Tim’s Blog

Wockner has an open letter so good, I copied it, changed it up some, printed it out and sent it to Ahnold.
Dear Gov. Schwarzenegger,

As the bill legalizing same-sex marriage in California sits on your desk for the second time in three years, I wonder…

How do you want to be remembered?

What do you want people to say about you 20 or 50 years from now?

Do you want to be remembered like Gov. Pete Wilson? As someone who did the wrong thing when presented with a historic opportunity? As someone who, for purely political reasons, blocked, for a few more years, an inevitable civil rights advance?

Surely you remember Pete’s veto of California’s first gay anti-discrimination bill in 1991. You were here in California then.

I know you know Pete did the wrong thing, because you have signed a whole bunch of gay rights bills since you’ve been governor — making California a fairer place where gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people finally now are almost equal citizens.

Almost. Because we still can’t get married. Because you vetoed the same-sex marriage bill that our elected Assembly members and senators passed in 2005.

Now they’ve passed it yet again, and there it sits on your desk beside your beautiful humidor.

I hope you realize this is likely the last thing of any significance that we gays are going to ask of you. Because when you let us get married, our 40-year battle for equal rights will have come to an end in California. Because we’ll finally have full legal equality. And it’s all up to you, Sir.

You know, when Pete vetoed that gay rights bill in 1991, gays rioted in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And there were huge protests in San Diego, West Hollywood and Sacramento.

We should have taken to the streets again in 2005 (peacefully, of course) when you decided, for your own political reasons, to veto a bill passed by our elected representatives that finally would have allowed us to no longer be second-class citizens.

I say “political reasons” because I know you’re not personally anti-gay. You have nothing against us. You have gay high-level staff. You’ve actually signed more gay-equality bills than any governor in U.S. history. Did you know that? And you’ve even actually said you’re not personally opposed to same-sex marriage.

I say political reasons because you must have vetoed that bill to avoid upsetting that certain percentage of anti-gay bigots who cling to the California Republican Party. You must want something from them down the road.

I don’t know what that might be. Some folks have said you might want to run for the U.S. Senate, and don’t want to provoke the anti-gay bigots to run someone against you in a Republican primary election.

But when the history books are written, Governor, the anti-gay bigots are going to be remembered in the same way we remember racists today. As an embarrassment from a less-enlightened, less-evolved era of U.S. history. I know you don’t want to be in the same chapter as George Wallace in a textbook students will read 50 years from now.

I know you don’t want to have happen to you what happened to poor Pete Wilson last month in San Diego.

Some folks got together and built a statue of Pete, privately funded, on private property, in the heart of downtown. They wanted to say thank you to him for his key role in the revitalization of San Diego’s downtown core when he was mayor here.

Pete came for the lovely ceremony in Horton Square. But he didn’t get to hear much of it. And neither did the hundreds of well-heeled guests who came to thank him.

That’s because there were hundreds of protesters less than 100 feet away banging on drums, yelling through bullhorns and chanting, “Tear down the statue, tear down the hate” and “Pete Wilson’s gotta go: Racist, sexist, homophobe.”

The protesters were Latinos and gays.

The gays carried signs reading, “We remember AB 101.” That was the simple gay rights bill that Pete vetoed in 1991, thereby leaving gays unprotected from discrimination in California for eight more years until another governor finally signed it.

The Latino protesters remembered, all too well, Prop 187. That was the unconstitutional immigrant-bashing ballot initiative that Pete championed and voters passed in 1994.

Yup, that’s right. Voters have been known to use the ballot initiative process to do dumb things, wrong things, even unconstitutional things — things that people in the future will look back on with horror.

When you vetoed the same-sex marriage bill in 2005, you cited another ballot initiative passed by voters — one that prohibits California from recognizing same-sex marriages conducted in places where same-sex marriage is legal — like Canada, like Massachusetts, and Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and South Africa.

You said you didn’t like the idea of the Legislature being the ones to legalize same-sex marriage. You said it should be up to the voters, or to the courts.

But did you know that when the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage there, all the anti-gay bigots screamed that this was activist judges run amok — and that the matter should have been decided by the Massachusetts Legislature?

I guess you know that. I guess you know all this. I happen to agree with the anti-gay bigots in Massachusetts that having our elected representatives legalize same-sex marriage is a better way to go about it than having the state Supreme Court do it, which may well happen here in California in just a few months anyway.

We elect the Assembly members and senators to represent us. If Californians had been so horribly outraged that our elected representatives voted for same-sex marriage in 2005, then California voters would have retaliated against those legislators who voted for marriage equality.

But voters didn’t. And this year’s same-sex marriage bill got more votes in the Legislature than the one in 2005 did.

I actually have more to say, Sir, but I’m at the word limit imposed by my editor. So let me end where I started. I wonder, Mr. Schwarzenegger: How do you want to be remembered?

Rex Wockner
San Diego

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I woke up at 2:30 AM with the return of a headache that has been plaguing me for days. Have had pains in my upper back and neck. HP rubbed my back for a while but the pain came back with a vengeance. Woke me right out of a (bad) dream.

Took two advils and read some blogs. Took another and took a shower.

Been drinking water, in case it was dehydration.  Feel bloated and gassy, but you know, I think I’ve felt that way for months now (I need to lose some weight).

Laying down makes the headache come back. Standing up and walking around doesn’t do much good either. Sitting on my ass seems to help, but only as long as I keep stretching my neck, moving my head around. ugh.

So what should I do? I blog because it feels better than reading.  Focuses the mind without it being too much like work. I’d watch TV or Crooksandliars or youtube but I don’t want to wake HP.

ARRGH! WTF is wrong with me? I am in such pain!

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In October, 2006, Kevin Tillman wrote this powerful piece which I just found on Truthout.com. I can’t think of a better response to the nonsense that President Bush offered the nation on Thursday night.

After Pat’s Birthday
By Kevin Tillman

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secreprisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

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One million Iraqi have died in our occupation. (Source: British Medical Journal, The Lancet)

Well done!

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I was nonplussed by news of the suicide at Burning Man. Suicide isn’t funny except occasionally in the movies and even then, not so much. Still, the fact that the guy was swinging for two hours in public view before someone realized that it was NOT actually performance art is a crackup.

A Burning Man participant was found dead this morning, hanging from the inside of a two-story high tent, according to Mark Pirtle, special agent in charge for the Bureau of Land Management.

The apparent suicide would be the festival’s first in its 21 year history, Pirtle said.

Pershing County coroners are investigating the scene and preparing to remove the body. Pirtle said the man was hanging for two hours before anyone in the large tent thought to bring him down. “His friends thought he was doing an art piece,” Pirtle said.

A makeshift morgue is being set up at the law enforcement command center on the outskirts of Black Rock City. Pirtle said authorities can not release information on the dead man’s name until next of kin is notified.

The incident has gone unnoticed by most of the 36,000 revelers who have already arrived. The city’s population is on pace to hit 46,000, Pirtle said, a fourteen percent increase from last year.

There’s comedy and then there’s comedy.

But on further reading, it turns out I know the people in the camp in which the dude strung himself up, having camped with that group last year. Nice people, for the most part (a bad apple here and there, but that’s to be expected in any group). And, sadly, it turns out the BEST part of the story, the swinging in full view for two hours, and the misperception of performance art, just simply didn’t happen.

Suicide isn’t a story unless there is someone or something to blame, and in this case the narrative that quickly took shape was thanks to the flippant, off-the-cuff remark to the press by the BLM asshole-in-chief Mark Pirtle and THAT is why this story is news at all.

Here’s the statement from Curt at Comfort and Joy:

On the morning of Thursday, August 30th a young man from Colorado chose to end his life in the rafters of a public tent at Comfort & Joy.

Though he was unknown to us, in the wake of his passing we’re learning from those who knew him that he was creative, kind, unconventional and smart, and that he was regarded with affection by many.

His final act, committed in solitude, has one lasting effect as it brings us together to mark his passing. To all who have offered our camp their sympathy and support during this time, thank you. To all who knew him, please accept our sincere condolences.

It is estimated that there was an one hour interval between the last visit to the tent by a camp member, and the discovery of the body by a second camp member. It is believed that the tent was unoccupied during this time, and that there were no witnesses to the suicide.

One other individual, not associated in any way with the camp, was in the tent at the time the body was discovered. Emergency personnel were immediately contacted by camp members. Authorities responded within minutes and closed the scene upon arrival.

The Black Rock City Rangers, Sheriffs and other law enforcement officials who assisted us with this incident were very professional, supportive, and helpful to us at a difficult time. We are grateful for their services. We are also thankful for the warm and organized support we have received from the grief counselors from the Black Rock City Mental Health Team. They helped us openly discuss what had happened and come to a shared understanding of the morning’s events.

Much of our camp was quarantined while the coroners did their jobs and we canceled that day’s events (a yoga class, a queer discussion group, glitter body painting and a watercolor painting workshop).

As a camp, we decided to make a contribution to David Best’s Temple of Forgiveness, where people can mourn, remember, write messages and leave items to be ceremonially burned on Sunday night. We felt the rope the young man used represented the terrible violence he committed upon himself and the people around him. By sending the rope up in flames, we hoped to allow some of that pain to disperse. None of us believe that this young man wanted to trouble us with his actions.

The members of Comfort & Joy extend their deepest sympathy to all who knew this young man. Our hearts go out to his family, friends, and special people in his life. Although we will never know or understand him the way you did, he indeed touched us as well, made us grow, and hopefully become better individuals. May the rest of his journey be peaceful and lead him to the joy we all seek in our lives.

We look forward to continuing our mission of creating positive, warm and supportive queer community both in Black Rock City and the Bay Area.

With love and respect,

The Comfort & Joy Family
http://www.playajoy.org

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wow:

Essay: “I’m the proud owner of Karl Rove’s father’s solid gold cock ring.”

Shannon Larratt, founder of the body modification online publication BMEzine, pointed us a few days ago to a first-person essay that a person named Yard[D]og was writing, regarding the adoptive father of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove (shown in the image at left). Yard[D]og claims to have been a close personal friend of the now-deceased elder Rove.

About the essay’s contents, Mr. Larratt said:

“Karl Rove’s father was not only gay, but a part of the early body piercing scene and a regular at 70s piercing parties… There are pictures of him on BME.”

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A Democratic Strategy on Gay Marriage
by Eric Jaye

Last year the Democrats had numerous opportunities to stand on principle — and in doing so show they had the courage to stand for something. No opportunity was greater than the raging debate over gay marriage.

Facing an evenly divided electorate, Republican strategists surmised that victory in 2004 lay in driving turnout among their base voters. That’s why they placed attacks on gay marriage on state ballots in swing states. They believed that such a debate would drive turnout, particularly among low-turnout Christian evangelical voters.

What did the Democrats do? By and large they ducked, with poll-crafted drivel that made them seem like typical politicians, not courageous leaders.

Most voters do not yet support gay marriage - although support for equal matrimonial rights has risen dramatically in the past decade. Polls show a sharp generational divide, with the majority of voters under 40 in support of gay marriage and the majority of voters over 60 strongly opposed.

But in this day and age, most swing voters reserve more venom for vacillating politicians than they do for two gay people deciding to adopt the bourgeois convention of lifetime commitment and matrimony.

It is this disdain for vacillating politicians that allows President George Bush to take so many controversial stands yet still win elections for himself and his party. It’s called leadership and voters reward it.

On a woman’s right to choice, Iraq, environmental protection, outsourcing and Social Security - Bush is ‘wrong’ from a pollsters’ perspective. Yet, why does he still seem so right to so many voters?

Bush wins by being “wrong” because his controversial positions resonate as authentic. American voters don’t agree with him on key issues — but they tend to believe he “stands up for what he believes.” In a political landscape in which character matters more than ideology, Bush wins by seeming “real” to voters.

So while Bush seems authentic at the very moment he is pursuing a political ploy to excite his right-wing base - Democrats seem weak and untrustworthy - not just to their base supporters, but to the broad mass of swing voters.

With a few exceptions, most Democrats simply lack credibility when they say they oppose gay marriage. We have the honor of belonging to a party that has been on the forefront of the civil rights movement for more than 50 years. Most voters, in most states, expect us to stand for civil rights - even when these very same voters are taking a go-slow approach.

So who do we think we are fooling when we mumble finely nuanced positions on gay marriage? The truth is we are only fooling ourselves.

We have now survived an entire generation of poll-tested politicians and incremental politics. Finely crafted “agreement” messages, once an innovation, are now an invitation to ridicule. Not just late at night on television, but at almost any hour, we can all enjoy a good laugh at the expense of a politician who is merely reading from a poll-tested script.

So what’s the right answer when Democrats are asked, “Do you support gay marriage?” The right answer, in almost every case, is the truth. And in most cases, the truth is “Yes.”

First and foremost - by saying “Yes” we are standing for something, even when the majority of voters don’t yet support our position. And telling the truth makes us sound like real people, not like robo politicians. But more than this - by saying “Yes” we can seize political terrain that allows us to drive the debate, not duck it.

And we are finding that when we take the offensive on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage, we can make real progress. At the very least, we have a fighting chance when we stop ducking the issue of gay rights and start debating it with clear and concise language.

Along with a team of top-notch consultants, we worked on the successful campaign in 2004 to repeal Article 12 of the Cincinnati City Charter, which allowed discrimination against lesbian and gays. Just this month we helped defeat the Topeka City Question in Topeka, Kansas that would have allowed discrimination against gays. Both campaigns were played out in the context over the debate on gay marriage.

Last year, as former consultants to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, we were closely involved in presenting the “winter of love” gay marriages to the public. We were also part of the unsuccessful effort in Oregon in 2004 to defeat the attack on gay marriage.

We took away from those successes, and that failure, the belief that when it comes to gay marriage the simple truth is better than a complicated lie.

But more than that - in the long run we can’t win if we don’t debate. And let’s not fool ourselves, this debate is not going away. The Republicans put it on the agenda, and they will keep it there, particularly so long as we refuse to even articulate our own position.

Cautious Democrats should face the fact that no position on gay marriage is the weakest possible stance. Silence is read as support for gay marriage. And your silence is seen as political at best, cowardice at worst. As a party, we might not have chosen this fight. But it is here. Unilateral surrender is not a workable strategy.

And to my fellow consultants I would offer this hard-learned lesson. Anti-gay marriage amendments are being fought on the basis of gay marriage — not some “hidden flaw” or “costly consequence.” These measures are not analogous to some down-ballot initiative that we can define. Voters know what they are about — gay marriage.

In California, we found during the San Francisco gay marriage insurrection that support for gay marriage increased slightly across the state, and support for civil unions increased dramatically, after we captured the airwaves with images of couples who were absolutely unremarkable in any way other than in their desire to profess life-long love and responsibility for each other.

First in Cincinnati, and then in Topeka, we won campaigns against discrimination in part by seizing the language of morality, rather than ceding it to our opponents.

We crafted mail pieces entitled “Not Just on Sunday,” and “Daily Bread,” that took up the language of the Lord’s Prayer in defense of tolerance and equal rights every day.

We didn’t hide from the issue. We didn’t run from the moral debate. We embraced it - and won. Democrats around the country have nothing to lose, and so much to gain, from doing likewise.

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True words from David Mixner:

Rove’s contribution to our national discourse was to refine the political art of division, anger and attack after the horror of 9/11, a time when the nation needed to be united more than ever before. He callously used the LGBT community as a political punching bag and encouraged those who bitterly attack us by giving them political legitimacy. He ceded the Republican Party to Robertson, Falwell and others, who used the White House to build even more power and raise even more money for their personal agendas. People who literally preached hate against the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities had Rove’s counsel and support. Then, he dragged out the Federal Marriage Amendment and dressed up George Bush in the Rose Garden to endorse it.

If Rove is remembered for anything, however, he should be reviled for hawking massive lies to a fearful nation in order to build support for the invasion of Iraq. He created a political strategy around questioning the patriotism of those that disagreed with the war. Instead of addressing the flawed conduct of the war, he filled the air with slick PR catchphrases like “shock and awe” and “mission accomplished.” Rove always seemed to be the last to let go of a lie, even insisting that weapons of mass destruction would still be found in Iraq long after everyone else had moved on.

Read the whole post

Karl Rove deserves bone cancer. Are you listening, God?

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This guy is counting to one million, online, streaming it out to anyone who wants to watch him count. He’s getting his streaming media paid for with the gig.

He stops counting quite a bit to answer his phone, play with his dog or talk to his wife, who I hear all the time but never seems to wander on screen. Still, he manages to get through AT LEAST twenty thousand per day, which by my math would mean he will be done some day (too many zeros for me, sorry).

Did I mention this was in streaming video?

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ATTENTION MAYOR NEWSOM: THE MUNI IS BROKEN!  PLEASE FIX IT NOW…it’s your job.

I can handle waiting half an hour for an N to show up at Carl and Cole during morning rush hour to take me down town. It sucks but it happens so frequently I’m used to it. I can deal with the cattle-car conditions on the N itself—hundreds people packed in like doomed galley slaves. I can withstand the constant barrage of delays in the tunnel. I’ve even grown accustomed to the terrible customer service: the surly, mean, dismissive attitude shared by most Muni drivers. These drivers routinely display the stereotypical worst behavior of the protected civil servant whom only a gun rampage can get fired for cause.

With the new T-line, all of this has gotten immeasurably worse, but I have been riding the Muni for a few years now and I’m used to all these annoyances. What I cannot handle, what no citizen of our great city should EVER have to handle, is riding on the Muni during the hottest week of the year, when half the Muni cars on the N have the heater on.  On the way home last night and again tonight, I was stuck on standing-room only, outbound-N with the heater running full bore.

As a Jew, I paniced momentarily, recalling that our Govenor was raised by an SS man.

WHY in the NAME OF GOD are the heaters going in these cars? It must have been a hundred degrees! People were already squished together, sweating and stressed and upset while old people stripped  and fanned themselves, just an inch from fainting dead away, and the HEATER was BLASTING from the ceiling like a infernal kiln. What circle of Hell, I wondered, had I been banished to at last?

Mayor Newsom, hard working San Franciscans should not be treated like this. We SHOULD NOT be subject to such dangerous conditions on a daily basis, as we commute to and from our jobs where we earn the money that pays you and the City Council and subsidizes the Muni. These conditions are unacceptable. I can guarantee that the first person to hit the deck from heat exhaustion will cost the city plenty. I will certainly voulanteer to testify in their suit. Does your budget have a surplus for the possible law suits that await?

I ride the Muni by choice: to help the environment, to save on parking, to avoid traffic. All the typical San Francican tree-hugger virtues.  Yet I am being punished for my choice. I feel punished because the conditions on the Muni feel, in every way, like punishment. A kind of daily purgatory. Are you aware that the new Pope abolished purgatory? Are not steamrooms still banned in San Francisco?

I don’t care what you have to do to fix this, just fix it. FIRE who you need to fire. Retire deadwood supervisors.  Raise taxes to pay for maintenance people to fix the cars. RAISE THE FARE TO $2.00! Start a guest worker program for foreign cable car repairmen. I would happily pay more to have a nice commute to work. Hell, I think I *deserve* a TOLERABLE commute! I’m certainly willing to pay for it!

PLEASE HELP US!  I voted for you. I even worked on your campaign.  Please do not let me down. I appreciate many of the progressive choices you’ve made during your term to make San Francisco a beacon of hope for many. However, if you can’t maintain the transportation infrastructure that you are responsible for, do not expect my support come reelection time. You are leading a city, not a morning talk show. Great hair and good looks will take you only so far in politics. Please act like my mayor and fix the damn MUNI.

Respectfully,

Tim Wayne

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