Brains: Couldn't Happen To Nicer Guys

[elfs]

Five tips to avoid annoying other people

Gretchen gives us stuff to think about:

1. Don't use a whiny voice
2. Watch your cellphone use
3. Don't curse
4. Clean up after yourself
5. Think about whether you're being interesting

Focus on the Family loses jobs

Having spent over half a million dollars helping Proposition 8 pass, FotF now has to cut back its own workforce 18%, laying 149 workers and closing down 53 job offerings. Wonkette schadenfreudes:

Sure, you have no income now because James Dobson burnt all of your company's money on a state ballot proposition. But imagine the alternative! Would you want to be employed knowing that several hundred miles away, in another state, pairs of consenting adults that already have been living together, people whom you've never met and will never meet, were applying for state licenses (pieces of paper, really) that offered them some new tax and medical options?

New Gingrich Vs. The Rising Homosexualist Facist Horde!

I heard this everywhere yesterday. Newt was on O'Reilly, and he told Bill

I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.

I think the threat to traditional religion in this country comes from leaders who serve wife #1 divorce papers while she's in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy, and who serves wife #2 with similar papers after getting caught receiving a blowjob from future wife #3 in the Congressional parking lot.

The call to 'route around' the Human Rights Campaign grows

A handful of young non-professionals were able to organize in a few days what HRC has been incapable of doing in months or years... [Meanwhile,] the website of the biggest gay rights group in the country has one single mention - it's a blog about a celebrity, of course - of the massive protests that occurred for marriage equality across the country yesterday. (A letter from Joe Solmonese tells us to be nice.)... It's time gay people realized that this group is often part of the problem, and rarely part of the solution. It needs to be swept clean of its deadwood, overhauled, or if it persists in its ways, defunded. When we are in a civil rights movement and the biggest organization is essentially a passive observer and excuse-maker, it's time to demand better.

David Frum leaves NRO!

Starting over Inauguration Weekend, I'll be launching a new website, NewMajority.com. It will be a group blog, featuring many different voices. Not all of them identify as conservatives or Republicans. But they - and people like them - are the people conservatives and Republicans need.

This has been big news, because it means that NRO, having lost Parker and Buckley, is bleeding out of every orifice those intellectual lights who are willing to wrestle with the conservatism of Russell and Kirk, and ask themselves which debates are worthy of time and attention and where compromise is possible. Although I wonder what his new website will do that Culture 11 does not.

The very model of common sense conservatism!

NRO is having it's "post-election cruise" and is cheering the ascedency of Sarah Palin, who "incarnates the practical, common-sense conservatism of Middle America."

Yeah, right. Her eldest son dropped out of school and ended up enlisting and going to Iraq in a deal cut to avoid a conviction; her eldest daughter is underage, unmarried, and pregnant; her other kids have at best lackluster schooling. She's uncurious about anything other than her own power. I guess that's Middle America, all right. The one that voted for Obama. The one Michelle Malkin is now calling 'stupid.'

Bush team engages in 'burrowing.'

Some 34 political appointees put into office by the Bush administration have either moved or applied to move to civil service positions, where they'll be protected by law from removal from their posts. I normally wouldn't object to this, but these people are part of an adminsitration that has been proud of its own inability to govern, and cement a mindset in our civil service that civil service itself is a fundamentally misguided activity.

Comments

Focus on the Family is just the tip of the iceberg

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

I think the issues that Focus on the Family is having are just the tip of the iceberg, on all side of the various political issues. Planned Parenthood called again yesterday, it seems like they're calling twice a week now, and the pitch was "we need to act fast to undo 8 years of the Bush administration".

I'm sympathetic to their cause, we give 'em quite a bit of money, albeit once a year and if they'd just send us a single annual renewal notice we'd be much much happier, but I think now that the big scary evil monster has been pushed back a bit for an election cycle they're going to have to run their fund raising a little bit differently.

The relative Democratic win, coupled with the economic downturn, is gonna be harsh on all advocacy groups.

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

Oh, and, yeah, HRC has been out of touch for quite a while now, used to give 'em money, haven't for a few years.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

HRC infuriated most of my LJ friends list when it abandoned its mission statement and core values and betrayed transfolk during the ENDA mess.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

(A letter from Joe Solmonese tells us to be nice.)...

Yeah, the HRC would be telling the rioters at Stonewall to let the cops beat them.

It's time gay people realized that this group is often part of the problem, and rarely part of the solution.

It's actually worse than useless, because it pretends to be doing something when it's really throwing us all under the bus for the sake of maintaining its own power and status inside of the Beltway.

It needs to be swept clean of its deadwood, overhauled, or if it persists in its ways, defunded. When we are in a civil rights movement and the biggest organization is essentially a passive observer and excuse-maker, it's time to demand better.

It needs to be defunded, period.

In the late 90's, the HRC supported Al D'Amato for senate in NY. My mom was teaching me to say, "Al D'Amato is a crook," when he was just a local Nassau County official back in the 70's. The man's corrupt. Always has been. But that's not the kicker: D'Amato was the Republican candidate for senate. The HRC backed the Republican candidate, not the Democrat, Chuck Schumer, at a time when both houses of Congress were held rather solidly by the Republican Party, a political party that is openly hostile to the very existence of every non-hetero in North America.

We dropped them like a hot potato after that, and when they next phoned us, I was screaming at them that they were all a pack of traitors and self-hating borderline closet-cases.