Year: 2008

Serving Those Who Serve: America’s Vet Dogs

Trish

A Vet Dog greets a service member at the airport

If you’re looking for a good cause to help you convert some year-end dollars into a tax deduction, it would be hard to beat America’s Vet Dogs.

The organization, an offshoot of the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, provides service and guide dogs for use by current and former military personnel. The roles the dogs play are many and varied.

  • Service dogs that provide balance or stability support (usually with a balance harness) for amputees, and who fetch and retrieve dropped items for vets who have difficulty bending
  • Guide dogs for blinded vets
  • Seizure or fall alert assistance dogs, especially for veterans who have suffered traumatic brain injury
  • “K-9 therapists” deployed to the battlefield to help prevent and control the stress of living in a combat zone
  • Greeters who welcome lonely vets as they travel
  • Bridges to the outside world for wounded vets who often otherwise recover in isolation

See what I mean? If you’re a dog lover, you know how much difference a dog can make. Check out America’s Vet Dogs and you’ll see why the dyslectic might have it right.*

* You know, by spelling “god” d-o-g

Now Can We Call It a Mandate?

Trish

Sen. Barack Obama had the largest margin of victory in total votes than any candidate who was not an incumbent. While some results are still not final, right now Obama is showing 9,124,522 more votes than John McCain. By percentage, his victory is less impressive — Obama is only the 13th highest non-incumbent, with 7 percent more votes than his opponent.

Obama had the largest margin of victory than any candidate who was not an incumbent

Then again, vote margins don’t equal greatness. The president who got the highest number of total votes over his challenger ever was…Richard Nixon over Sen. George McGovern in 1972. Nixon got a stunning 17,995,488 more votes and became the only president to resign the office, which he did in 1974.

The highest percentage more than his challenger was Warren Harding in 1920 over Ohio Gov. James Cox. Harding pulled 26.2 percent more votes but died of a heart attack within two years of taking office, in 1923.

Huckabee Cites Lack of Violence in Dismissing Gay Civil Rights Struggle

Jon Ponder

In an appearance on “The View” last week, Mike Huckabee congratulated American voters for electing their first black president, noting how far the country has come since the days of segregation. And then — at 0:55 on the video above — co-host Joy Behar asked him about gay civil rights:

BEHAR: You’re very passionate about [progress on African-American civil rights], I see. But do you feel that way about gay rights, too?

HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexual should have every right in terms of their civil rights to be employed, to do anything they want, but that’s not really the issue … But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different from individual civil rights. And — you know — we’re never going to convince each other of that…

BEHAR: But segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there in the books.

HUCKABEE: But there’s a difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. You had John Lewis getting his skull cracked on the bridges of Selma. Look, that’s wrong…

BEHAR: Gay bashing goes on, too.

HUCKABEE: There’s Christian bashing — look what happened to the lady out in California the other day. She’s out there — she’s 69 years old, holding a cross. People come up — violence is wrong. It doesn’t matter who’s behind it.

Huckabee’s scattershot outbursts reveal the flimsiness of the Christian moralists’ rationale against gay civil rights. First he asserts that there is a magic threshold, a tipping point, of violence that gay people must endure before the majority will grant them equal rights. Then he counters the argument that current levels of hate-crime violence against gays, which includes murder and life-threatening assaults, ought to be sufficient, by citing an incident of “Christian bashing” in which an elderly anti-gay protester in Palm Springs was shoved and the cross she had carried to a gay marriage rally was knocked from her hands.

Footage of the Christian bashing incident, which you can see in the video below, backs up the story that Phylliss Burgess, 69, was shuffled around by the crowd and, indeed, someone knocked her cross down.

[…]

Poll: 8% of Prop 8 Supporters Would Change Their Votes

Jon Ponder

Buyers’ Remorse: Prop 8 won by 4 percent and change — 52 percent to 48 percent. In a new poll from SurveyUSA, 8 percent of people who voted for Prop 8, a more than sufficient number to tip the vote the other way, said they had changed their minds:

Of the adults who tell SurveyUSA they voted FOR Prop 8, 90 percent of them told us recent rallies held by “No on Prop 8″ Protesters have not changed their minds about the issue. 8 percent say protesters have changed their minds.

On the status of California’s 20,000 or so gay married couples, 59 percent said their marriages should remain legal. Thirty-four percent said the marriages should be annulled immediately. This is interesting because 34 percent is also roughly the percentage both of California voters who are Republicans and who approve of the job performance of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Oh, and bias alert. The SurveyUSA article on the poll was titled, “No on Prop 8 Protesters Have Not Changed Many Minds in California.” Not “many,” certainly, but “enough” — and that is what counts.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Some of us — especially those under 60 — have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books. Well, this is it. We’re now living history, suffering one of the greatest financial panics of all time. It compares with the big ones — 1907, 1929 — and we cannot yet know its full consequences for the financial system, the economy or society as a whole.

— Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International

By Voiding Equal Protection, Prop 8 Could Threaten Rights of Minorities Nationwide

Jon Ponder

In their outreach to blacks, Latino, Asians and other minority voters, the conservative operatives behind Proposition 8 neglected to mention a key aspect of the initiative that could contribute to rolling back minority rights for years to come.
Prop 8 stripped gays of the right to marry with 52 percent support — less than is required to approve bond measures.
Prop 8 not only rendered quaint the California Constitution’s equal protection clause — a foundational precept that instructs the state to protect the rights of all citizens equally — it also rescinded the right to marry for California gays. This sets it apart from other states’ anti-gay marriage amendments because it establishes a precedent for conservative efforts to curb minority rights using ballot initiatives and by other means:

California’s gay marriage ban could open the door to legal discrimination against unpopular groups if the state Supreme Court allows the voter-approved measure to stand, blacks, Latinos, Asians and other minorities said…

Legal scholars say the measure, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, breaks new ground by limiting the courts’ ability to protect minorities.

“They could take away any right from any group,” said University of Southern California Law Professor David Cruz, who filed a brief in favor of gay marriage in an earlier case.

The ban … amended the constitution with 52 percent support — less than is required to approve some state bond measures.

“The entire purpose behind the constitutional principle of equal protection would be subverted if the constitutional protection of unpopular minorities were subject to simple majority rule,” read a brief by black, Asian and Hispanic groups challenging the ban. “This case is not simply about gay and lesbian equality.”

Despite the peril it presents to American social justice, legal experts say that the California Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn the amendment because it was passed within the parameters of existing law.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

I think he’s impatient. I think, my summation: He doesn’t like homework. And homework means reading or getting briefed or having a debate. And part of the presidency, part of governing, particularly in this area, is homework, homework, homework.

— Bob Woodward, reflecting on President Bush’s governing style

Richardson Must Do One Thing to Get Our Nod

Trish
Bill and his little friend

We like New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson alright. We do remember him padding his resume with that baseball pitcher draft story. And we know he’s not what you’d call really comfortable around gay people. And his record of respect toward women is…not stellar.

But we’d forgive all that, and get behind Obama’s likely selection of Richardson for Secretary of Commerce if he’d do one thing: shave that beard!

Seriously Bill, what is up with that stuff? Is it a goatee? A Balbo? A Van Dyke? An anchor? A Zappa? Which? How’s about you go back to the original baby-face vibe and ditch that slightly satanic thing you’re sporting now?

Weasel McConnell Knifes Bush in the Back

Trish

Did the Senate Minority Leader just say he’ll be happy to see Bush go?

A top Republican said on Friday that Democratic U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is “off to a good start” and indicated he was pleased to see President George W. Bush get ready to leave.

“Our members, in one way, are kind of relieved by the departure of an administration that became unpopular and made it very difficult for us to compete,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill.

McConnell won 52.9 percent of the votes over Democratic challenger Bruce Lunsford in a surprisingly (to McConnell) competitive re-election campaign. Had he lost, it sounds like McConnell would have blamed it all on Bush, the man who employs McConnell’s wife, U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. McConnell has also been at Bush’s side on Iraq, cheering on the alleged progress that showed victory was just around the corner every year since he backed Bush’s ill-fated plan to invade.