What Are We Waiting For?

This weekend, if you do nothing else, there are two vitally important things we hope you will take time to accomplish in order to stop the madness that seems to be bleeding the planet of peace, prosperity and natural resources:

1. Push for campaign finance reform in order to publicly fund elections. This will make it more likely that elected officials will work for US and not big corporate donors and lobbyists.
2. Demand an end to media consolidation. When only a few corporations are allowed to own the media, they control the information – and disinformation – we receive. Without full knowledge and understanding of the urgent issues of the day, we are unable to make informed decisions to solve our problems.
   

A short list of what we are facing today and why you need to get involved:

Looming Recession:

The news that 4,000 jobs were lost in the month of August -- the first outright decline in four years – a “stunning number” considering economists were forecasting a 100,000 gain -- sent stock markets reeling with the dollar falling to a 15-year low:

"The [U.S.] jobs data ... is simply horrific and fans the most pessimistic fears -- the housing market woes will undermine the U.S. consumer, push the U.S. economy into recession and drag down growth in much of the rest of the world."

Threats of war with Iran:

Six nuclear-armed stealthy advance cruise missiles (ACMs) were “inadvertently” flown on the wing pylons of a B-52 from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on August 30

“There is informed speculation that the movement of the nuclear weapons was leaked because the [Louisiana] air force base is a staging area for deployment to the Middle East.

The Pentagon recently drew up plans to hit 1200 targets inside Iran in a massive bombardment campaign aimed at destroying its military and overthrowing its government. The movement of the nuclear weapons may have been an alert to the public by disgruntled members of the military that such plans would include the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons.

The report that the weapons were transferred to Barksdale for "decommissioning" appears to be a cover story concocted by Pentagon spinmeisters, since any movement of nuclear weapons is treated as highly-classified information.”

Health Care Crisis:

Health care is very expensive in America. According to the National Coalition on Health Care, health care spending in the United States reached $2 trillion and was projected to reach $2.9 trillion in 2009. The country spends 4.3-times more money than what is spent on national defense. Nearly 47 million Americans are uninsured. Even with insurance, the cost of prescription drugs can put a strain on one's budget. A 2006 survey revealed one in four Americans report paying for medical care has been a problem for their family in the past year, and nearly 30 percent say a family member has put off getting medical care.

Global climate change is rapidly transforming the environment:

“Wildfires are flaring in Alaska, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. In Glacier National Park, where glacier numbers have fallen from 150 to 26 since 1850, the habitat of bighorn sheep, mountain goats and grizzly bears is vanishing.

Meanwhile, sea levels are rising around the low-lying Florida Keys and global warming is killing off the nation's trees. Spruce bark beetles are chewing their way through Alaska's Kenai Peninsula and the Chugach National Forest, while pine beetles are destroying red spruce woodlands. Non-native grasses have replaced native shrubs in the Mojave Desert, fuelling longer-lasting wildfires.”

Arctic sea ice had fallen to 4.75 million square miles — or 250,000 square miles below the previous record low of 5.05 million square miles in September 2005 and polar bears are expected to become extinct by the year 2050.

Obviously, there are many other crises that we could list here but for a lack of time and space we will stop at these.

Visit Stop Big Media to find out what you can do about media consolidation.

Learn about campaign finance reform and how you can make a difference.

Help! Pat Buchanan is Imposing His Marriage on Us!

When we watch the news and hear outlandish and false statements about LGBTQ people and our "agenda" go unchallenged, we worry that the misinformation will eventually be seen as "the truth."

Unfortunately, as occasional victims of these lies, we are left to scream helplessly at the television, demanding for a correction or an apology -- which never comes.

Today we want to address a particularly annoying lie that keeps recycling throughout debates over the Larry Craig debacle -- that gay and lesbian partners demands for equal marriage rights are unjustified and illegitimate.

As you are no doubt aware, Senator Larry Craig’s tearoom tap dance is all-the-buzz lately on every TV news/talk show.

Pundits and talking heads – most of them straight (at least publicly) males – are pontificating on the inescapable reality that the GOP is riddled with gay bashing hypocrites.

Last week, on one particular segment of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, he and Republican strategist, Pat Buchanan spent about 15 minutes agonizing over the potential negative impact Craig’s sordid tale would have on the Republican’s chances of winning the 2008 Presidential election.

During their exchange, Matthews stated (and has since repeated) that it irks him to see self-hating gay bigots like Craig pushing for laws like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Constitutional Amendment to ban equal marriage rights.

Matthews is especially fired up over DADT, which he believes is a “legitimate” concern for “patriotic” LGBTQ Americans who want to serve their country (and implicit in his insistence that arguments against DADT are legitimate, is Matthews’ opinion that demands for marriage equality rights are not valid).

A few nights ago, Matthews went head-to-head with Pat Buchanan over the Larry Craig fiasco and the two pundits their views on the validity of DADT and the issue of marriage equality.

Matthews reiterated his views on DADT and Buchanan countered that the policy is a logical solution because it protects unsuspecting and vulnerable straight soldiers from being molested by gays as they sleep in their barracks. (What a bunch of hooey!)

When the dueling conservatives got around to discussing marriage, blow-hard Buchanan bellowed that advocates for equal marriage rights are trying to force him to accept our marriages as legitimate – and that would be unfair to him:

“You‘re—but see, the two homosexuals would be asking their—they‘re imposing something on me. They‘re saying, you must recognize my—our relationship as marriage. And I say, look, my values say no. I mean, if you‘re living in Dupont Circle, that‘s your business.”

As usual and until now, Buchanan’s absurd statement went unchallenged.

We will now offer the response we can only dream of hearing on the air some day:

• First, that kind of insulting and conceited statement just infuriates us!
  

• Second, just how would our marriage be in any way an imposition on Pat Buchanan -- or anyone else besides us for that matter?
  

• Third, assuming that Pat Buchanan is a married man, we are not in the slightest bit burdened by his marriage. Despite knowing that somewhere lurks the specter of Buchanan’s marriage, we go on about our daily lives as if it does not exist at all.
  

The only problem we have with Buchanan’s marriage is that although we are American citizens and we pay taxes that support programs that are available to Buchanan and his wife, we are not able to enjoy the same rights and privileges granted by those programs.

Want to know what is really unfair? That WE are the ones forced to accept Buchanan’s marriage while being denied the right to our own!

If you want to add your voice to the growing chorus of American’s who are sick and tired of anti-marriage legislation, please sign our petition and we will pass it on to the President and your representatives in Congress.

Here you will find many more examples of Republican ‘moral values’ hypocrisy.

Bald-Heads and Other Fetishes

Senator Larry Craig likes anonymous gay sex and as the photo collage on the right illustrates, George W. Bush likes the feel of bald heads.

It seems right wing-nuts are more obsessed with sex than Larry Flint.

While they noisily demand adherence to laws and policies that establish socially acceptable, sexual “norms” for the rest of us, many of the loudest of the pontificators of Puritanism have secretly carved out exceptions to those rules for themselves.

The more extreme the anti-sexual rhetoric -- the more bellicose the protestations -- the more likely we are to discover they have their own hidden and lurid fetishes. In the meantime, LGBTQ people are forced to live our lives without the legal rights and protections of marriage.

The scenario has become so silly and obvious: from now on, when we hear extreme conservatives preach aggressively in support of legal and social controls for private sexual behavior between consenting adults, we will see it as a symptom of that person’s own Paraphilia.

Now that we understand the situation, we can easily see why these wing-nuts continue to dwell on the subject of sex, even when the rest of us are concerned about the war, the economy, jobs, fair trade policy, election fraud, democracy, and other minor issues of the day.

We see nothing wrong with wing-nuts obsessing over sex – as long as they do so in private and with other consenting adults. In fact, we wish them well in their pursuit of group sex, threesomes, homosexual or heterosexual sex, pornography, S & M, whatever “stiffs their spiffs.”

But as long as our government is controlled by closeted sexual deviants, same-sex partners will continue to suffer the consequences of life without legal rights and protections. Such rights will only be granted to “normal, heterosexual married couples.”

While we wait for the rest of the country to wake up to the fact that perceptions about equal marriage rights are being warped by negative stereotypes sputtered by holier-than-thou hypocrites, our families bask in the purgatory of second-class citizenship.

Because marriage confers legal rights, protections and obligations we do not have, we are forced to make the time and take the extra effort to get legal documents to protect our families.

And we absolutely cannot and should not wait for our elected perverts to do it for us.

The Gay Life

This from an article we read this morning:

"Larry Craig is a clear illustration of what the gay rights movement is up against in our fight to be removed from the list of second class citizens. He cares more about his purse and his image on the world stage than he does the suffering of a class of people of which he is a part. He is as much a traitor and betrayer as Judas Iscariot himself.

All of this begs the question, "why?" It's a question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered. What about homosexuality is so threatening to society that groups like the RepubliKKKan party and the Religious Reich are compelled to do all in their power to keep gays in the closet, in the tearoom, and by the actions of vice cops, in the courtroom?

I have no real answers on the why. I have some theories, but I can't call any of them facts.

Social control: Politics and religion are in the business of social control. They use many means to maintain their power over society as a whole. By effectively making homosexuality both a crime and a sin, effectively if they can't shame us into compliance by invoking the name of god, they will get us with the threat and real possibility of legal action. By using these methods, they insure that none but the bravest or most foolhardy will have the courage to come out. They also insure that those who have the need, but not the courage to be honest will eventually wind up busted, and in the legal system. That means dollar bills. If there is one thing that America loves, it's those filthy green-backed pieces of rag paper.

Envy: As I said above, men are horny from the time that testosterone begins raging through their bodies around adolescence. Gay men as a general rule are more likely to find a willing partner for quick anonymous sex. The sex we have has no way of being reproductive. Effectively, without the threat of AIDS or other STD's, gay sex is sex for pleasure. It is sex for pleasure with no ill effects, or nine month surprises. The same cannot be said of heterosexual contact. There is the ever present reality that the nine seconds of pleasure of the orgasm will be followed by nine months of worry followed by eighteen years of child support. Tell me that isn't cause for jealousy. If people will kill because of jealousy, does it not stand to reason they would label someone who was getting more sex than themselves a sinner?

The need to hate: There are simply some people out there who have to hate. It is their Alpha and Omega. It is their overriding reason for living. Gays make a convenient target. As a matter of fact, the use of the word "faggot" remains the last socially acceptable bit of hate speech. The actions of the Religious Reich and the Republicans insure [sic] that nothing short of our own version of a march to Selma will ever begin breaking the hatred."

Read the entire article here

Smoking Gun Proof of Blatant Election Fraud

How we got George Bush:

It's no secret - the election was a fraud!

George Bush has shredded the Constitution; bankrupted the country; blackened our reputation as a people; and lied us into an illegal, immoral, self-destructive military operation in Iraq.

And he was never elected president.

Not in 2000. Not in 2004.

And the news media, Congress, and the Democratic Party have never even attempted to do anything about it.

If you're living in America, that's the kind of country you're living in now.

It's not a question of when or if we'll lose our democracy, it's been gone a long time. The only question is what we're going to do to get it back.

George and John: Breaking up is hard to do!

This week’s meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Sydney should mark the last time that Australian Prime Minister John Howard and US President George W Bush get to schmooze one another as official heads of state.

As they gaze one last time into one another's eyes, perhaps they will be saddened that their days of war mongering against the Muslim world and against the LGBTQ Community are nearly over.

After all, they have been successful at murdering hundreds of thousands of Muslim men, women and children -- and have unleashed an unprecedented assault on gay men and lesbians in the US, Australia, Afghanistan and Iraq:

"Life is particularly less safe for gay and lesbian people in Iraq, many of whom are being hunted down and executed by Islamic extremists. But it is over the rights of their own gay and lesbian constituents that Bush and Howard are arguably most aligned.

In the lead-up to the 2004 US Presidential election, Bush’s Republican Party sought to mobilise right wing Christian voters by placing referenda on gay marriage on the ballot papers of many of the vital swing States that would determine the election result.

Bush went on to win many of those States, with gay marriage banned in each.

Similarly, in the lead-up to Australia’s general election in 2004, John Howard introduced legislation to ban gay marriage."

We say good riddance to both of these dangerous and delusional men.