Something interesting to think about....

from the Star's Brent Ledger:

One of the great advantages of gay life has always been its social freedom. Unfettered by institutional restraints, gay relationships were free to seek their own balance.

People would pal around with friends, lovers and various combinations of the two, and few of these relationships were as exclusive or as hierarchical as marriage, which basically suggests that there's only one intimate relationship worth having and it had better be sexual and exclusive.

But like everyone else, I find myself getting on the pro-marriage bandwagon just because to do otherwise would be un-gay. And this annoys me, because it stifles nuance, innovation and discussion.

There are a million ways to support relationships, gay and straight, and they don't all have to start with the letter "m."

I want to support friends who have married but I don't want marriage to become the default position for gay relationships the way it is for straights. Nor do I want gays to think less of themselves for not participating in an essentially straight ritual.

While marriage confers undeniable legal and financial benefits – perks that should be available to all – its sociopsychological benefits are perhaps more open to debate. Reading about the queer couples lined up for marriage in the U.S., many of whom had been together for decades, I couldn't help noticing how well they'd done without it.

The only thing that I would add to these sensible points to ponder would be this: should marriage for straights be the default setting? Straights are probably long overdue to be "free to seek their own balance", to "pal around with friends, lovers and various combinations of the two" and be wary of "relationships were as exclusive or as hierarchical as marriage, which basically suggests that there's only one intimate relationship worth having and it had better be sexual and exclusive".

Droll sarcasm at its accurate finest.

MSNBC’s staying with four hours of former GOP Representative Joe Scarborough, who sits with moderate conservative radio host Mike Barnicle and ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan talking the entire time about how the media is too much in Obama’s tank.

Jesse Taylor over at Pandagon, today.

She's got it.

Commenter "Thena, Sultana of Stale Raisin Bread" addresses the difference between poor, working class and middle class:

The difference (IMO) between working-class and middle-class is not just about income but about security.

I figure it this way:

the genuinely poor are those who struggle to get by on a day to day, week to week basis. The keyword here is Survival.

the working class (where I see myself) are those who get by but can’t really get ahead - able to pay the rent but not save up enough for a down payment, perhaps, or employed but uninsured, for instance. The keyword here is Security.

Real middle-class status, to me, implies a certain basic level of security: you know you’ve got enough to take a hit and keep rolling in a “One down three engines good” sort of way. You own your home (or have a mortgage that you can easily keep up with); you have health insurance and savings and a 401K or a government pension and you can reasonably expect that things are going to be Okay - maybe not fabulous, maybe you won’t make that trip to DisneyVille this summer, but you’ll eat regularly and go straight to the ER when you injure yourself instead of waiting a few days to see if it gets better on its own. The keyword here is Stability.

(In this paradigm I’d use “Savings” as the keyword for the upper class - being those who have money left over to save or invest after their material needs and comforts are assured for the foreseeable future - and “Surfeit” as the keyword for the genuinely wealthy, the people who have more money than I can figure out what to do with. And I am capable of finding good homes for absurdly large dollar figures, I work in a state government accounting office. At the moment.)

By this measure I believe there are a whole lot of people in this country who are not middle class but call themselves by that name because they don’t want to admit the economy’s broken.

(In case you were wondering about the name: there was a period where most regular posters at Pandagon had a food-related nickname, or a foody variant on their normal nickname. Why, I cannot recall.)

Best quote on abuse of authority that you will hear for a while.

"When your only tool is a hammer, everyone looks like a nail."

Commenter "Cynical in CA" over at The Agitator.

Genius.

Boffo Quote 010: The small businesswoman speaks!

"If the government was my boyfriend, all it would want to do is have me up the ass."

The lady in question insists on anonymity.

"They can look at the damned pictures!"

The tradition of Thomas Nast is alive and well, thank god.

What's theirs is theirs, what's yours is theirs, what's ours is theirs

Digby nails it:

"[T]the Bush era set up a kind of corporate Marxism, where risk is socialized, but where wealth is privatized. And the middle class ... are the only ones who ever feel any pain."

Coincidence? She thinks not...
And I agree with her.

[I]t is no coincidence that the War On Drugs heated up after the civil rights movement achieved a set of huge victories that gave this country a moment of hope for something like racial equality. Now we have a country where 1 in 15 black people are currently in jail.

Amanda Marcotte, "The brainless, pointless War On Drugs", March 6, 2008

One should also remember that a real wave of felony disenfranchisement laws gained steam at around this time. As the law in the USA currently stands::
* only two US states have no laws on voting by felons;
* only inmates convicted of a felony are barred from voting (with their right to vote restored upon release from prison) in 13 states;
* felons (in prison and on parole) are barred from voting but can vote upon completion of parole in 5 states;
* inmates, parolees, and probationers are barred (and so can vote only upon completion of all supervised release) in 20 states;
* inmates, parolees, probationers, and ex-felons are completely barred from voting (restoration of voting varies by state) in 10 states.

Given that Blacks are grossly disproportionately represented in the American prison population it should come as no surprise that every single state of the former Confederacy is found in the two categories with the toughest restrictions, as are three states which were Confederate Territories in whole or in part, as are three states that remained in the Union but had majority-Reb populations, and "bleeding Kansas", which is currently aggressively pro-GOP. (Further, many of the felony disenfranchisement laws in the Old South started during Reconstruction as the former Confederate states cast about for ways to prevent their'n newly free and unacceptably uppity niggers from votin'.)

Don't forget that these lists don't have to be accurate to stop a person from voting. By way of example: many, many people in Florida (mostly Black) in the notorious 2000 presidential election found themselves unable to vote because of being erroneously listed as having felony convictions, and could not get their right to vote restored in time or at all. (It was, I'm sure that we all agree, just a coincidence that the list was provided by a Texas GOP firm to a state with a GOP governor, a GOP legislature and a GOP Secretary of State - Katherine Harris - who was disgustingly overt about her efforts to stop people from voting Democrat. And most Blacks vote Democrat. Just a coincidence.)

Ralph Nader in a nutshell

"[M]y sense is is that Mr. Nader is somebody who, if you don’t listen and adopt all of his policies, thinks you’re not substantive. He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work."

Barack Obama, quoted in the New York Times,
February 24, 2008.

Boffo Quote 007

"When you relax and don't try to be charming you can be quite charming."
___

Boffo Quote 006

"Modern conservatism is built around the idea that collective, government sponsored solutions to social problems can't work, and operates by making certain that those solutions won't work."

Robert Farley, "The Big Con: Disability Edition",
from Lawyers, Guns & Money
.

Boffo Quote 005

“Most people tend to blame their triumphs on internal excellence and their failures on environment, but reverse it for others.”

Amanda Marcotte, "Just admit it", November 26, 2007.

Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

From Terry Pratchett's Men At Arms.

It's always wise to listen to the comedians and satirists. They usually tell the Truth well in a few memorable lines, as opposed to Serious Thinkers who often can't be as pithy or as accurate no matter how many extra chapters you give them. And this is a perfect example.

Boffo Quote 004

“Popular fiction doesn't just mirror its readers' reality, it inspires and creates it -- which makes it somehow more real than reality.”

Douglas Wolk summarizing Alan Moore’s take on pop culture in Moore’s graphic novel Black Dossier. Quote is found in the review “Who are these unmasked men?”, Salon, November 24, 2007

Boffo quote Number 003

"You can say that `anecdote is not evidence', but isn't every day, every experience, every anecdote a sample? Are you not allowed to draw conclusions from thousands upon thousands of cumulative samples?"

Robert Rose, Friday, November 16, 2007

.

Boffo quote Number 002

"Your modesty is so retiring it left for Mexico years ago and never came back. It's sitting on a beach somewhere wondering if you'll ever write..."

The Real Interrobang, November 15, 2007

I don't believe in heaven, but....

if there is such a place I hope that there is a spot reserved for cheerful, unpretentious geeks who take the time to ponder Bigfoot and his true believers, and who, like me, have many a happy memory of faux documentaries breathlessly examining some paranormal topic. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Phil Nugent Experience.

“There’s very few people that think that basing laws on dogma is a good idea unless they have repugnant political ideas that can’t be explained logically, so they have to hide behind god.”

Amanda Marcotte, “Crucifixes and Lapel Pins”, October 15, 2007

I guess that one must start with a profound thought. That's easy. I will steal one from Terry Pratchett:

“[T]here are hardly any of the excess of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do. … A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.”
Small Gods (Corgi Paperback edition), p.20