Good news
There were whoops of joys and hugs and tears among scores of gay rights advocates and same-sex couples this morning outside the California Supreme Court building in San Francisco as word spread that the justices had cleared the way for gay and lesbian marriages.
Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group, ran out of the building on McAllister Street and screamed, “We won!”
I also cannot resist re-linking Mark Morford's celebration of marriage from four years ago.
I was there. I saw the lines, the smiles, felt the intense emotional energy. It was simply irrefutable: These are people in love. These are couples who have been together for years, decades, who have started families and raised children and set up homes replete with dogs and dinner parties and antiques and regular shopping excursions to Safeway and the mall. You know, just like "real" Americans.
These are couples who are willing to go the distance, to commit and connect, and who are eager to prove to themselves and the world that their love is something true and real and momentous, something that, in truth, can only serve to reignite and reunite our stagnant, fractured, contentious, 50 percent-divorce-rate nation. Hey, we need all the help we can get.
And one other thing was very apparent: It was a situation in which you simply could not imagine anyone hurling gobs of intolerant hate at it. It would have required a serious amount of nasty, inbred ignorance and appalling nerve to march up to any of the passionate and committed couples waiting patiently in line for their marriage ceremony and say, you know, God hates you for this, you immoral disgusting sodomites, and it's intolerable and unacceptable that you wish to love and honor each other till death do you part.
I'm sorry I cannot be in my city to celebrate today.
Pride Flag Flying Over the Armory
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche
Iron Man
Iron Man is the first comic-book movie that's actually better than its source material. That's partly because Iron Man is one of the most boring characters in the history of comics, but it's also because the movie manages to transcend its source.Oh, and don't make the mistake I did by leaving before the end credits finish; rumour has it there's a rockin' monk's reward.
Labels: movies, superheroes
Of interest to some readers
Ouch!
"There is no such thing as an antiwar film to a US Marine"
Bisy backson
Equinox
Obama
Which is, of course, its own statement, and a valid one.
Well, if you've been following the campaign news at all the last few days, you've surely seen that the inevitable direct invocation of American racism in the campaign has come in the form of videos of the Senator's pastor speaking at his Black church. It seems his pastor says that yeah, racism in America is really bad.
Shocking!
The Senator is not an Angry Black Man, but he knows one!
Oooh, scary! Maybe I shoulda endorsed the White lady after all.
So with this in the air, the Senator could defer talking directly about racism in America no longer. Here's his speech: A More Perfect Union. It's thirty-five minutes long, so go when you've got some time—but find the time to go soon.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it.
Update: “He wrote it himself. Think of that. He wrote it. Himself.”
Anniversary
I have neither the time nor the inclination today to outline the numberless Iraqi dead, the almost four thousand American dead, the thousands more American soldiers maimed in mind or body, the war crimes, the erosion of our armed forces' strength, the lost mystique of our intelligence services, the strengthening of al Qaeda and Islamist jihadism, the unrecoverable loss of American credibility, the corrosive effect on our whole political culture. I'll just give you this piece from the Financial Times about the money: Iraq war costs inspire shock and awe.
Six months before the start of the US led-invasion, Larry Lindsey, then White House economic adviser, estimated that the war in Iraq could cost as much as $200bn.That's right. More than a trillion dollars.The claim, which cost Mr Lindsey his job, was dismissed as baloney by Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary whose own estimate was $50bn to $60bn. Andrew Natsios, head of the Agency for International Development, estimated the reconstruction of Iraq would cost the US $1.7bn (€1.1bn, £849m).
These estimates have proved to be what the war’s critics say is just one of many grievous miscalculations. The Iraq war will be five years old on Tuesday, and serious estimates suggest it will be, with the exception of the second world war, the most costly in US history. Two academics estimate the government is spending $12bn a month in Iraq, while the Joint Economic Committee of Congress says the war has so far cost a US family of four $16,900, a bill that could rise to $37,000 by 2017.
The most conservative estimate of the war’s cost comes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, whose remit limits its analysis to US government spending. Up to September 30, the end of the 2007 fiscal year, it says $413bn was spent on Iraq. From then until the end of 2017, it calculates overall spending on Iraq and Afghanistan at $570bn-$1,055bn, depending on how quickly troop numbers are reduced. If three-quarters of the budget is spent on Iraq, the ratio of recent years, future direct budgetary costs would be a further $428bn to $788bn.
Interest payments on debt raised so far and attributable to the Iraq war would cost $290bn up to 2017, with a further $131bn to $218bn covering spending over the next 10 years. This would bring the US government bill until 2017 for Iraq to $1,300bn-$2,000bn.
If you had a trillion dollars, what would be the first thing you would spent it on?
Labels: iraq, the crisis
Google Sky
Archive
Yes, boys and girls, the White House archives its email to PST files.
Hint: It involves the internet
- K. D. Lang (or k. d. lang)
- Oral sex
- Olivia Newton-John
- Rotary International
- Pop-punk
- Speedy Gonzales
- Barry Manilow
- Bonnie and Clyde
- 4Kids Entertainment
- Geordi La Forge
- Spam
- Truth
Big Day
Labels: cinema
