services.

It's the "health care services" provision that had Republicans riled, according to a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, whose name is on the whip alert and who voted no on the bill.

"The concern was that the reference to 'health services' in the bill -- under the current Administration -- would include abortion services," the spokesman, Michael Steel, told TPM. 

To recap, paranoia that the bill might have been a secret horrible back door way to fund abortions defeated the very real danger of girls being sexually abused.  Then again, Republicans have made no attempt to hide the fact that some of them have no problem with rape or incest or sexual abuse of underage girls being preferable to them getting an abortion.

Even though the bill had nothing to do with reproductive health care services.

Paranoia is a wonderful thing.

More of this completely reasonable line of thought coming over the next two years as GOP paranoia descends upon the country.  Hey. you voted them in, America.  Elections have consequences.

Senate Dems Call 9-1-1 On The 9/11 First Responders Bill

The 9/11 first responders health care bill blocked by Republicans may be resuscitated after all, thanks to New York Senate Dems Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.

"We believe we are on a path to victory by the end of this week," said Senator Charles Schumer. But he was quick to add that unexpected obstacles could arise.

He and fellow New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand outlined for reporters some changes they will propose to their bill in an attempt to win over enough Republican support for passage as Congress winds down its legislative session for the year.

They hope to do that by producing a less expensive bill that they said would end up paying for itself, with $57 million left over in a 10-year period. That money could be used for deficit reduction, they said.

Instead of costing $7.4 billion, Gillibrand and Schumer said the measure's price tag would be reduced to $6.2 billion.

Their revised legislation would impose a new 2 percent fee on goods and services from firms in foreign countries that are not members of the Agreement on Government Procurement. Gillibrand said Saudi Arabia would be one of the countries in that category.

Other ways the $6.2 billion cost of the health bill would be covered were by continuing a fee on travelers to the United States that is set to expire in 2015 and continuing another fee for outsourcing companies that have more than half of their employees on visas to work in the United States.

And of course the problem according to Republicans was that the bill would add to the deficit, which apparently is more important that the people who ran to the collapsed World Trade Center and risked their lives and their health to save people during the worst terror attack this country has seen.  The trimmed down bill, now paid for, has to pass muster with the Republicans.  If they say word boo, it's time for Chuck to go nuclear on camera.

I honestly don't know how Republicans got away with opposing this in the first place.  Democrats should have been screaming on every morning show, newscast, and Sunday roundtable they could get access to over this.  The same Republicans who said building a Muslim community center anywhere in Manhattan was an insult to 9/11 are the same people throwing the first responders under the bus?

I applaud Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand for taking the high road, but this is something that Dems should have hammered in the press relentlessly.

Still A Non-STARTer For The GOP

Well, if you thought for a millisecond that the tax cut deal and DADT and even the surprise passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act last night was going to usher in a new era of bipartisan snuggle fun time in the Senate, I'm here to disabuse you of that particular notion as it looks increasingly grim for the START treaty.  Republicans are looking for political payback.

With some prominent Republicans angry over passage of legislation ending the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, the mood in the Senate turned increasingly divisive and Mr. Obama and Democratic lawmakers scrambled to hold together a coalition to approve the treaty.

Senator Harry M. Reid, the Democratic majority leader, moved to hold a vote on Tuesday to close off debate, saying, “You either want to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists or you don’t.” But the fate of the treaty, known as New Start, was complicated by a deadlock over government spending and the political subtext about whether the pact’s approval would rejuvenate a weakened president after his party’s midterm election defeat.

For the second day, Mr. Obama’s supporters defeated a Republican amendment that would have blocked approval of the treaty by the end of the year. But the 60-to-32 vote left them short of the two-thirds majority they will need for final approval, and the White House lost a Republican it had hoped would join them on the decisive vote expected later this week.

The debate on the Senate floor came hours after Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican leaders in the upper chamber, said they would vote against the treaty. While their opposition was not a surprise, the question was how aggressively Mr. McConnell in particular would lobby the handful of wavering Republicans who will decide the matter.

“I’ve decided that I cannot support the treaty,” Senator McConnell said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “I think the verification provisions are inadequate and I do worry about the missile-defense implications of it.” While the treaty was signed eight months ago, he said, “rushing it right before Christmas, it strikes me as trying to jam us.”

One Republican who had previously signaled willingness to support the treaty, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, suggested Sunday that he would not. Mr. Graham cited the sour mood engendered by Democrats forcing votes on other topics in recent days, including the bill on gays in the military that passed Saturday. “If you really want to have a chance of passing Start, you better start over and do it in the next Congress because this lame duck has been poisoned,” Mr. Graham said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. 

And Republicans are right back to the same idiotic arguments that they used during the health care reform debate:  that somehow this is "jamming it down the throats" of America as a last minute, unread cryptic mess even though the Senate has been discussing this treaty for eight full months now, and that Republicans want to "scrap it and start over".


It's clear the Republicans believe it's time to exact more concessions from the President and Democrats, and they are pretty confident that they will get them.  With the government now running on the fumes of short-term continuing resolutions and the Tea Party base livid that the Republicans haven't impeached Obama yet, the GOP has no choice but to say no to everything else.

We'll see if the Republicans stop acting like spoiled brats long enough to get this ratified.  As Sen. Kerry pointed out yesterday, this treaty has already been in Senate debate longer than the last three arms treaties with Russia combined.

The Tea-ranny Of The Majority Wants To Repeal The Federal Government

As I said yesterday the goal isn't to get crazy stuff like a constitutional amendment allowing states to repeal federal laws passed, it's to prevent the debate on our politics from ever moving an inch to the left.

The same people driving the lawsuits that seek to dismantle the Obama administration’s health care overhaul have set their sights on an even bigger target: a constitutional amendment that would allow a vote of the states to overturn any act of Congress.

Under the proposed “repeal amendment,” any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.

The idea has been propelled by the wave of Republican victories in the midterm elections. First promoted by Virginia lawmakers and Tea Party groups, it has the support of legislative leaders in 12 states. It also won the backing of the incoming House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, when it was introduced this month in Congress.

Like any constitutional amendment, it faces enormous hurdles: it must be approved by both chambers of Congress — requiring them to agree, in this case, to check their own power — and then by three-quarters of, or 38, state legislatures.

Still, the idea that the health care legislation was unconstitutional was dismissed as a fringe argument just six months ago — but last week, a federal judge agreed with that argument. Now, legal scholars are handicapping which Supreme Court justices will do the same.

The repeal amendment reflects a larger, growing debate about federal power at a time when the public’s approval of Congress is at a historic low. In the last several years, many states have passed so-called sovereignty resolutions, largely symbolic, aimed at nullifying federal laws they do not agree with, mostly on health care or gun control. 

The repeal amendment is the new unreachable goal for the wingnut right, just like all the other constitutional amendments that fell by the wayside:  amendments preventing flag burning, abortion, gay marriage...but it gets the wingnuts out and gets them to open their wallets to give.  It also pushes the debate further to the right, to the point where openly questioning if we should even have a federal government, and murmurs of secession from the union are growing.

It's a dangerous game to play, but that doesn't matter to some on the right.  Some 150 years ago very similar arguments were made in a much more violent fashion.  If the wingnuts can't have the country they want, then there won't be a country at all, it seems.

StupidiNews!

• South Korea's live-fire artillery exercises have ended without retaliation from North Korea, but tensions remain extremely high.
• The Senate has passed the Food Safety bill for a second time after a legislative snafu rendered the previous version invalid.
• South Carolina plans to celebrate the 150th anniversary of beginning of the state's role in the Civil War, causing controversy among many.
• A US Appeals Court has ruled that genetic diagnostic medical tests can be patented by companies.
• HP's WebOS tablet is on the way for early 2011 as a leaked keyboard accessory listing indicates.

Last Call

I wouldn't call the shift of six electoral college seats from Obama to McCain in the new census a "dramatic shift" towards GOP dominance, but at the state level it's going to make things harder for Democrats for the next decade.

The biggest gainer will be Texas, a GOP-dominated state expected to gain up to four new House seats, for a total of 36. The chief losers — New York and Ohio, each projected by nongovernment analysts to lose two seats — were carried by Obama in 2008 and are typical of states in the Northeast and Midwest that are declining in political influence.

Democrats' problems don't end there.

November's elections put Republicans in control of dozens of state legislatures and governorships, just as states prepare to redraw their congressional and legislative district maps. It's often a brutally partisan process, and Republicans' control in those states will enable them to create new districts to their liking.

The combination of population shifts and the recent election results could make Obama's re-election campaign more difficult. Each House seat represents an electoral vote in the presidential election process, giving more weight to states Obama probably will lose in 2012. The states he carried in 2008 are projected to lose, on balance, six electoral votes to states that his GOP challenger, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, won. That sets a higher bar for Obama before his re-election campaign even starts.

"The way the maps have shifted have made Obama's route to success much more difficult," said Republican Party spokesman Doug Heye. He said the GOP takeover of several state governments on the eve of redistricting efforts was "a dramatic shift."

Republicans now control the governor's offices and both legislative chambers in competitive presidential states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, Maine and Wisconsin. They hold the governors' chairs in other crucial states, including Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia and Iowa.

When Obama carried those states in 2008, most had Democratic governors happy to lend their political operations to his cause. Now he will run where governors can bend their powers against his administration's policies and his campaign's strategies.

Democratic Party spokesman Brad Woodhouse said his colleagues are aware of the challenges they face, "but we are putting a plan in place to maximize our opportunities, minimize potential setbacks and ensure that the process in each state is fair and done in accordance with the law."

In other words, expect Democrats to put up some resistance to the redistricting plans in blood red states.  The bad news?  In states like Texas and Florida, the GOP has a supermajority in the state legislature, meaning that Democrats may not be able to do a damn thing about it.

It's going to be a hard road.  We're going to see some crazy legislation come out of Florida, Texas, and other Southern and Southwestern states.  Something tells me not everyone there is going to be particularly happy with one-party rule and it's very possible that the Republicans will go way over the line.

But they will push the political debate further to the right in America as they do it, and will continue to do so.  And it's going to be extremely difficult to push back.

I Fight For The Users

Got to see Tron Legacy today.



Good times if you're a Tron fan. Maybe a bit too much effort to rope in all the references possible to the original film, but its heart is in the right place, and it's a beautiful movie visually.

The original film, well back in 1982 Zandardad was five years younger than I am now when he saw it. Made a geek out of him, and when I saw it (and nearly wore out the new VHS recorder and the tape of it as a result) he noticed how my eyes lit up and knew I was going to be a geek too.

Pop was a pretty fair lightcycle driver back in the day too. Never passed up an opportunity to play the Tron arcade game when he could. I was a Marble Madness and Mappy man myself at the tender age of 7, but Pop? Tron was his game, and he was good. We'd go with my younger brother and hit the arcade at the mall on weekends. Pop's specialties were Hat Trick and Tron.

Didn't take long for the family to end up with a C64 and me with a Basic For Kids workbook and a subscription to Compute's Gazette in 1984, and the rest was history.

"I fight for the users" pretty much sums up Zandardad. More than a little Kevin Flynn in him, always wanting to help the little guy. The older Kevin Flynn, still played by Jeff Bridges in the movie, is a somewhat more of a Zen hippie than my practical father, but Flynn's gray beard is identical to the one my father sports. The older Flynn's motto, "Remove your self from the equation" is more than a bit of my father as well.

Flynn's son Sam (Garrett Hedlund), well there are more than a couple similarities. Painfully intelligent but a slacker more worried about the idea than the execution, not quite ready to be in his father's impressive shadow, Sam and Kevin Flynn along with program Quorra (Olivia Wilde) are searching for a way to take back the digital world from Flynn's creation, Clu (a younger, digitized Bridges) whose quest for perfection has of course turned him into the very tyrant he and Flynn set out to stop.

Will the film create a new generation of computer geeks? Maybe. It's a good film, but tries too hard, the Windows Vista to Tron's dependable, legendary Windows 2000. It doesn't quite get it right, but it's still pretty nice and worth giving it a look.

Your inner 7 year old geek kid will enjoy it. The older you? Well, let the kid enjoy themselves and you'll be okay.

A Gay Old Time At The White House

MoDo The Red sobers up enough to ask Rep. Barney Frank if America's ready for a gay President.  The running joke is we've already had at least one.  As far as an openly gay President?  Let's just say I agree with Frank that I wouldn't count on that happening as a Republican.

I called Barney Frank, assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic. He wasn’t. “It’s one thing to have a gay person in the abstract,” he said. “It’s another to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a gay presidential candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two men kissing.”

Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, he added, “it’s not clear that a gay president could use federal funds to buy his husband dinner. Would his partner have to pay rent in the White House? There would be no Secret Service protection for the paramour.”

Frank noted that we’ve “clearly had one gay president already, James Buchanan. If I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be him.” (The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan aims higher, citing Abe Lincoln, who sometimes bundled with his military bodyguard in bed when his wife was away.)

Frank said that although most Republicans now acknowledge that sexual orientation is not a choice, they still can’t handle their pols’ coming out. “There are Republicans here who are gay,” he said of Congress, “but as long as they don’t acknowledge it, it’s O.K. Republicans only tolerate you being gay as long as you don’t seem proud of it. You’ve got to be apologetic.” 

The four openly gay members of Congress are all Democratic House members (Jared Polis will be sworn in in January as #4).  Rumor has it there are at least that many closeted members on the GOP side (I leave that speculation to Howie Klein) but Frank has a point:  no gay President would be tolerated by today's Republicans.

I don't think it's a matter of if America's ready, but if Republicans are...and the answer to that is "not for at least another generation."  Having said that...we did just elect the nation's first non-white President.

I don't think it will happen in my lifetime, unfortunately.

Ebony And Ivory Coast

Meanwhile in other world news, the country of Ivory Coast is just the latest in a long string of African nations embroiled in conflict and misery.  The UN is reporting thousands are fleeing the country ahead of a looming larger war.

The disputed presidential election outcome between opposition leader Alassane Ouattara and incumbent Laurent Gbagbo has threatened to derail a fragile peace process in the west African nation.

The renewed refugee flow has also put neighboring Liberia and Guinea on high alert.

"In my village the majority voted massively for President Laurent Gbagbo, and [the New Forces soldiers] threatened us because of that. They came to our houses and started to harass us, to mistreat us," said Jean-Jacques Issignate, 19, from Nyale, an Ivorian village along the Guinea border. "We fled to the forest ... I spent one week in the forest."

Provisional results from a November presidential runoff intended to end more than 10 years of civil war showed Ouattara as the winner with a nearly eight-point margin.

Earlier this month, the nation's highest court, headed by an ally of Gbagbo, canceled thousands of votes from the north -- Ouattara's stronghold -- and declared Gbagbo the winner with 51 percent of the vote.

Oldest story in the book it seems:  the not-so-peaceful transition of power.   The international community is backing Ouattara's bid for the country's presidency, but Gbagbo isn't going to give up without a fight, and that's why everyone's getting out of the way before the inevitable UN action puts yet another fire zone on the map.  No doubt the conflict will draw the usual mercs and warlords looking to make a name for themselves, and these days who knows what private military companies may get involved here as we head into 2011.

What I do know is that most likely, things are going to get a lot bloodier here and soon.

Korean-ing Off The Rails, Part 3

The UN Security Council is finally getting around to talking about the scary prospect of the resumption of hostilities between the two Koreas, and what the rest of the international community can do (IE, the US and China) to stop that from happening.  The problem is South Korea's live fire exercise drills this weekend, with North Korea promising retaliation if the South goes through with them.

As the U.N. Security Council prepared to convene Sunday morning to hold an emergency session concerning tensions on the Korean Peninsula, South Korea reiterated that it will go forward with live-fire military drills this week.

The drills will take place Monday or Tuesday in the Yellow Sea off Yeonpyeong Island, the state-run Yonhap news agency reported, citing a military official. Tensions between the two Koreas have been high since the North fired upon the island last month, killing two marines and two civilians.

"The planned firing drill is part of the usual exercises conducted by our troops based on Yeonpyeong Island. The drill can be justifiable, as it will occur within our territorial waters," the official said.

The military said Thursday that the exercises would take place in the seas southwest of the island between December 18 and 21, but adverse weather forced a delay Saturday.

North Korea has warned of serious consequences if the drill goes on as planned, but it won't deter the South Koreans, the official said. China and Russia have asked South Korea to reconsider.

"We won't take into consideration North Korean threats and diplomatic situations before holding the live-fire drill. If weather permits, it will be held as scheduled," the military official said.

In response to the South's decision, Russia called for the emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, set for Sunday morning. The meeting was slated to begin at 11 a.m. ET.

South Korea is definitely the aggrieved party here in this mess, and asking them to play nice isn't going to work unless they can show some sort of game face.  It's clear there's a real problem here, and North Korea isn't exactly the most stable of nations.  South Korea will go ahead, hence the meeting about what will be next.

If anyone is interested in keeping this mess from blowing up, it's China.  You'd figure they'd be taking the lead on this, but it looks like Russia and the US are the most active nations on the Korean front right now.  We'll see how it goes.

The Business Of The Roberts Court Is Business

No Supreme Court in history it seems has been as beholden to the business community as the Roberts Court.  The NY Times' Adam Liptak takes a look at the relationship between the court and the most influential filer of amicus briefs as of late:  the US Chamber of Commerce.  Indeed, more and more corporate law is ending up before SCOTUS, and that means more and more corporate legal teams are including veteran litigants who have gone before the court before and know how to play the game.  It's a game they are winning.

The chamber now files briefs in most major business cases. The side it supported in the last term won 13 of 16 cases. Six of those were decided with a majority vote of five justices, and five of those decisions favored the chamber’s side. One of the them was Citizens United, in which the chamber successfully urged the court to guarantee what it called “free corporate speech” by lifting restrictions on campaign spending.

The chamber’s success rate is but one indication of the Roberts court’s leanings on business issues. A new study, prepared for The New York Times by scholars at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, analyzed some 1,450 decisions since 1953. It showed that the percentage of business cases on the Supreme Court docket has grown in the Roberts years, as has the percentage of cases won by business interests.

The Roberts court, which has completed five terms, ruled for business interests 61 percent of the time, compared with 46 percent in the last five years of the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, and 42 percent by all courts since 1953.

Those differences are statistically significant, the study found. It was prepared by Lee Epstein, a political scientist at Northwestern’s law school; William M. Landes, an economist at the University of Chicago; and Judge Richard A. Posner, who serves on the federal appeals court in Chicago and teaches law at the University of Chicago.

The Roberts court’s engagement with business issues has risen along with the emergence of a breed of lawyers specializing in Supreme Court advocacy, many of them veterans of the United States solicitor general’s office, which represents the federal government in the court.

These specialists have been extraordinarily successful, both in persuading the court to hear business cases and to rule in favor of their clients. The Supreme Court’s business docket has stayed active in the current term, which began in October. In a single week this month, the court heard arguments in a case brought by the chamber challenging an Arizona law that imposes penalties on companies that hire illegal workers, and it agreed to hear two cases that could reshape class-action and environmental law.

This relationship, business law through the Supreme Court, has been the core of Roberts Court precedent.  Never before has the corporate community been given such a powerful voice in the judicial.  It's one of the main reasons I actually think the insurance mandate will pass constitutional muster:  the health insurance companies and the Chamber want it.  At the same time, we've already seen the price that the country s paying for decisions like Citizens United.

This court has repeatedly come down in favor of business over people, and it will continue to reshape America in that image for decades to come.

Overreaction Attraction Action

Here's what opponents of DADT repeal say will happen as a result of today's vote.  Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association predicts the end of America:

Character-driven officers and chaplains will eventually be forced out of the military en masse, potential recruits will stay away in droves, and re-enlistments will eventually drop like a rock.

The draft will return with a vengeance and out of necessity. What young man wants to voluntarily join an outfit that will force him to shower naked with males who have a sexual interest in him and just might molest him while he sleeps in his bunk?

This isn’t a game, and the military should never be used, as is now being done, for massive social re-engineering. The new Marine motto: “The Few, the Proud, the Sexually Twisted.” Good luck selling that to strong young males who would otherwise love to defend their country. What virile young man wants to serve in a military like that?

If the president and the Democrats wanted to purposely weaken and eventually destroy the United States of America, they could not have picked a more efficient strategy to make it happen.

Rarely can you point to a moment in time when a nation consigned itself to the scrap heap of history. Today, when the Senate normalized sexual perversion in the military, was that moment for the United States. If historians want a fixed marker pointing to the instant the United States sealed its own demise, they just found it.

Quite interesting.  Well, by that "logic" anyone who doesn't immediately signal their intent to quit the military must be a closet case lurking with the intent to destroy America with gay sex.  I wonder how long it will take before the Right Wing declares war on the Pentagon?  Will they defund the Defense Department to stop men showing either other their rifles?  Will the Republicans introduce legislation to stop women hiding in the bush?  Will our now eternally tainted military become Pubic Enemy #1.

How long before Republicans sing the praises of conscientious objectors who are bravely refusing to serve in war because of gay cooties?  Surely if the draft is inevitable, these manly patriots will join the military in order to save the civilian population, right?

I mean it's not like these guys are a bunch of chickenhawks who are trying to score lame political points by demonizing our LGBT loved ones, yes?

Perish the thought.