In 1969, a 14-year-old named Jerry Levitan talked his way into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room, armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Impressed by the kid’s chutzpah, Lennon obliged him with a five-minute chat that covered war, peace, and the newly arrived Bee Gees.
Levitan teamed up with filmmaker Josh Raskin in 2007 to make “I Met the Walrus,†an animated film that turns Lennon’s thoughts into concrete, if trippy, images. It’s cool.
The California Supreme court announced yesterday that it will hear arguments challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the anti-gay amendment that overturned the right of gay people to marry in the state.
The Prop 8 debacle could be resolved by limiting the state of California prospectively to the issuance of civil unions for all couples, rather than marriage licenses, leaving marriage to the churches.
– Kmeic
In May, the same court, which is composed of seven Republicans and one Democrat — who are all elected for 12-year terms — decided 4-3 to strike down a law banning same-sex marriage.
The judges are being asked now to decide whether the constitution can be amended to make discrimination against a minority group legal, a move that directly violates the constitution’s foundational principle of providing protection of rights equally to all residents — or whether a change of that magnitude should have been made through the constitutional “revision” process instead. A revision to the constitution would have required a two-thirds vote by both houses of the legislature before going before the electorate as a ballot initiative.
In a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmeic, who served as a high official in the Reagan and Bush I Justice departments but who supported Barack Obama this year, laid out a compromise to the constitutional debacle brought on by the passage of Proposition 8 that puts the solution in the hands of California’s governor:
As Leonard Pitts Jr. pointed out in his column a few days ago, African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for president and in large majorities for gay marriage bans in states that had constitutional amendments on the ballot. Granted, as some commenters have pointed out, blacks are not a sufficient percentage of the population to have swayed the vote the opposite way, but such arguments miss the point — those who were so recently oppressed seem ever so ready to oppress the next guy for whatever reason.
Time.com/CNN currently is running this story on the issue.
Also, was it essential to the story for Time to interview only the African-American member of both a mixed-race gay couple and a mixed-race lesbian couple? Does the story seem fair and balanced?
Hillary Clinton should have just held on until the write-in votes were cast. At least that’s what the results in Jacksonville show.
Write-in votes were released by the Duval County Supervisor of Elections office today, and there were some surprising results. First, the tally reached 736. Second, George W. Bush got two votes in favor of a third term. Next, not all of the candidates are still with us, and a few never were. Finally, Jesus out-polled God by 17 votes.
The full results:
Last month, representatives from both the Consumer Federation of America and the Financial Services Roundtable proposed reducing the amount of credit card debt held by financially troubled consumers by 40 percent:
The unusual joint request from the Financial Services Roundtable and the Consumer Federation of America highlighted the urgency of the situation: consumers — even those with strong credit records — defaulting at high levels on their credit cards, while banks battered by the credit crisis bleed tens of billions in red ink from the losses.
The reduction would have to be approved by U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, whose Treasury Department agency oversees national banks.
Here’s an even better idea: The Federal Reserve estimates that the total of all credit card debt in the United States is $900 billion. Why not use taxpayer money to pay off all consumer credit card debt in one fell swoop?
Hey, $900 billion is a steal in comparison with the money we taxpayers are shoveling out to Wall Street, the automakers and the citizens of Iraq.
Many people within the Christian right view Mormonism as a demonic cult, primarily because they believe Mormon dogma asserts that Jesus was the brother of Satan. So why then would Mormons donate half the $40 million budget of the Christian extremists’ Proposition 8 campaign to end the right for gays to marry in California?
By revealing their hateful, almost gleeful aggression toward gays, any inroads Mormons may have made with Christian extremists in this sorry episode could well come at the cost of hobbling their efforts to join mainstream society forever.
Some are suggesting that the Mormon leaders were attempting to align themselves with the Christian right after tensions were exposed between them and evangelicals during the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a lifelong Mormon whose grandfather had five wives:
The Southern Baptist Convention website categorizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a “cult” that is “radically” different from historic, biblical Christianity.
A faith guide issued by the influential Christian right group Focus on the Family declares that “God cannot be identified … with the Mormon religion’s notion of god.” And each year, evangelical organizers behind the National Day of Prayer bar Mormons from speaking at their proceedings…
“It would be extraordinarily hard for mainline denomination people in the South to openly and strongly politick or be involved in a Mormon’s run for office,” said Bobby Welch, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination and a fixture of the Christian right.
The division was so pronounced that Romney was forced to give a speech about his faith — an effort that was compared to John F. Kennedy’s speech on his Catholicism during the 1960 campaign. Unlike Kennedy’s speech, however, Romney’s was not well-received, mainly because it was delivered with all the emotional impact of a Powerpoint presentation.
It also hurt the Mormon cause when, two months after Romney dropped his presidential bid, a scandal erupted in which the state of Texas removed dozens of children from a compound operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a renegade polygamous Mormon sect. The visuals of the glassy-eyed “sister wives” in their 19th-century prairie dresses were a stark reminder of the Mormons’ history of polygamy, child sexual abuse and violence.
So did this spate of bad news lead the Mormon leaders to join forces with their Christian enemies, and, if so, was it a smart decision?
Michigan billionaire Elsa Prince’s second greatest claim to fame is that she was a founder in 1977 of Focus of the Family, a nonprofit group that, despite its warm and fuzzy name, is in tenor and in practice an anti-gay hate group.
Prince’s top claim to fame, however, is that she is the mother of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, the scandal-plagued BushCo mercenary group that, since 2004, has been paid at least $323 million on a $1 billion no-bid government contract. Blackwater is in the headlines now because six of its mercenaries may be facing charges for the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007. Earlier scandals have included the abrupt resignation of State Dept. Inspector Howard Krongard over Blackwater-related perjury charges, allegations that Blackwater employees were traitorously recruiting U.S. troops in the war zone and that and Blackwater security shot a dog belonging to the New York Times Baghdad bureau.
In August, Elsa Prince made two donations that totaled $450,000 to Proposition 8, the California initiative that narrowly passed on Nov. 4, and will amend the state constitution to revoke the right of gay people to marry, if it is not overturned by the California Supreme Court.
Around the same time, Focus on the Family reportedly donated over $439,000 to the anti-gay cause. In October, just months after Prince and Focus on the Family donated a combined $889,000 to the California hate initiative, Focus on the Family announced it would lay off or reassign 46 of 1,300 employees. Now it says there will be more layoffs due to restructuring of its distribution arm.
It’s a dead cinch the families of the dozens of employees who are about to be fired would have preferred that the nearly $900,000 donated to Prop 8 by Prince and their bosses had gone toward salaries.
They may also be wondering where the group’s other millions have gone. In fiscal year 2006, Focus on the Family reported total revenue of $142,279,843 and net assets of $79,316,290. More current figures were not readily available.
According to PrideSource, other top donors to Prop 8 included Robert Hurtt, president of California company Container Supply ($550,000), Howard Ahmanson, owner of California company Fieldstead & Co. ($995,000) and John and Josephine Templeton of Pennsylvania, where John is president of the John Templeton Foundation ($1,000,000).
Bush administration insiders are lining up for the one handout they’ll need most after their team is out of office: a presidential pardon.
More than 2,300 people applied for a pardon or commutation in fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, the largest number for any single year since at least 1900, according to Justice Department Statistics…
Bush might even pre-emptively pardon his cronies before they’re charged with anythingBush…has so far used his pardon power sparingly. He has approved 157 pardons and six commutations, the lowest number of any president since World War II, except for his father, George H.W. Bush, who approved 74 pardons and three commutations in his four years as president.
But Bush also never vetoed legislation until Democrats started writing it. Bush will likely pardon like there’s no tomorrow and might even pre-emptively pardon his cronies before they’re charged with anything. Since, after all, everybody knows what they did.
But legal scholars say there has been no comparable grant of amnesty for what would presumably be a large group of government officials for unspecified conduct…Though a blanket amnesty would forestall potential criminal cases, legal analysts said a pardon could be read as a tacit admission of guilt…
Unlike other controversial pardons, [Dean of the Chicago-Kent School of Law Harold] Krent said the extent of any potential illegal activity in the Bush Administration is not known. “We, as a society, lose the benefit from the closure and mere transparency that comes through a criminal trial,” he said.
Legal analysts agree that presidential pardons, originally meant as the court of last resort for innocent people unfairly imprisoned, have become a political tool.
“I think it’s an absolute disgrace the way Democratic and Republican administrations, the Bush Administration apparently being the worst, have departed from giving many commutations and pardons except in political cases,” said Phillip Heymann, a former Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton White House who now teaches at Harvard Law School…
“The Department of Justice has basically closed down the pardon program for all intents and purposes for meaningful release of ordinary people,” [Margaret Love, the U.S. Pardon Attorney from 1991 to 1997] said. “I don’t think any substantive thought is given to the issues raised by the people who are applying.”
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
