Via Daily What.

Elizabeth Eve and Kathryn Cartledge have been together for 30 years and raised two daughters. Why can't they marry?

A Federal Appeals Court in Boston issued a ruling this morning that the Defense of Marriage Act denies gay couples their Constitutional rights to the same federal benefits straight couples enjoy.

In all, straight couples enjoy more than 1,000 rights and benefits that are denied to gay and lesbian couples, even in states where such marriages are legal.

The Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, was passed by Congress in 1996 when it looked like Hawaii was about to legalize gay marriage. Of course, since then a couple dozen states have followed suit and either passed laws or amended their constitutions to outlaw gay marriage. Eight states have legalized it: Massachusetts, in 2006, followed by Connecticut, New York, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, Washington state and the District of Columbia. Maryland and Washington’s laws aren’t enacted yet and still could face popular votes.

In those states that have legalized marriage between any two consenting adults, gay couples are being denied the same federal benefits straight married couples enjoy. That, the appeals court said, is unconstitutional.

The decision won’t go into effect until the US Supreme Court rules on the case, which I find worrisome, considering the current domination of the court by conservative activists.

Part of the problem here is that anti-gay religious people have been able to mobilize the popular vote better than we who support the right of all consenting adults to make the legal contract we know as marriage.

I’ve known all along that the courts and/or Congress are going to have to step in and assert the rights of GLBT people to marry; states aren’t known for expanding the rights of people on their own. Look at the history of the Civil Rights Movement or that of the Women Suffrage Movement. The majority of people seem to want to preserve their own rights rather than extend equal rights to a minority.

When I ask people who oppose same-sex marriage why they think gays should be denied the same rights they enjoy, they invariably quote religion. But if it’s a religious issue, why is it codified into the laws of a nation where the church is supposed to be separate from the state?

They usually either don’t answer or they use the slippery-slope argument. You know, the one: “If we do this, the next thing you know, people will want to marry their dogs.”

But dogs aren’t consenting adults, nor are farm animals, birds, insects — or children. So don’t start with the pedophilia argument either.

If you have a religious objection to gays being married, then you don’t have to allow them to be married in your church. And you don’t have to marry someone of your same gender.

But you can’t deny people their rights because your religion says they’re sinners.

I’ve had this discussion with plenty of “love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin” types. My argument is that people are born to be who they are.

How can you separate someone from the person they were born to be?

I think we’re all on a continuum — we all have tendencies within us. I’m straight. Some people are bisexual; others are gay or lesbian.  It’s how we’re meant to be, and we all deserve the same right to choose our life partners from among consenting adults.

A report, published today in the New York Times reveals that President Obama approves personally the targets on the secret “kill list” of the US extensive drone program. If in many corporations in America office workers have a “casual Friday”, at the White House the big day is “assassins Tuesday”. It is when, according to the NYT, about two dozen counter-terrorism security officials meet with the president in the Situation Room. The decisions can deal with terror suspects anywhere in the world, as the Obama administration seems to view countries sovereignty as an insignificant detail. In the past few years, the main targets have been in Yemen and Pakistan, but the sky is literally the limit for the secret program. “Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nomination’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical,” wrote NYT’s Jo Becker and Scott Shane. The evolution of president Obama has stunned some of his current and former advisers who told the NYT that it is without precedent in US history to have a president heading personally this type of shadow war.

President Obama, through the managing of the drone program as well as maintaining Guantanamo open has shown once again his shrewdness, callousness and fundamental hypocrisy. On the second day of his presidency, Obama signed several executive orders to “honor” some of his campaign promises. He declared that brutal interrogation techniques were banned and that the infamous Guantanamo prison would be closed down. “What the new president did not say was that the executive orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric,” wrote Jo Becker and Scott Shane. Basically, in a covert manner, president Obama, using his legal skills, had preserved three major Bush policies which he had attacked so vehemently doing the campaign: rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention.

In 2008, then candidate Obama rightly said that Guantanamo and what it represented was “the best recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and terrorists “enemies of America”. In 2012, the shameful prison is still open, and adding to this assassination has now become state policy. Despite the lies of the Obama administration, drone strikes are never “clinical” and most of the time kill countless civilians in what is casually called collateral damage. Drone attacks fuel anti-American sentiments all over the world, most notably in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They are in breach of the most basic international laws, and they also represent an extremely dangerous slippery slope. Besides being a war fought in a cowardly manner, where the “pilot” operating the drone is thousands of miles away from his victims, it could also be arbitrarily extended for domestic programs. It could also become a weapon of predilection worldwide. Israel has drones, and would not hesitate implementing assassination program in Gaza, of course, but also as far as Iran.

Right now the Obama administration drone program targets Al Qaeda. But the notion of terrorists is so elastic, that it could be  extended to any “enemies of the state”. This notion could be dangerously broad. Would this include in the very near future someone like Julian Assange or prominent people from Occupy? Even so it will probably make most Americans feel better to know that their president/hit man has his hand on the trigger, it is a scary prospect for freedom and democracy.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one and two by Doctress Neutopia. Photographs three, four and five by World Can’t Wait.

Hoping to gain deeper insight into his work as an FBI informant and the role he says the FBI played in his immigration case, I asked Hesham for permission to file a FOIA request with the bureau for his entire file. He agreed and signed a certification of identity form requesting that the agency turn over all of the records it maintained on him to me.

My FOIA request was filed in May 2011. The FBI sent me a letter saying they were processing my request. Then, last August, the bureau sent out a special agent from the FBI’s Tampa field office to speak with Hesham about my FOIA.

Bill Tidwell showed up at the home of Hesham and Jody Abu Zubaidah, his wife, on the morning of August 26, 2011. Hesham was at work. Jody’s mother, who was living with the couple at the time, answered the knock at the door. She told Jody there was “some guy in a suit at the front door.”

Jody stepped outside and Tidwell pulled out his identification. He said he needed to speak with Hesham. Tidwell said Hesham wasn’t “in any trouble, but it was important.” Jody told Tidwell Hesham was at work. Tidwell returned later that afternoon. Tidwell told Hesham he was sent by FBI headquarters to speak with him about the FOIA request I filed. Tidwell used my name. The agent asked Hesham how I found him and what my intentions were. Hesham told him that I was writing a story about him. Tidwell asked Hesham to go over everything he told me.

“Did Jason Leopold force you to sign [the certification of identity] form? Did he offer you any money?” Tidwell asked Hesham.

When the House returns Monday from a week-long recess, members and staffers will see something that hasn’t been in the Capitol for four years: Styrofoam.

In the first move toward phasing out part of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) “Green the Capitol” program, polystyrene cups were reintroduced this week as an option for coffee drinkers in the Capitol Carry-Out, the building’s mini-cafeteria.

The basement eatery had been part of Pelosi’s “Greening” program since 2007, when Democrats took control of the House. The program brought climate-friendly vending machines and compact fluorescent lightbulbs to the Capitol; caused the Capitol Power Plant to switch from burning coal to natural gas; and reduced energy and water consumption in Capitol buildings by 23 percent and 32 percent, respectively, according to an April 2010 report.

Wonkette offers a reminder about the nature of the problem: “‘Foamed polystyrene’ is a miraculous invention that manages to be completely awful through every step of its near-eternal ‘life cycle’ — it is manufactured with petroleum that must be imported from Middle East dictatorships, toxic ‘styrene oligomers’ migrate into the food it holds, it’s highly flammable and produces black poisonous smoke, and most of the 25 billion polystyrene cups tossed every year will take more than half a millennium to degrade. And that’s why the Republican-led House of Representatives made it an immediate priority to cancel the House cafeteria’s four years of biodegradable food and beverage packaging.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not surprisingly, isn’t happy, noting that the new Republican policy will send 535 more tons of waste to landfills.

Part of me wonders if the GOP policy brought back the environmentally-irresponsible cups just to annoy Pelosi, or if Republicans are choosing to thumb their noses at “green” policies, just because it makes them feel better about themselves.

I suppose it’s possible that it’s both.

Original Article: For the love of polystyrene – The Political Animal

Hang on to your emotions, hang on to your emotions

When a demagogue inside your head has taken charge
And by default what you say or do is criticized
And this litany of failures is recited a thousand times
You’d better

Hang on to your emotions, hang on to your emotions (Reed)

____________________________________________________________

Being that this is indeed Sunday, I thought it time for the resurrection of Sunday Lou, especially seeing as how original articles on my site have been few and far between the past two months. The tone of Lou’s song, Hang on to Your Emotions, from his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling (one of my personal favorites in his extensive catalog) is very fitting for my various frustrations and insecurities as of late. Of course, it is not my intent to turn this site into my personal forum for the occasional introspective and esoteric examination of my life, though there ultimately will be a bit of that, but by and large, constructive and pragmatic critique of our Imperialist State is what sparks my intellectual passions. Part of my frustration stems from so many recent assaults on our freedom and our common sense by the forces of said Imperialism. So for today, Sunday Lou will be a manifestation of my quips regarding recent political deeds and doings.

___________________________________________________________

Could it be you’ve never felt like that
That your mind’s a cage – inside the cage a cat
That spits and scratches all it can get at
And that’s you, and your emotions

Could it be you’ve never felt like that
Your mind’s a cage – inside the cage a rat
Rabidly trying to get it, you
And your emotions, you and your emotions

When your imagination has too much to say
When that facile voice inside your head says give your life away
You might think to ask – how it got that way
What books it has read – that make it that way
And where it got the right – to speak to anyone that way
You’d better

Hold on to your emotions, hold on to your emotions (Reed)

____________________________________________________________

The Sherrod Charade:

As anyone paying attention to the News Cycle knows, Shirley Sherrod lost her position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a snippet of a speech she gave — edited and released by Tea Party guru Andrew Breitbart — some time ago to members of the NAACP that made her appear to be insensitive to the plight of white farmers: A Racist!!

Considering many of my relatives make their living through farming (they happen to be white as well) and have to rely on the various subsidies through the USDA, I would be quite livid if they were denied fair treatment solely because of their race. Of course, this wasn’t entirely the case with Mrs. Sherrod as she would go on to explain in her speech — the part that mysteriously wasn’t released by Mr. Breitbart — that she realized that simply having blind disdain for a farmer simply because he was white made her no better than the white man who hates blacks simply because they are black. She overcame her irrational hate and actually befriended the farmer and his family and she became a better and more actualized person in the process.

This was a case study — through the personal story of Mrs. Sherrod — of the profound racial schisms that exist in this country and how every single person, regardless of skin color or ideology, is affected by our own misconceptions and lack of humanity and civility toward one another. The moral of the story was lost by the blind reaction of the propaganda and misinformation machine known as Mainstream Media (and yes, even so-called liberal outlets like MSNBC and others are included in that complex). Breitbart was justifiably vilified for doing what he does: distorting facts and reality to suit his ideological objectives. Fox News, as one can imagine, got in the act by doing what they do best and making the snippet of the speech headline material for their easily manipulated viewers. This in and of itself is nothing new nor newsworthy as most rational and objective individuals have long given up and bothering to care or even pay attentions to the crap that spews from Fox News and similar outlets of misinformation.

This whole incident was really a non-issue as anyone with a modicum of intelligence would dismiss the story all together or do some due diligence and find a copy of the entire speech and put it in its proper context to realize the poignancy of Mrs. Sherrod’s story.  Of course, that would have been asking too much from Obama and his Cabinet as Shirley Sherrod was unceremoniously axed from her position because lord knows our first President of Color couldn’t bare being labeled a racist by an objective “News” organization like FOX.

It’s really surprising to me the blind reaction and ignorance by the Obama Administration as this was a golden opportunity to open up a deeper dialogue about race antagonism in this country. If anyone remembers way back to 2008 during the Primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, Obama, under fire for his relationship with Reverend Wright, gave an eloquent speech here in Pennsylvania relating his own personal experiences with being a man of color and his quest for finding his own racial identity and that relationship with the greater themes of a long history of racial antagonisms and schisms in this country. Rather than being a rational and pragmatic leader, Obama cowered to the reactionary elements of blind political divisiveness and further marginalized his own unique history to use Mrs. Sherrod’s speech — her whole speech — and personal story as a “teachable moment.”

In a speech shortly after the incident, Obama addressed the Sherrod firing and accepted some responsibility for his shortsightedness “saying the affair was a ‘bogus controversy based on selective and deceiving excerpts of a speech’ which ‘led to her forced resignation.’ Obama added, that ‘many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments including my own administration.’” (Wagner; Politics Daily)

Just taking some blame for the incident was more than I could have hoped for given the President’s previous patterns of eluding accountability for instances of ineptitude that he had direct influence of. Yet the fact that he added “…many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments…,” shows a complete lack of credibility and understanding of pragmatism and accountability. No one was responsible for Shirley Sherrod’s firing except Obama who failed to use common sense and have the many hundreds, if not thousands, of employees at his disposal to actually find the entire speech and realize what a great opportunity it was for not only his administration, but for exacerbating a greater dialogue about race in America; and also the best opportunity he will get to show just how hideous and underhanded his harshest critics actually are. All President Obama accomplished was to give undue credibility, power and influence to Mr. Breitbart and FOX “News.”

Considering the propaganda published and reported by the far right media, President Obama would have had to have fired himself about a hundred times by this point if he had given the ultra-right-media the same respect — in regard to himself — as he gave them in the Sherrod fiasco.

I am constantly shouting from the mountaintops that President Obama is merely the latest in a long line of Puppets who do the bidding for the myriad of large multinational Corporations that dictate our Democracy and Legislation for their Imperialist/Moneyed interests. But in the case of Mrs. Sherrod, President Obama proved himself to be less than merely a puppet of corporatism, but now a “leader” lacking common sense — and a modicum of intelligence — who will bow down to the reactionary ignorance of propaganda machines that themselves exist only to divide us and perpetuate the blind hatred and intolerance of individuals, like our President, who have a wealth of experience to share based on their diverse cultural backgrounds. Rather than just viewing President Obama as a tool for Imperialist interests, I now put him in the category of the common “Uncle Tom” who is willing to sell out his own unique cultural heritage as well as “We the People” for his Corporate Masters.

____________________________________________________________

Sing us away Lou:

When a night city’s breeze blows across the room
And a 5 am moon and sun start their swoon
You hear your lover’s breath
And not a moment too soon
You get to

Release all your emotions, you get to
Let go of your emotions, and now
Release all your emotions, you’d better
Let go of your emotions

Release, I wanna let go
I wanna release, now (Reed)

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• Buzz it up
• Mixx it up
• Share via MySpace
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Tell a friend