FIRST DRAFT

They make our heart sing

It's just some funky old photo to most of y'all. 

Looking closer, you might guess, correctly, that it was taken on a Sunday. For the record, it was an Easter Sunday. Also for the record, I believe it may be the only (and last) photo ever taken of me carrying a purse.

But if you're from Texas, you see more. Almost certainly, in at least one of the springtimes of your childhood, you too were situated, possibly against your will or better judgement, in a field of Lupinus texensis so your parents, aunts, uncles, and/or Meemaws could snap your picture.

Transcending boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, and photographic abilities, tens of thousands of bluebonnet pictures have been taken of tens of thousands of children. As well as not a few adults, dogs, new pickups, and other objects of affection. That's just how we do down here.

But here's the deal: more than the bluebonnets (which, by the way, were more likely Lupinus subcarnosus, the sand-loving cousins of texensis), more than the Easter dresses, more than any actual reason that led to the picture being taken, it's the incidentals that give it power. 

That little goober in the red didn't know this location but the kid she would be and that I used to be knew every inch of it by heart. It wasn't my backyard or an actual playground but it might as well as been. "Going down to the bay" was how most of my wandering kid adventures started out. The best ones, anyway.

I look at this and I'm standing on the very spot where it was taken, I know the stray cats living under those exact salt cedars covered with wild mustang vines. Even over the pushy prevailing wind from the southeast, I can hear the noise from the mobs of courting Least Terns that have turned the little spit of an island in the background into their rookery. The wind, the salt in the air, grassburs and sand in my socks, the oyster shell road we're standing next to, the sense memory of all of it comes in waves. Not imagined or blurred nostalgia, but involuntary and absolute experience. Time travel, or as close as I've gotten to it.

Everybody has at least one old Polaroid or some other momento like that, don't they?

Tell us about yours.

Just kill it and move on to the next one

Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me. On TV. I know there are white supremacists in the United States who would happily hunt me down in the woods. But that's so minuscule—the number of people who are like that. The chances are so small. I think the bigger problem is that, on both sides, we fight people whose politics are different than ours with the worst of that. Like their efforts to equate Obama with Ayers, or to equate McCain with Timothy McVeigh. Or, you know, to call Bush "Hitler." The need to make someone who disagrees with you into something extreme—to turn him into a monster.

Sherman Alexie (emphasis mine)

That last bit of Alexie's quote has bounced around in my brain pan since I first read it. A lot.

Won't speak to, can't speak to, what's behind the behavior of anyone else, but me personally, I've spent a lot of time in the monster-making workshop. I'd go so far as saying that making monsters of the opposition, along with jeering, ridiculing, trash-talking and exaggeration, constituted the bulk of my online participation here in Netrootsville, Left Blogtopistan. Political crack is a helluva drug.

And now? Now I slouch before you a changed woman. Not that I'm not still a card-carrying member of the hoi polloi and certainly not that I've come to some enlightened moral high ground. That's not it at all.

It just stopped working for me, the monster-making. It stopped being motivating. The vegetable throwing stopped being fun. It stopped making me feel part of a community. I got bored with it. I got bored with the part of me that it came from. I have no idea about anyone else, but for me, that stuff comes from the lazy part.

I didn't see this coming. It's kind of an unanticipated side effect of a much larger set of changes I've made during the last year, and I guess it's the lazy factor that connects it all together. Things started out really simple. I didn't want laziness to be my default setting anymore. I just wanted to get healthy, eat right, lose weight. So I started doing it.

Then I decided to clean up my act around money stuff. Then I felt I really needed to rededicate myself to my job and career goals. Next thing I know, I'm going to the gym, working with a trainer three times a week, and cutting grains out of my diet. All along, I sort of thought it would all end the way countless other self-help binges have in the past but it didn't. Or at least it hasn't yet, which is good, since lately I've started considering grad school.

I still spend way more time on the internet than most "normal" people but it's a whole lot less than I used to. I still watch too much TV but again, much less than before, and I've completely lost all patience with political coverage. If you had told me a year ago I'd be this person, I'd have laughed at you. What? Me not spend the evening getting cozy with MSNBC? But I just cannot sit still watching that stuff anymore.

You know what my favorite kind of television is now? Women knocking the holy crap out of stuff, stuff that deserves to have the crap knocked out of it. Hot kick-ass ladies beating shit up, if there was a channel that showed that 24/7, I'd probably go back to being a couch potato.

And if there were kick-ass Dems beating shit up, I'd start paying attention again. Not monster-making, not crack. Just sack up, get the job done, and move on. And for the record, I don't entirely agree with Alexie about the monster thing. Sure we waste a lot of our energy creating monsters out of simple differences.  But sometimes the monsters are real. The problem is we (us, the people we vote for, the process, the pundits, that "we") still waste a lot of energy on them, and we still don't ever seem get rid of them. Kill it with fire, hit it with a rock, shoot it in the eyestalk with an alpha-meson burst, I don't care.

Just take it down and move on.

 

 

NOTE to the NSA, FBI, or whoever is listening in: above references to killing and maiming in politics are strictly rhetorical and do not refer to actual violence.

"Yes. This is Dog"

"You think dogs will not be in heaven?
I tell you, they will be there long before any of us."  

Robert Louis Stevenson

As skeptically humanist as I remain about heaven, I still want to believe that all dogs go there. And I believe it looks like this. Or maybe this.

There's a reason both the links above went viral this week. This is what joy looks like. Throw the ball!

Yeah, we can pretend we're that

My favorite music of any past year is the stuff I'm still listening to the next year and the one after that, long after all the year end lists and taking account is past. Sharon Van Etten's epic has been on lots of "best" lists for the last two years, and her spanking brand new Tramp is already making waves.

epic's "One Day" is one of those songs that always sounds brand new, even after a couple years: 

 

She's the real deal. Go out and get to know her.

Paging the ghost of Upton Sinclair

The real surprise isn't that this happened, it's the fact that the plant actually got caught. That they did this in the first place speaks to the impotent (by design) oversight of our "reasonable and predictable regulatory structure" that guy with the purty hair brags about.

Damn those good-for-nothing unmanned drones.

The long arm of the law, in your uterus

I feel more empowered already.

"Today's ruling is a victory for all who stand in defense of life. Every life lost to abortion is a tragedy, and this important sonogram legislation ensures that every Texas woman seeking an abortion has all the facts about the life she is carrying, and understands the devastating impact of such a life-ending decision. We will continue to fight any attempt to limit our state's laws that value and protect the unborn."

We will, however, continue to dismantle and destroy those laws and systems that value and protect living children. Once they're born, those little suckers are on their own

America, 1900: Subsistence Marriage

My maternal great-grandparents and children. This is on my wall at home, next to one taken around the same time of my great-grandparents on the paternal side. In both pictures, of these two families that were very different from each other, there is one commonality: an older husband, younger wife, and two sets of kids, the older set from a first marriage. Here, the two older girls and the older son were from the first marriage. My great-grandfather above married my great-grandmother less than six months after his first wife died in childbirth.

Needless to say, if the shoe was on the other foot and my great-grandmother had been widowed with three kids, she would have been waiting a lot longer for a second husband, if anyone married her at all. Said hypothetical second marriage would probably only have happened if she'd been able to hold on to whatever property she had inherited upon her husband's death. The likelihood of that inheritance happening, of course, depended on what state she lived in. Women's property rights varied widely by state in the second half of the 19th century. "Reforms" that allowed women to inherit property from their husbands were not passed to advance the rights of women but to lessen the burdens to creditors and society posed by impoverished widows and their kids. 

(NOTE: the baby in this picture grew up to be the very tired woman in this picture.)

America, the day after Christmas, 1929

My mother is the dark-haired girl sitting between her father and her older sister. They're on the steps of her grandparents' house in Hext, Texas. Said grandparents were probably the source of presents, the dolls, the baseball bat, a stiff new pair of overalls for the oldest boy. My great-grandfather ran a general store and while hardly well-off, at least had enough to spare. His daughter, my grandmother, on the right, isn't even 30 in this picture. You can't see the sunglasses underneath my grandfather's hat. He'd been gassed in World War I and barely survived, living the rest of his life nearly blind and plagued by a slowly deteriorating cardiopulmonary system. By later standards, he would have been declared fully disabled on discharge but full benefits for WWI veterans, even the non-wounded and able-bodied, were a very, very, long time in coming.

My grandparents' existence at this point, at the beginning of The Depression, swung between the places and times my grandather was able to work, assuming there was paying work to find, and the eventuality that his health would fail, if the job didn't end first, or the weather would turn too harsh. They traveled back and forth between the Gulf Coast, where the warm winters were easier, and the Hill Country where they could stay with family during the lean times. A lot of the time in between was spent camping or living out of a truck. 

Because we are cursing bunch of cocksuckers around here

And because Athenae tweeted this, and I couldn't agree more,

 

some thoughts on the effectiveness, or non-effectiveness, of profanity. Best of all, one of the commenters links to this video, which, getting back to ruining children by exposing them to reality, contains one of my favorite bits ever from Fry & Laurie, at 0:45 seconds.

 

 

The kids are alright: Star Witness

Because we could all use some inspiration:

These two high school students, Kate and Janelle, are seniors in the arts program at Peterborough Collegiate and Vocational School (PCVS), located in downtown Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Earlier in the fall, district school board trustees voted to close the old (founded in 1827!) downtown fixture next year and move its highly-regarded Integrated Arts program to larger more modern Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School. The decision to close down the much-beloved PCVS sparked protest after protest in the community but it didn't seem much of anything was going to reverse the trustees' decision. A few weeks ago, just trying to draw more attention to efforts of their peers and the community at large to keep the school open, Kate and Janelle recorded their video, using the reverb in a PCVS stairwell to make Neko Case's already-atmospheric Star Witness sound even more haunting.

 

It worked. The video started getting forwarded around, someone tweeted it to Case, she re-tweeted, the video went viral, the story got blogged, re-blogged, and picked up in the media. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, thoughtful, concerned citizens (and teenage girls singing like angels) for the win!

On Monday, more progress: the Ontario Minister of Education appointed a special facilitator to review the policy and process behind the school trustees' decision to close PCVS.  Follow the PCVS story here.

 

Assets, not liabilities

Merry Christmas everyone!

Having served various administrations, we know that politicians of both parties love this country and want to keep it safe. But right now some in Congress are all too willing to undermine our ideals in the name of fighting terrorism. They should remember that American ideals are assets, not liabilities.

You may know that, General.  Me, I'm not so sure anymore.

Gay rights are human rights

 

 

Conservatives, of course, beg to differ

 

 

Happy Anniversary, Doctor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The year was 1963, An Unearthly Child was the episode title, BBC One was the channel.

The rest is history.

 

Which Who is your favorite? I'm a total heretic, I really love #11.

 

Idiots of America, unite!

Want to just riff a bit on A's excellent How, Exactly Would We Know This? post from yesterday, as well as some of the comments, because I believe it's a critical conversation, central to our very own little First Draft neighborhood and the larger community, our shared net-rooty identity, to the extent we have just one.

Here's the deal. We are all, every one of us, the Idiots of America. This idea that we on the left, and the people we elect to represent us, are in the position to serve as some kind of missionaries to the beknighted knuckledraggers out there, that we could do that, not even that we should do it, well that's a lot of crap.

Don't get me wrong, I know what team I want to be on, and I like US and the things we tend to believe in, better than THEM and the things they tend to believe in.  But as pointed out yesterday, it's a struggle to know everything we need to just get by these days, not to mention weighing the relevancies and prioritizing our goals. It's a fucking uphill climb to do that as individuals, not to mention as communities. Sifting and winnowing is hard, y'all. And it's not like we can stop the game clock, evolve as individuals, as a society, fix all the broken crap, and then start the game over and play better for the rest of the quarter. We have to do it all on the run, in real time, fixing and breaking and fixing as we go. It's a struggle for all of us,  we are all equally vulnerable to the overwhelm, we all make flawed choices with respect to what and how we filter and amplify, or who we choose to depend on to do it for us.

The obligatory digression: 

Let's talk about water, H2O, agua, something sort of important to, you know, carbon-based lifeforms. So, where does yours come from? Is it surface water or ground water? How does it get to you? Does it come from the watershed you live in, or from someone else's? What are the major pollution threats? Point source or non-point source? Starting with your town/region/county and ending with the EPA, who and what regulates your water, protects it, decides or recommends how much can be used and in what ways?  Are these decider/recommenders elected or appointed? If elected, when was the last election? Did you vote in it? If appointed, who appoints them?  Are meetings and other processes that bear on your water made available to the public? Do you attend and participate? Are there any volunteer organizations involved in water issues around you? Are you a member? What are the desired future conditions for your water region and how were they developed? When were they last reviewed and updated?

Okay, I'll stop. If you knew most of the answers without googling, good for you. If you didn't, you're in the biggest of big tents. Most Americans, no matter their political party, religion, or education, don't know shit about their water supply, their watershed, or much of anything past their faucets and garden hoses. So, no shame if you are one of them but I will ask you one last question. Let's take the top three issues you DO know about, you DO involve yourself with. Of those three, which are more important to your survival, your kids and grandkids' futures, to all carbon-based life, than water?

See where I'm going with this? Regarding lots of really important stuff, we are all, every one of us, "low-information" voters, non-participatory citizens shirking our responsibilities.

So, back what A said. "AMERICA IS REALLY FUCKED."  All of it. All of us. With respect to framing, how about let's start from right there instead of "THEY are WAY More Fucked than WE are and WE need to Help THEM Be More like US." 

I guess Nancy Grace is more what they have in mind

This. Times a thousand.

Yes, it's just a stupid tv show and I get that there are traditional aspects to the art form but over and over, week after week,  this is about some invisible rigid construct of "pretty" and "feminine" and "sexiness," one single recognized standard for the "natural sexiness" of a woman.

"I think it came out in moments ...you had glimpses of this beautiful, vulnerable girl."

Fuck that shit.

For the crafty types

No kittens available in your neighborhood? Too poor to buy your own cat? Or maybe you want something very specific, like, say, one that looks more like a giant rabbit alien?  No problem. Make your own!

Start with about a yard of cat, as above. It goes without saying that it should be cut on the bias.  Stuff with the best chow you can afford. Voila! Leave your stuffed cat laying about likely cat environments, no one will be the wiser.  Unless they try to wake it up.

Frank Kameny, big damn hero

In Washington, DC yesterday, a man named Frank Kameny died quietly at home. He was 86. Fittingly enough, Kameny's death happened on National Coming Out Day, something we've been celebrating since 1988, when it was created to commemorate the great 1987 March on Washington, that October day when a quarter-million LGBT citizens came to their nation's capitol to remind the rest of the country that they too were Americans and wouldn't accept being treated as anything less. That such an event took place at all, that we still celebrate it nearly a quarter of a century later, that more people than ever before are out, that DADT is history now, that same-sex marriage is a reality—none of these things could have happened if pioneers like Frank Kameny hadn't paved the way for us.

"Hero" doesn't  seem big enough somehow to describe what Kameny was, what he accomplished, what he risked, but he was a hero and much more. He was out, proud, and fighting for his civil rights during times when it was truly dangerous, when doing so could get you fired, jailed, publicly shamed. All that and more happened to Kameny but he chose not to accept it.

That 1987 march was actually the second GLBT march on Washington, but decades before either, years before even the Stonewall Riots, Frank Kameny started fighting back. His career as an activist began in 1957, after he was fired for being gay.

Kameny, a WWII veteran, earned a PhD in astronomy from Harvard, taught for a year, then became a federal employee in 1957, working for the U.S. Army Map Service in DC. Not only was he fired within a year for being gay, he was (as was customary at the time) banned from from future federal employment. He appealed his termination all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

In 1965, Kameny was an organizer of the first-ever gay and lesbian protest at the White House to draw attention to government discrimination against homosexuals. Another LGBT pioneer, Jack Nichols, describes the event.

As we marched, I looked about at our well-dressed little band. Kameny had insisted that we seven men must wear suits and ties, and the women, dresses and heels. New Yorkers later complained that we Washingtonians looked like a convention of undertakers, but given the temper of the times, Kameny's insistence was apropos. "If you're asking for equal employment rights," he intoned, "look employable!" In the staid nation's capital, dressing for the occasion was, in spite of New York critics, proper.

We paraded in a small circle. Behind lampposts stood unknown persons photographing us. Were they government agents? Perrin and Otto wore sunglasses so absolute identification would be difficult should they fall prey to security investigations. We walked for an hour that passed, as I'd predicted, without incident. A few tourists gawked and there were one or two snickers, more from confusion than from prejudice.

We'd hoped for more publicity than we got. Only The Afro-American carried a small item about what we'd done. But we'd done it, and that was what mattered. We'd stood up against the power structure, putting our bodies on the line. Nothing had happened except that we'd been galvanized, and, to a certain extent, immunized against fear."

 Forty-four years later, Kameny was present in the Oval Office as President Obama signed a memorandum extending (limited) federal benefits to partners of gay federal employees.

 

Innocent families trapped onboard plane with kissing lesbians

When the bits of information about Leisha Hailey's experience on a Southwest Airlines flight first started trickling out yesterday via Twitter (which I was of course on at the time), I had two simultaneous reactions. One, I assumed without knowing any other source information that the airline was at fault. Two, I snickered at the PR ramifications because, I mean really, could you not find someone more adorable to pick on, Southwest? She's one of the Yoplait bridesmaids fer chrissakes, not to mention the only remotely likeable character on the L Word.

So yeah, as noted by a Twitter friend, maybe I rushed to judgement believing the worst of Southwest. I didn't care then, and I don't really care now, even though Hailey and girlfriend have since stated they take "full responsibility for getting verbally upset with the flight attendant after being told it was a 'family airline'" and the airline has "clarified" the real reason they got booted wasn't their "excessive" display of affection but their profanity and "aggressive reaction." 

In Hailey's version, the "excessive" PDA was one kiss, after which the couple was approached by a flight attendant who told them they were traveling on a "family airline." And that, that right there, is what this is about: the completely unselfconscious, unexamined assumption that GLBT people are supposed to have the decency to be ashamed of ourselves, to know our place, and to accept it without any kind of undue reaction. 

You're a paying customer on a crowded airplane, someone in authority says something to you that translates as "what you and your partner are doing isn't merely irritating, it's disgusting, harmful to children and families even." You then have the choice of swallowing the hatred quietly and politely, conforming, going along to get along, or you get angry. Short of physically harming someone or doing something that might cause the plane to crash, I think anger is perfectly understandable in that situation.

In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's the only really sane reaction. 

This story isn't important because Southwest kicked another celebrity off a plane because they can get away with it because it won't put a dent in their business. The story is important because we do know our place, and we will continue to claim it. 

Snarker gets the last word:

So for every person out there who persists on thinking we’re just shoving our big gay agenda into their faces, trust me – we’ve thought about the consequences of what we’re doing a lot more than you ever have. And we do what we do because we’ve decided that it’s worth it – despite all the bullshit – to be who we are. Because to self-censor ourselves for other people’s so-called comfort isn’t doing the world any favors. In fact, it hurts the world to let this double standard exist that says one kind of love is more acceptable than another kind of love. We think long and hard and endlessly about many of the simple gestures that straight people just take for granted. 

So each time gay people demand to be treated equal, cry foul against discrimination and simply dare to give the person we love a kiss before the plane takes off, we chip away at that double standard. We stake our claim on our own equality. We say, I have the right to do this. If that makes you uncomfortable world, well, that’s your fucking problem. It’s not excessive to kiss someone you love, Southwest Airlines. And it is definitely worth it.

 

Winning the internet, all of it

It's not often, lately anyway, that we read a story that makes us want to fistbump the whole interwebs and shout, "Fuck yeah humans!" 

But this is one of those stories. 

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

Heroism or Socialism?

So, Fox News, it's heroism for humans to instinctively pull together and save someone who's busted up, helpless, and about to burn to death in front of you but it's nanny state socialism for society to provide a safety net of healthcare benefits so that otherwise healthy 24 year olds don't die of sepsis from infected wisdom teeth?  

And Ron Paul would say that if motorcycle dude doesn't have insurance, there better be a church willing to take on his medical bills and resulting disability payments, rehab, taking care of his dependents, etc. Like most churches totally have that kind of dough laying around. 

“We’ve given up on this concept that we might assume responsibility for ourselves, that our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it,” said Paul, an opponent to federal healthcare as well Medicaid and Medicare plans.

No, we havent. Assuming responsibility for ourselves is what most Americans do every.fracking.day, day in and day out.  And if you do that, especially if you do that, as opposed to being, say, a rich dude running for office, you get why this argument is total crap.  You get that, as hard as you work and as much as you save, and as carefully as you plan, there are things out there that could take you down in a second, wipe out your savings in a few hours, reduce you to total personal and financial helplessness in a day.  

That's not conceptual. It's just the reality of life in the U.S. 

 

[Edited because I forget instinctually and instinctively are not the same thing]

 

Texas fires: how to help

Just a few places to donate:

American Red Cross of Central Texas

Austin Pets Alive!

Capital Area Food Bank 

Austin Disaster Relief Network 

Catholic Diocese of Austin

More updated info available on Twitter: #centraltxfires or #txfires

via The Statesman:

118,400: Acres burned in 181 fires in the past seven days.

700: Approximate number of homes burned by wildfires in the past seven days, about the same as the previous nine months.

121: Number of mutual-aid system firefighters from across the state who are currently fighting the Central Texas fires, using 72 fire engines and 18 command vehicles.

40: Texas Forest Service aircraft deployed statewide, including 15 single-engine air tankers, 12 helicopters and 13 aerial supervision aircraft assets deployed to multiple fires.

8: Texas Military Forces resource groups deployed so far, including 2 CH-47 Chinook helicopters, 3 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters assisting with fires in Bastrop County, 1 UH-60 Blackhawk staged in Austin to fight central Texas fires, 2 UH-60 Blackhawks assisting with the fires in Colorado County, and 3 ground wildfire support packages consisting of 4 dozers and 16 personnel each.

In addition, Texas Department of Public Safety emergency management personnel, highway patrol troopers, air assets and a mobile communications center have been deployed to Bastrop County, and the Texas Department of Transportation is providing personnel, equipment and fuel to responders. 

(If you feel the need to opine that Texans caught in these fires don't deserve your righteous offer of help, take that shit somewhere else.)

Trippy and fun

I watch a lot of television, less than I used to but still more than a lot of grown-up type people would consider seemly. I love great, meaty, meaningful groundbreaking TV, but I also have a weakness for the crap stuff. When I first read about Canadian scifi/fantasy series Lost Girl, I figured it would be crap but I thought I'd give the first episode a shot. Eight hours later, I'd watched the entire first season. 

Now, don't get me wrong, Lost Girl is no Masterpiece Theatre either. First and foremost, it's just fun. I'd go so far as to say delightful even, which is a good thing for series about a badass and snarky (Canadian) bisexual succubus named Bo.

In spite of its too-short first season, the show picked up a cult following, along with a 22-episode second season, which starts on Canadian TV this Sunday. The good news stateside is that Syfy has picked up both seasons. The bad news they still haven't announced a start date. That shouldn't be too much of a problem for anyone with an internet connection. The entire first season is on YouTube and I doubt it will take long for season 2 eps to show up. 

I don't think I've read an article about the show that didn't mention Buffy, so let's get that over with. Yeah, it definitely owes a debt in that direction, but in a good way, a very old-school S1-S3 monster-of-the-week way. Except with hardly any vampires, less moral philosophy, and a lot more grown up sex. Female-centric girl-power-yay! show? Check. Badass but vulnerable heroine trying to find her way? Check. Cheeky sidekick who gets all the good lines? Check. Broody non-human love interest? Check. Wise mentor with a mysterious past? Check. Love triangle? Check...sort of. There IS a love triangle with Bo in the center. The aforementioned broody dude, Dyson (a policeman who's also a shapeshifting wolf) is on one side. On the other is a woman, Lauren, a human doctor. 

The coolest thing about the Bo/Lauren (aka Doccubus) ship, aside from the fact of a canon same-sex relationship for a lead character in a hit show, is the total absence of anything remarkable. Bo's got a boyfriend and a girlfriend. No big. All the angst and drama, and there is plenty on all sides, is about other more important plots and monsters stuff. That said, there was a lot more Dyson/Bo in season 1 than Lauren/Bo. Not surprisingly, gay lady fans made their voices heard, and TPTB have already answered just as loudly, promising to balance things out with more Lauren/Bo this season. Go dyke geeks!

That response isn't surprising. Show creator Michelle Lovretta is a self-described fangirl, and it shows:

The amazing thing about genre fans is that they take ownership of a series, create their fanfics, their compilation vids, debate lore amongst themselves, come to panels etc. Genre fans tend to be a creative and inquisitive bunch, so in a pretty unique way — if you’re lucky enough to create a genre show that fans embrace, and we’ll have to wait and see if we fall in that category — your stuff will mutate and expand and be out there in the universe beyond the ways you yourself have created. It’s trippy and fun and what i love as a writer AND a viewer of this stuff. Yeah, I’m the starting point: I created something in my head. But it ceases to be a one man show the moment you’re in development: then there’s the writers, actors, producers, directors, crew, network, website/motion comic peeps etc, creating something new. …and now, it’s finally over to those fans who choose to feel some sort of ownership of the world and make it their own.

 

I know you are but what am I?

 

Forget the snake oil, worry about the snake

As much as possible, I stopped listening to Rick Perry a long while ago.

Now that he's really running, I have to admit it's interesting, in a sick fascination kind of way, to see how he operates as a Presidential candidate. Since I lived in NY during all but the very last bit of Dubya's governorship, this is the only time I've been in the position (along with a 20 million or so other Texans) of having firsthand knowledge, not experienced by the rest of the country, of a potential Presidential candidate. When someone's had their boot on your neck for a decade, it's weird watching them show their game face to a whole new set of necks. 

It's a whole other thing, though, watching the response as everyone else, from one end of the food chain to the other, tries to get up to speed on Hairdo. It might actually be interesting if it wasn't so damned frustrating. 

I know this is a process people have to go through, and I know for absolute certain I'm guilty of the exact same stuff at other times with other issues, but it's exhausting listening to the parsing, the indignant discussions, and especially the pat assessments by progressive bloggers as well as mainstream pundits: he's just another Bush, just another Fred Thompson, just another Bachmann, "We got this, he's just another C student idiot. Yay for us, we're smarter." 

First, everything Perry and the rest of the field are saying and doing right now is pretty much just a big choreographed butt-sniffing ritual so the RNC and assorted conservative PTB can decide who's the prettiest and and give them the cash.  

Second, when it comes to the base, there isn't any such thing as too crazy, too extremist, too conservative, too racist. 

Recent transplant to Austin Ana Marie Cox, in the Guardian. 

Perry, like Bush, plays upon the conservative base's disdain for the "lamestream media" with such tweaks and hyperbolic – Texas-sized! – rhetoric (he just accused the chairman of the Federal Reserve of treason!): the more commentator types wring their hands over Perry's statements, and the more coverage they generate, the more rank-and-file rightwingers can smugly satisfy their suspicion that Beltway panty-waists just don't get the "passion" that animates Tea Partiers and their would-be leaders.the more commentator types wring their hands over Perry's statements, and the more coverage they generate, the more rank-and-file rightwingers can smugly satisfy their suspicion that Beltway panty-waists just don't get the "passion" that animates Tea Partiers and their would-be leaders.

For example, according to Alternet, what Perry said in South Carolina was a damning gaffe by an ignorant racist, caught on tape for the world to see.

Rick Perry may be having the worst day in politics. His extremist belief that everything from consumer protection to Social Security to federal child labor laws is unconstitutional keep dogging him on the campaign trail.

Now he’s been caught on tape in South Carolina comparing the civil rights movement to the GOP’s fight for lower corporate taxes and deregulation. He could hardly have picked a worse day to fundamentally misunderstand and misrepresent the struggle for civil rights in America.

Bad day? Dude picked up two key endorsements and and a helicopter full of cash that day. Caught on tape? Of course it was, as it was meant to be. Racist? Of course. Misrepresenting? Definitely. Misunderstanding? Maybe he knows his history, maybe he doesn't, it's beside the point. Nothing Perry did that day was an accident. Those of us who were sickened by it were never going to vote for him anyway.

Let's get to the real point, folks: Perry is dangerous and not (simply) because of his views on god, guns, and gays. Or secession. Or civil rights. This is an experienced, tested politician — who has never lost an election— with an agenda above and beyond the snake oil salesman routine everybody's obsessed with. 

Cox:

More than any of his fellow contenders, Perry represents a bruising roll of the dice on America's future. Not so much because he's untested – he's the nation's longest-serving governor, after all – but because he's shown no concern for what the results of the tests he puts citizens through are … beyond being the foundation for proof of his distaste for the very system of governance he exists in. In another statement of impressive audacity, he recently called for Obama to "put a moratorium on regulations across this country" that are "killing jobs all across America".

Eliminating "all regulations" would, of course, put an end to, among other things, the safety testing of food and drugs, government oversight of transportation and even the ban of medical experiments on animal-human hybrids! A Perry regulation moratorium would add an element of risk to going to the grocery store, getting on a plane, even stepping out of the house, though it could provide lifetime employment for mad scientists and the like. It would be total anarchy: Mad Max meets Dr Moreau.

In case you think AMC's being a bit overwrought.

Populist homeboy Jim Hightower was on MSNBC the other night.

"They say the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see its ugly side,” Hightower said. “Well, Perry’s got a very ugly side. He’s going to get the kind of media scrutiny that he’s not had.”

I wish. So far, he's mostly gotten the exact same kind of media scrutiny. It's working pretty well for him.

“Republicans get a two’fer with him. One, they get one of the furthest-out of the far-out tea party right-wingers, sort of a Michele Bachmann with better hair."

That's the part of this interview that got the most play on the internet, but what Hightower said next should have been the money quote:

"And also though, they get the real Perry, which is the exuberant, corporate Republican who never met a corporate lobbyist he wouldn’t hug as long as that lobbyist had a campaign check and a wish list.

“He really is kind of a George Bush plutocrat without the intelligence or the ethics. That’s the real Perry, is really going to be the corporate Perry. That’s the kind of governorship he has run.”

 

Dry as a bone

 

Extended periods of drought interrupted by episodes of flash flooding.

 That description of Texas Hill Country climatology is a grim joke frequently used in the education and outreach conducted at the non-profit natural area where I volunteer. It always gets a chuckle because it's such an apt description that even the kids get it. That's our baseline, we're used to it, we know how to live with it. More importantly the regional flora and fauna have adapted to it over the centuries. 

...Texas has long been stalked by megadroughts, events that can last 30, even 40 years. The story is told within the trunks of the bald cypress that line the creek and riverbeds of central Texas. Using the science of dendrochronology, researchers from Texas and Arkansas sampled nearly 300 trunk-core samples, creating a record of tree rings stretching back before Columbus landed in the Americas. One tree, still living, was but a sapling in 1426.

The record shows that in the 1700s and early 1800s, before American settlement and even extensive Spanish and Mexican settlement, several dry stretches were longer than the Drought of Record. The driest 10 years were 1716 through 1725, and the worst 20 years were 1697 through 1716. There have been numerous 30- and 40-year droughts. The worst gripped Texas and Mexico for nearly a half-century, from 1450 to 1489.

We know drought. We can do ordinary drought. But this drought, the one we're in now, isn't ordinary. We've had a scant 6.53 inches of rain so far in 2011, the worst single drought year on record in Texas. 

The drought is already changing the way we look at the land, the way we do business and live our lives. All over Texas, the country’s largest beef-producing state, ranchers are selling off herds early, losing millions of dollars, or hanging on just to watch the animals die for lack of water. Thirsty cows can even die from too much water; dehydrated and moved to water, the cows gulp it down too greedily, bloat up — and keel over dead.

Note that "single worst drought year" is not at all the same thing as "worst drought ever." I've already heard that error too many times in the news stories about what's going on down here. The worst drought in modern recorded history (the Drought of Record) was seven years in the 1950s. The devastation from a drought of that magnitude lasts a long time. One of the most endangered animals in the state is the Houston Toad, and while habitat destruction and pollution played a big part in the extirpation of the species from much of its range, it's believed that the killing blow to the population occurred during the 50s drought, when the toad's breeding cycle was completely disrupted for the better part of a decade. 

Many of the Central Texas springs and creeks are home to rare aquatic species, some of them endemic to a single site. A major multi-year drought at this point in time will likely destroy these forever. The natural world is a mosaic, one piece connecting to the next, and a threat to one species will continue to affect all those connected to it. The 2008 drought in Central Texas all but stopped the flow of the Blanco River. That in turn changed the flow of the larger Guadalupe River, which in turn caused a disaster in the extended salt/brackish water estuary system at the mouth of the Guadalupe. Because the upstate fresh water inflow was so disrupted, the salinity of the coastal estuary changed, which in turn killed off blue crabs and other smaller species that serve as food for thousands of migratory birds, including the only wild migrating flock of Whooping Cranes. Twenty three cranes (of 281) starved to death that winter. 

But the future, sadly, is likely to be worse than the past. “Texas is going to get hotter and drier,” said Malcolm Cleaveland, a professor at the University of Arkansas who led the researchers. Indeed, rainfall modeling shows that rising temperatures and more arid conditions over the last few decades are likely to increase in the 21st century.

According to a paper published in Science in 2007, “Droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.” Rain will become more rare and it will evaporate more quickly, making the megadroughts of old look like periodic dry spells. And it will be in part thanks to increased carbon emissions, a fact that Texas will have a hard time confronting.

Everyone knows about Rick Perry praying for rain recently. What's ironic is he's also been praying for an end to EPA regulations. 

And last week, in an interview with CBN News, Perry gave a preview of his approach to federal environmental policy by explaining that he prays for the EPA to roll back emissions and air quality standards:

Frankly I pray for the president every day. I pray for his wisdom, I pray that God will open his eyes. I wish this president would turn back the health care law that's been passed, ask that his EPA back down these regulations that are causing businesses to hesitate to spend money.

Unless Perry is talking about reductions in hospital expenditures because of improved public health, his belief that EPA regulations of mercury, air toxics, and carbon emissions will cause businesses to stop spending money is exactly the opposite of what analysts say would happen. 

Anticipation rewarded

Good news for fans of Zach Condon and Beirut. News came yesterday that the digital release of the new album The Rip Tide has been moved up to next week. August 2 to be precise. This is good news, very good news. 

I didn't get well-acquainted with Beirut's debut Gulag Orkestar when it came out in 2006 but I still insipidly dismissed then-20-year-old Condon and his music as gimmicky and pretentious. This based on nothing other than what I'd read about and bits and pieces I'd heard on NPR and online, and most likely on my own state of mind during that year, which was, pardon the clinical term, nuts.

I don't remember buying The Flying Club Cup the next year, but I do remember the first time I listened to it, and there probably hasn't been a week that's gone by since that I haven't played at least one cut from it. I may still have a touch of crazy, but not nearly as much as back then, and music like this is no small part of the reason why.

Though not as immediately catchy as his debut, The Flying Club Cup contains a sense of intrigue that pulls the listener in beguilingly, twisting and swaying and marching its way through the romanticized ideas of the Balkan town, the rustic Southern French village, the small Italian trattoria. It's elaborate New World indie pop that tries to touch the Old as best it can. Flügelhorns and accordions and mandolins line the 13 songs here like old bricks, Condon's voice rising elegiacally over in layered swells, tired and wise, inspired by, but not limited to, the rich French musical past, from Tino Rossi to Jacques Brel. Because Beirut plays music that feels like it's been reflected off a long and storied life, there's the possibility for unearned pretension to appear, but there's a real sincerity, and a sense of life, that finds its way into the songs here.

Here's the gorgeous "Cliquot," videotaped live with Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste on lead vocals.

 

Phone rings. Door chimes. In comes company...

Okay, you may not think you like musical theatre. Or even if you do, you may not enjoy Sondheim. What's wrong with you?! ... I mean ... I don't care, I bet you'll like this:  a special revival of Sondheim's classic Company now showing at movie theatres all over the country, starring a bunch of ridiculously good-looking people who also happen to be damn talented, including one Mr. Stephen Colbert. Don't try and tell me you don't want to see Colbert singing and dancing and being married to Martha Plimpton.

In addition to Colbert and Plimpton (who very nearly steals the show), the cast includes Neil Patrick Harris in the lead role, Jon Cryer, and oh dear lord Christina Hendricks. Not to mention Patti LuPone. That's right, Patti fucking LuPone singing Ladies Who Lunch. 

The first limited run of screenings last week was so well-received more dates have been added, but you've only got till June 26. See if there's a screening near you.

I saw it on Sunday and I still can't stop humming.

 

Proceed with the Hairdo jokes at your own peril

How Rick Perry will perform on the larger national stage in a run for the Republican presidential nomination is still anybody's guess. For that matter, whether he will is still not a certaintly, not formally at least. But since Perry's initial coy overtures, it's clear that a lot of the uninitiated don't really "get" Perry yet. And why should they? He hasn't brought their home state to its knees. Understandable for now, but if and when he formally announces, Leftward Blogtopistan will likely persist in:

1) Assuming because they've experienced George Bush, they know all there is to know about Perry.

The stupidest mistake of all. The most frightening part of the Bush administration was the machine in the shadows pulling the strings. Perry has an efficacy and individual agency that Bush never had and never will. 

2) Assuming Perry is just another stupid conservative. 

We should all know by now that when politicians espouse stupid and backward ideas, this doesn't mean that they don't know better. Hey I've done my share. FSM knows it's tempting, but to dismiss Perry as ignorant and therefore harmless because of what he champions from his bully-pulpit is to pretend that the god, guns and gays strategy has stopped working. Last I checked, it hasn't. 

3) Assuming Perry is too extreme to appeal to moderate Republicans.

On the face of it, this is probably true. But moderates can still be counted on for their free-market-rules-all-no-new-taxes kink (and for wanting to win). Mittens, Bachmann and Pawlenty can talk about jobs and debt and the economy but what have they actually done about them? Even Fox News didn't buy Pawlenty's economic hallucinations. Hell, Romney hasn't had a job since 2007.

Perry will be hitting the campaign trail fresh from laying down the latest iteration of his "Texas Model." A draconian nightmare you say? Yes, certainly, but for every furloughed teacher, every sick kid in the emergency room, every grandma kicked of Medicare, every state employee looking through the want ads, there's a fiscal conservative solemnly praising Perry's no-nonsense burn-down-the-village-in-order-to save-it-toughness.

Don't say we didn't warn you

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,

Unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come from grace

to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.

If we say we can, we're lying.

If we say No, we don't see it,

That No will behead us

And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,

Beside ourselves, and only that, so

Miraculous beings come running to help.

Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,

We shall be saying finally,

With tremendous eloquence,

Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,

We shall be a mighty kindness.

     — Rumi

(translation by Coleman Barks)

 

I've always thought Helpless is as close to sacred music as anything you can find in the rock canon. 

 

Under the boot of the Socialist overlord

Looking through the HR newsletter at my borg this morning, I saw this in an article on upcoming changes to our health plan:

Due to the federal Affordable Care Act changes, preventive care will be paid at 100%.  Services include:

Newborn, childhood, adolescent, cancer and adult health screening
Health counseling
Annual physical
Mammography
Colonoscopy
Immunizations: regular childhood shots, flu shots, tetanus shots

Great godamighty neighbors, do you hear that sound? That's the sound of our freedom's lifeblood circling the drain!

The precious liberties our forebearers fought for are under the ax, neighbors! Imagine an existence without the gawd-given right for us and our children to die from preventable diseases, while insurance agents hard at work in the blessed free market suck up every penny of our family savings!

Gott-dam chilling, ain't it?

Economic voodoo in Texas: pulling other states backwards

It was a while back, hell she was still straight back then, but one of the most genius standup bits Wanda Sykes ever did was about the fallout from the Enron scandal. It ends with Sykes comparing the newly-relative dangers of gangbangers, who don't scare her so much anymore, to those of men in suits carrying the WSJ. Seeing the latter, Sykes runs across the street to cut through the projects:

Cuttin' through the projects, you might just lose what you have on you that day. I ain't never been mugged of my future!

Which brings us to Governor Rick Perry and the 82nd Texas Legislature.

Texas has long been as politically and culturally influential as California. If that’s not often recognized, it’s for a valid reason: the influence Texas exercises pulls other states backward. “People used to say that the future happens first in California,” Krugman writes, “but these days what happens in Texas is probably a better omen. And what we’re seeing right now is a future that doesn’t work.”

In an excellent article in the current edition of The Nation, Bob Moser (editor of The Texas Observer ) pulls together the strings stretching between the right wing's marauding in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida to what's happening in Austin right now, where the already uber-conservative Lege (recently infiltrated by 30 brand new members straight out of the bowels of the Tea Party) is doing the voodoo kind of math that happens when a 23 billion dollar shortfall has to be zeroed out using subtraction only. Of course, the ringmaster of the circus is Perry, rolling in the political hay to be made from Walker et al's iterations of his "Texas Model."

“I don’t think there is anything that is so important that [it] cannot be…reduced, or for that matter, eliminated,” Perry said, summing up his governing philosophy.

  <...>

But the collapse of Texas’ illusory prosperity has not deterred the seventeen governors that Perry and the Republican Governors Association helped elect in November—including Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida—from taking their cues from Perry’s vaunted model. It’s especially handy as an excuse to gut labor laws, relax regulations and ax budgets. “If you look at the job creator over the last ten years, it’s been Texas,” Scott said shortly after his swearing-in. Walker, as he began his controversial governorship, joked with an audience of dairy businesses that he’d told Perry, “Look out, we’re coming after you.”

While Perry preens in the spotlight, publicly ridiculing "the doom and gloom crowd"  worrying about a little ol' 23 billion deficit, he's getting coached from the sidelines by none other than the man in the bathtub, Grover Norquist.

When Norquist paid Perry one of his frequent visits in March, he urged the governor to stand firm in the face of growing protests against drastic budget cuts. “Now is not the time to get wobbly,” he said outside a Dallas machine shop, while workers looked on quizzically. “Do more tort reform, more tax reduction, more spending restraint.”

Quoting “political philosopher Rahm Emanuel,” Norquist reminded Perry never to waste a crisis. “Sometimes the only way to get the bureaucracy to rethink what it’s doing is to tell them there’s a crisis,” he said. Perry nodded knowingly.

The Moser article is must-read stuff. You especially don't want to miss the part about the lobbyists for luxury yacht owners pleading for a tax break so that Texas can remain "big boat territory."

If this shit is scary, it should be. Used to be, Lege sessions were the loneliest of times for progressives in Texas. This year, it's bloodier than any in my memory, as Goodhair and the Tea Partiers try to fill that 23 billion dollar hole with the bones of the poor, the elderly, the mentally ill, school children, and thousands of state employees on top to even things out. It's more mind-boggling than ever, but it's not as lonely. Which is not a good thing. 

 

 

Going Dickensian on the fake empire

"The Straight Dope." Bill Moyers talks to David Simon Go read it.

Bill Moyers: Do you really believe, as you said to those students at Loyola, that we’re not going to make it?

David Simon: We’re not going to make it as a first-rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. Empires end, and that doesn’t mean cultures end completely, and it doesn’t even mean that for nation-states. If you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys, you’d have said, “Man, what’s going to be left?” But Britain’s still there, and they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do. Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. A lot of our foreign policy represents that. And this notion that the markets were always going to go up, and that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity out of nothing.

 

via Guernica.

 

Crossposted at Back of Town

Texas Lege: Country & Western Civilization

To the uninitiated, Texas is seen as one huge undiferentiated mass of Backward. It's not true, but meet someone who helps perpetuate the stereotype. Like US Rep Louie Gohmert, State Rep Wayne Christian is from East Texas, the region I like to think of as the Deep South of Texas. Watch the vid to see why:

 

 

Wednesday cat blogging: Spring in Palookaville

I know Friday's more appropriate for pet blogging but since it's not on my shift, and since I've been playing around with Vignette (Android equivalent of Instagram/Hipstamatic) a lot lately, please accept some pretentious Wednesday-style feline portraiture. I take more photos of Alfie than any of the other residents in the multi-species ranchette partly because the black and white and pink color combo on such a big lumbering hulk of a cat is pure win and partly because he can be all sweetness and light in one picture and total evil giant rabbit alien in the next.

 

Working for a Living: If they wanna get me, well I got no choice

"Career opportunities, the ones that never knock"

Working for a Living: There was no hollow promise that life would reward you

"God bless California, make way for the WalMart"

 

Working for a Living: It's me and my machine for the rest of the morning...

Worth waiting through the good-natured yucking it up between Bruce and James. Possibly the best cover of this song, which is a masterpiece, I've ever heard. Yes, even better than Emmy's. I said it.

Floodin' down in Texas

Well, it's been a week or so since I updated y'all on the august proceedings of the 82nd session of the Texas State Legislature, so let's pry the lid of the Best Little Hellmouth in Texas and take a look. Stand back, now, it goes without saying this won't smell good.

So yesterday was a big day for Governor Hairdo. Not only did he come home from his California vacation (where they made fun of him behind his back), but more to the point Lege-wise, he delivered his seventieth or eightieth State of the State speech. Okay, okay, it was only his tenth but damn the years do drag by since he's been in office.

Not surprisingly, it was pretty much a pile of crap. About the only highlight was when he joked about how no matter what everyone is saying about all the billions of dollars we're in the hole, the state of the state is all "What budget deficit?" Actually, he just said it was "strong" and that all anybody ever remembers is results, so just wait a few years after we gut a bunch of social services and other unnecessary luxuries and we'll show all those naysayers and liberals and other hippy states. What a thighslapper, huh? I mean after all, few things are funnier than a bighaired man seeking higher office saying "pay no attention to that colossal multi-billion dollar deficit behind the curtain," right?

The State of the State 2011 word cloud above, via the Texas Tribune, speaks volumes. Mostly about what barely got mentioned, or wasn't mentioned at all. Especially compared to previous years' clouds, this one certainly threatens some bad weather regarding spending on such frivolities as education, schools, universities, healthcare... I've looked and I can't even find a mention of children. Not surprising, given that Perry's already snapping scissors in the direction of Health and Human Services, Medicaid and CHIP.

More than just a little bit aggravating (some might say tragic) is that the impact of some of these cuts could be lessened, and no I don't even mean by raising taxes. I'm talking about the state's 9.4 billion dollar Rainy Day Fund. And trust me, I'm not the only one talking about it. It's pretty much the question of the month all over the damn state: If this isn't a rainy day, then what the hell is?

According to Reuters, plenty of other states have reached under the mattress during this recession

at the beginning of the recession, 41 states had rainy day funds and reserves that totaled at least 5 percent of their budgets. By 2010, only 22 states had reserves

But see, the Texas GOP just don't roll that way. No, the RDF must be kept as sacrosanct and unsullied as they like to think their teenage daughters are. The signals were sent even before this session started, as soon as it did start, and then Perry doubled down on the prime directive yesterday.

Hurricanes can come and go, children and seniors can be left out in the cold, community college after community college can wither and die, larger universities can lose scores of staff, faculty, entire departments, "non-essenential" state agencies can be axed left and right, but none of that constitutes a rainy day in Texas.

We all look up at the same big sky

Posting about the documentary Prodigal Sons wasn't something I'd planned on, mostly because it didn't seem at first I had much of a reason to use this space to do so. The film's been out a while; even though I just saw it a few weeks ago, it's not exactly news.

I could tie in the fact that it's one of the nominees, in the Best Documentary category, announced last week by the GLAAD Media Awards. Or maybe I could use the news that broke a few days ago about the impending release of The Other Side of the Wind, the supposed "unfinished masterpiece" by Orson Welles that's been squirreled away unseen during a 40-year dispute over ownership.

There are reasons even more compelling than those for me. Like one of the reviewers in the clip blurbs below, I simply cannot get this film out of my head, so this is a bit of an exorcism. There's also the GLBT piece, which was what first caught my attention when I heard about it. But that's just one part of this story and the whole of this documentary is much larger than the sum of its individual parts. Bigger than sibling rivalry, bigger than mental illness, bigger even than Orson Welles.

This is a story, and a damned good one, about the stuff that we all can't help but relate to: how and why we are who we really are, and who and what we have to fight in order to be that person, the choices we relinquish out of love, or struggle to defend with our lives.

And the three very different endings those three women found to this story are a parable about our options, as Nature Boys and Nature Girls, and how easy it is to forget those options when you let somebody else drive. When you let yourself be their dream and not your own; when you are a mirror for a door inside somebody else. When you forget that you always own the sand and stone beneath your feet; when your answer to the question "Are you alive?" is not firm and quick and immediate, fierce and on fire with the knowing of the answer to the question. When you forget who painted the sky; when you forget what you are here for. 

That's from one of Jacob's final Caprica recaps. I was still mourning the show and reading those last four pieces of his at the same time I was first watching, then rewatching, Prodigal Sons, so it's all wrapped up in my head together, a convoluted, bittersweet meditation on identity and kinship.

If you haven't already done so, go watch this movie. It's out on DVD now, and also available via Netflix and iTunes.

Super cool

Just a little somethin' something that, with all the pet lovers around here, was too super-cool to not share.

Dope on the table

Okay, so someone at a conference asked Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld what he thought of The Wire. Watch the video below and see if you can tell exactly when the Commissioner makes his first mistake:

If you answered "As soon as he opens his fuckmook mouth," you'd be right.

Bealefield says he knows David Simon. If so, then he was probably not surprised by this:

Publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies—at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.

Commissioner Bealefeld may not be comfortable with public dissent, or even a public critique of his agency. He may even believe that the recent decline in crime entitles him to denigrate as "stupid" or "slander" all prior dissent, as if the previous two decades of mismanagement in the Baltimore department had not happened and should not have been addressed by any act of storytelling, given that Baltimore is no longer among the most violent American cities, but merely a very violent one.

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.  That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work. Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.

That Gun Don't Make You No Hero, Mister

"If I'd gone down there sooner, maybe I could have shot him myself," Mr. Zamudio, age 24, said in a phone interview Sunday night.

... By the time Mr. Zamudio was in close range, others had wrestled the suspect to the ground. Mr. Zamudio helped hold him down.

And young Mr. Zamudio deserves all due credit for his assistance during the chaos. But what the WSJ leaves out in their story Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help (yes, that's the real title) is this part, via Slate and Digby:

But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!'

" But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.

Zamudio agreed: I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.

When Zamudio was asked what kind of weapons training he'd had, he answered: "My father raised me around guns … so I'm really comfortable with them. But I've never been in the military or had any professional training. I just reacted."

The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio "grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall" before realizing he wasn't the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn't pull out his own weapon was that "he didn't want to be confused as a second gunman."

This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer's identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn't use his gun. That's how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, "very lucky."

Daniel Hernandez, who kept Giffords from bleeding to death, didn't have a gun. Neither did 61-year old Patricia Maisch, who kept the shooter from reloading, or Roger Sulzgeber, the man who helped Zamudio hold him down.

Guns aren't magic. Guns don't make heroes. Heroism does.

More Texas Lege preview: two to watch

We're six days out from opening day of the 82nd Texas Legislature, and for those unfamiliar with the local players, let's take a look at two dudes that have gotten a lot of press lately and bear watching during the session.

By this time next week, the biggest, or at least loudest, pre-Lege controversy will be settled. Incumbent Speaker of the House Republican Joe Straus will either have retained his gavel, or will have been ousted during an opening day vote by far-right Rs who find Straus "insufficiently conservative" to handle his job duties given the midterm Republican groundswell in the November elections. In addition to his supposed lack of conservatism, the attacks on Straus have focused on his record of voting pro-choice and pro-gay, as well as his Judaism. Yeah, outright racism will always be a safe bet for extremist conservatives in Texas, like State Republican Executive Committee member John Cook's infamous claim that Straus was just not ... well ... Christian enough to hold the speakership:

"When I got involved in politics, I told people I wanted to put Christian conservatives in leadership positions," he told me, explaining that he only supports Christian conservative candidates in Republican primary races.

"I want to make sure that a person I'm supporting is going to have my values. It's not anything about Jews and whether I think their religion is right or Muslims and whether I think their religion is right. ... I got into politics to put Christian conservatives into office. They're the people that do the best jobs over all."

Whatever their stated reasons, the thing uniting the anti-Straus contingents is more likely the fact that he enjoys wide support from both Republicans and Democrats in the house and based on pre-vote pledges, is favored to win re-election to the speakership come opening day. In other words, he is popular, powerful, and effective and that poses a threat to extremists on the far right. But this is the Texas Lege, where anything can happen, so we'll have to wait and see.

On to Dude #2, Representative Aaron Peña. The story is a few weeks old but if you don't follow Lone Star politics you may have missed it during the holidays. Back in December, two state representatives announced they were switching from Democrat to Republican. One was Alan Ritter, from Nederland in southeast Texas, and nobody really gave a shit. The other was Aaron Peña, from Hidalgo County on the lower southwestern borderline opposite Reynosa, Mexico.  Hidalgo County: 88% Hispanic, 70% Democrat, median income in the low 20Ks, second only to the Bronx for number of citizens receiving foodstamps.  Gee golly, doesn't this sound like the ideal place for a Republican representative? In fact, until Peña defected, Hidalgo County had no Republican officeholders. None. Zip. Nada.

Aside from locking in a Republican supermajority in the Texas House, we still don't know for certain everything that the Republicans who approached Peña at one of those lonely deep South Texas crossroads at midnight sometime last year have in store for him. Peña is known to be seeking support for redistricting his county and for a 2012 Congressional run. What remains to be seen is what he will do during the upcoming Lege session to earn it. Let the shucking and jiving begin!

Listen to the ones that care. Believe them when they say: It Gets Better

It's a new year and an auspicious time to remind everyone that it DOES get better.

Whether that's a message FOR you, or a message that might be FROM you to someone younger who needs to hear it, please be brave. Listen and pass the good news on.

Depending on where you work, this is probably NSFW, at least without headphones.

The vid's creator and star is genius comic/writer/performance artist Rebecca Drysdale.

 

"Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both"

All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don’t think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it’s all marvelous fun.

Molly Ivins wrote that 40 years ago, shortly after she first starting covering the Texas Legislature for The Texas Observer. Were she still with us, Molly would not be at all surprised to find it still true, quite possibly more so than ever.

The 82nd Texas Legislature (we just call it the Lege down here) convenes at noon on January 11, 2011. Regular sessions (as opposed to special sessions) of the Lege are held every two years. Back in 2009, the 81st regular session pretty much ran aground at its end when House Democrats purposely stalled progress on Voter ID, a do or die issue for Republicans who came into the 81st with a hardon for it since the Dems killed it in the 2007 session. As the subsequent two-day special session dealt only with transportation funding and sunset review for critical state agencies, a giant pile of unpassed legislation from the 81st was just left to die.

Pre-filing of legislation for the upcoming session opened on November 8 and Republican legislators had themselves quite the field day. Of course, Voter ID will rise again, along with (predictably) immigration reform. Among the scarier bills (it's hard to pick just a couple) proposed: one designed to prohibit state funding being used on abortions, both directly and indirectly, and another to abolish the state Higher Education Coordinating Board, putting higher ed directly at the mercy of the cravenly political, not to mention batshit conservative, State Board of Education.

Frightening as all that may seem, likely to eclipse everything else this session is the state budget for the next biennium. The exact extent of the projected budget shortfall for the state is hard to determine. It depends on whose version you want to believe but the consensus is 25 billion minimum and possibly as high as 35. Keeping the Ivins quote in mind, along with recent bloviations about ditching Medicaid and CHIP, it's sobering to contemplate the extent of the coming carnage.

I plan to keep y'all updated, so buckle up. It for sure ain't going to be a pretty ride.

 

(Title reference here)

 

 

xmas ham crisis: "odd and not readily identifiable"

I don't know about you, but this sure did make me nostalgic for my grandma's Chicken with Headlamp.

Out of turn, yeah. But there wasn't near enough HAM about and I was compelled to rectify the austerity of it all.  Think of the children y'all

 

 

 

Just chalk ... or fire

Maybe it's a shortsided response on my part, but it's still jarring to be reminded there are plenty of people who doubt the extent of community online or at best qualify its existence as some kind of cold flat reflection of "real life." 

I look back at just this past week:

coming together in the Crack Van and on Twitter to bear witness to DADT repeal,

the pain of finding out I have two more dead friends in my Facebook list, and another reeling in grief because how do you go on when half of you is gone?

And then there was yet another story about yet another foul-mouthed hippie blogger who had a crazy notion that people would maybe find a way to help other people

Over 900 gift cards were sent out by 689 people who were so thrilled to help.  450 people who needed small Christmas miracles received donations for medicine, food, or presents under the tree for their children.  No large corporations got involved.  No one only offered to donate if they got something out of it themselves.  With no sponsorships, no ulterior motives and with only a simple need to reach out and help a perfect stranger, 689 everyday, normal people (Jewish, Christians, Atheists, Muslims and more) sent out over $40,000 worth of donations to make sure Christmas came.

I dunno, it all feels pretty real to me.  

Done. Next?

For the record, I am happy to have been wrong about the administration being able to overturn DADT. They earned their political capital and I hope they are able to use it to somehow chip away at the Republican majority's brick wall next year.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep pushing, expecting more, calling them out when our gut tells us. It's a long fight, almost certainly longer than this administration, and we can't lose sight of the end. There are a voices clamoring this week for anyone who ever publicly doubted Obama and the Dems, anyone on the spectrum from the "professional left" to regular joe bloggers and tweeps, to fess up about how wrong they were and to kindly STFU from here on out and keep clapping.  About the GLBT agenda, about Social Security and debt, about indefinite detention, about net neutrality. To which I say, "Fuck that shit."  Call it doubt, call it cynicism, call it analysis, call it reserving final judgment, maybe just call it public discourse, it's part of how we define the arc of the moral universe.

Like Barney Frank said yesterday, "Two down, two to go." That's the spirit.

 

DADT repeal vote imminent

According to some DC sources via Twitter, the House vote on the standalone DADT repeal should be around 3 p.m. but it may come up earlier, so keep your eyes and ears on CSPAN's live stream.

In a related story, Lt. Dan Choi, who became one of the public faces of DADT, was hospitalized in a Veteran's Administration mental health facility yesterday. Choi chose to make his breakdown and hospitalization public via email:

I did not initially want to publicize this but I now realize it is critical for our community to know several things: veterans gay or straight carry human burdens, Activists share similar burdens, no activist should be portrayed as super human, and the failures of government and national lobbying carry consequences far beyond the careers and reputations of corporate leaders, elected officials, High powered lobbyists, or political elites. They ruin lives.

 

A different paradigm

Even aside from fan squee (I was so loud the cat looked at me funny), this resonates.  THIS is what I want from my government when the going gets tough. Fight like hell and if you have to sacrifice, make it worth it.

 

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