Bonehead and his Rich Legal Team in a Circle Jerk

It seems that our embarrassment to Ohio and his over paid outside legal team has come up with a way to defend DOMA in a rather circular manner. According to the AP,

"But attorneys representing the House's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group counter that DOMA is subject to a lower level of court scrutiny because gays and lesbians don't meet the legal criteria for groups who receive heightened protection from discrimination. Under that lower standard, DOMA is constitutional, they argue."

Translation: Because we are winning a few battles against discrimination, we don't meet the legal criteria for groups who receive heightened protection from discrimination therefore it is his right to discriminate against us.
With this line of thinking, they can fight any anti-discrimination laws against any minority and there is no way for the minority to win.

While DADT is history ( for now ), our brave LGB (no T) soldiers can fight and die the same, can post pictures of their families and loved ones, and be open about their lives if they want but because of DOMA can not have the same benefits for their families or legally married spouses. No health care, no housing or moving, etc...

DOMA hurts those of us who are legally married by denying our vows and the 1300 federal benefits afforded to str8 couples. I should not have to be listed as a dependant on my wife's taxes.
It gets in the way of LGBT families trying to get help with a child's higher education costs.
It separates legally married couples and breaks up families when one is deported for no other reason other than DOMA.

Again, it is not illegal to NOT defend a bad law. The President, DOJ, many judges, and a slim majority think it is a bad law. This bad law hurts Americans and their children.

Why on earth does Bonehead think it is OK to blow 1.5 million taxpayer dollars to defend a bad law!?
Why can't anybody do something to stop him!?

After Bonehead loses and DOMA is history, what other minority will he defend discrimination for?

Weekly Art 6

Posing with the Moon. Awsome photos!


Last week we lost a great man. This is a simple and beautiful tribute to Steve Jobs. A portrait in salt.
Notice the Apple logo change.

Sculpture Made Out Of 10,000 Flip Flops  

Classic Paintings Remade As Modern Photos  

Occupy Wall Street's Age Divide - Great Piece

I may be the same age as this guy but I did not go to school until the mid 90's. I still owe more than I can pay back. I am one of the 99%.

 Paul Campos

The reason baby boomers don't understand the protesters is because we grew up with all advantages now being denied the younger generation—and it's left us totally clueless. 

I am a baby boomer. Like many people my age, I have a high-paying and generally pleasant job, which features excellent benefits and a flexible work schedule. I’m also one of those people who, not long ago, would have dismissed the Occupy Wall Street protesters as just another bunch of spoiled kids, indulging in political street theater, while lacking any serious and constructive agenda. (Those people seem to include almost all of the mainstream media, which until a few days ago limited their coverage of the protesters to mocking their clothes and music. Predictably, time has transformed many boomers into their own parents.)

I am, in other words, part of what could be called the Clueless Generation. The Clueless Generation is made up of middle-aged, professionally successful people, who grew up in a nation that featured a mostly thriving economy, low-cost higher education, and some minimal commitment to economic justice. As a consequence, we graduated from school with little or no debt, got good jobs that featured real possibilities for advancement, and have on the whole ended up doing very well for ourselves.

A lot of us have also become insufferably smug and complacent. Over the past year I was lucky enough to be jolted out of my own smugness and complacency by a series of painful encounters with recent law-school graduates. I began to investigate the question of how many law graduates were getting jobs as lawyers, and discovered that a shocking percentage—more than half—were not.

Since I went to law school in the 1980s, the cost of legal education has quadrupled in real terms, thereby ensuring most current law students will graduate with six figures of debt from law school alone. Meanwhile legal employers are downsizing and outsourcing, to the point where the ratio between new lawyers and new jobs for lawyers is approximately two to one. And most of the new jobs don’t pay enough to allow even those who are lucky enough to get them to pay their educational debts.

A lot of boomers have become insufferably smug and complacent.

A businessmen looks at demonstrators marching in the financial district on Sept. 26, 2011 in New York., Spencer Platt / Getty Images

My attempts to bring this economic and human crisis to the attention of the law-school world have been met mostly with denial and incomprehension. It seems the Clueless Generation is largely incapable of grasping that this is no ordinary downturn in the business cycle, but rather that America is no longer the same country in which we were so fortunate to come of age.

For the still largely unacknowledged crisis in legal education merely mirrors the vastly larger crisis in our society as a whole. Millions of young adults are graduating from college and professional schools with massive amounts of educational debt—debt that, thanks to sweetheart legislative deals that lined the pockets of bankers, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. In just the past decade, total outstanding educational debt in America has risen more than five-fold, from $180 billion to nearly $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the international crisis of global capitalism has led employers large and small to do everything possible to cut labor costs. This has produced the current 15 percent official unemployment rate among Americans in their 20s. (The real unemployment rate is far higher, since the government counts people as unemployed only if they did zero hours of paid work in the past week and have been actively seeking employment at some point in the last four weeks.)

What the Clueless Generation finds difficult to comprehend is that literally millions of highly educated and hardworking young Americans—people who followed all the rules and did everything we told them to do—are either severely underemployed or have no jobs of any kind. Meanwhile, they struggle with the massive educational debts they incurred after the baby boomers decided that access to the bargain-priced higher education from which we benefited wasn’t so important after all.

Now, as the protests spread across the country, the core of the Occupy Wall Street movement—young, overeducated, and underemployed—is beginning to find common cause with many other people disillusioned with a social system that continues to grant its privileged elite ever-greater rewards. The compelling images from what the movement calls “the 99 percent” paint a portrait of our new Gilded Age that we ignore at our peril.

America’s first Gilded Age in the late 19th century led eventually to mass protests and nationwide strikes, which played a key role in the development of both progressive politics and the modern labor movement. The widespread labor insurgency of the mid-1930s pushed FDR to adopt the most important and long-lasting features of the New Deal. And the civil-rights and antiwar mass mobilizations of the 1960s helped overcome some of the great injustices of that era.

It seems that at this moment we in the Clueless Generation could use a reminder that the 1960s were about something more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll.                                  

National Debt by President

Investigating Bryan Fischer - I Really don't like this guy!

I have downloaded the 23 page report but have yet to read it. I can not stress enough how important it is that we expose this man and all like him. The hate and lies must stop!

From joemygod.com

Clip description:

The Propagandist is an in-depth investigative piece about Fischer's history in Idaho written for the Southern Poverty Law Center by Idaho journalists Jody May-Chang and Jill Kuraitis, both of whom have closely followed Fischer's activities for many years. The article is included in a 23-page report issued by the SPLC Oct. 10, 2011.

Hear the full report.

Labels: AFA, Bryan Fischer, hate groups, hate speech

Marine Vs NYPD in Times Square

Those officers should be ashamed of themselves and this Active Soldier lets them know it.

 

"What do you put in your mouth but don't Swallow?" - Hmmmmmm

Spock is Gay

From joemygod.com

"when i found out that jamey rodemeyer killed himself - i felt deeply troubled. but when i found out that jamey rodemeyer had made an it gets better video only months before taking his own life - i felt indescribable despair. i also made an it gets better video last year - in the wake of the senseless and tragic gay teen suicides that were sweeping the nation at the time. but in light of jamey's death - it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it - is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality." - Actor Zachary Quinto, writing on his personal blog. Quinto came out this weekend.

Thank you Zachary.
For those of you still in the closet......Come out! Come out! Where ever you are!
We need you to show the world we are many. That we are your friends and family. We are neighbors, church members, parents at PTA, doctors and lawyers. We are the same and deserve the same.

KC Catholic Bishop INDICTED for Failing to Report Kiddie Porn Priest

But what about the children?

Kansas City's anti-gay and "pro-life" Roman Catholic bishop has been indicted on a charge of "failing to protect children" after he and his diocese waited five months to report to police that "hundreds of images of child pornography" were discovered on a priest's computer, reports the AP.

Bishop Robert Finn becomes the first U.S. bishop criminally charged with sheltering an abusive clergyman and the "highest-rank clergyman charged" in the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals, reports the Kansas City Star.

A Jackson County grand jury on Oct. 6 secretly indicted both Finn and the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph on misdemeanor charges of failure to report child abuse in a case involving a priest facing child pornography charges. As Finn and the diocese denied wrongdoing Friday after appearing in court, news of the charges roiled the nation and the Catholic world.

The charges were announced Friday at a news conference by Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. "This is a significant charge," Baker said. "To my knowledge, a charge like this has not been leveled before."

Finn as a member of the clergy and the diocese as the operator of schools are required under Missouri law to report reasonable suspicions of child abuse. But they did not do that for five months in the case of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, the indictment alleges. In a statement, the diocese said its lawyers entered a plea of not guilty for the diocese.

Ratigan faces multiple child pornography charges in state and federal court. A separate lawsuit filed in June accuses Finn and the diocese of violating federal and state child pornography and child abuse laws when they allegedly concealed evidence that the priest "was creating child pornography by photographing and being sexually inappropriate with young parish girls."

The Kansas City Star has published an editorial demanding the Bishop's resignation, saying that Finn "must go."

Bishop Finn is affiliated with the Opus Dei movement. Finn has called for "war" against gay rights and pro-choice activists. Kiddie porn producing priests? Not so much.

Oct. in LGBT History Month - This is Why

Betty White and Luciana in "I'm Still Hot" - Go Betty!!

Rachel Maddow On Frank Kameny - LGBT history

This is the kind of history our kids need to know. LGBT history is NOT about sex. It is about the hard working people who helped shape this great country and this man is at the top of that change.

Thank you Frank for a life time of service.

 

 

Bigots fail in California! Anti-gay referendum doesn't get enough signatures

From Alvin McEwen at Holy Bullies and Headlass Monsters

All of the religious right's lies and all of the religious right's men won't be able to put gays in the closet again.
From the San Diego Gay & Lesbian News:

Today was the deadline for signatures to qualify a new referendum for inclusion on the November 2012 ballot.

As EQCA announced yesterday, the anti-equality advocates were unable to get the specified number of signatures to get their discriminatory policies back in the hands of the voters.

They were seeking a referendum to overturn the recent FAIR Education Act (SB48), which ensures classrooms are including LGBT, minority and handicapped individuals in the teaching of history.

At many public locations where the group attempted to gather signatures, it was reported they were misleading the public about what the law was about, even linking it in some cases to pedophilia.

After a last minute rally in an attempt to uncover or gather more signatures, today the group sent out an email to all their supporters, entitled, "We Fought the Law and the Law Won."

In the email, they shared their disappointment with losing their attempt at overturning the "very bad law" and thanked their supporters.

They also offered guidance on what to expect of their referndum's "opponents," avowed to not give up the fight for the sake of the children and identified the state politicians that stood with them in the attempt to overturn the FAIR Education Act.

The communication also gives insight into to their discriminatory tactics, from the school board level, up.

Unfortunately we did not collect enough signatures to qualify the referendum to overturn SB48. That law will be in place in our schools at the first of next year.

We thank all of you that worked so hard to provide the hundreds of thousands of signatures received. In the end, 90 days was too short a time to accomplish such a large task.

In the coming days you will see the celebration of our opponents. We know this because it has already started in social media and other places. And some of the rhetoric will be harsh. Remember, despite what they say about us, we opposed SB 48 simply because we do not believe that children should be exposed to an intentionally one-sided argument about lifestyles and values we do not hold.

And you will have to face some of those who said from the beginning that our referendum effort was a waste of time. They said we did not have enough money, the commitment of enough groups, or enough days. Ultimately they were right. And in private perhaps they will ask if the effort they withheld would have made the critical difference.

In the end, everybody that dedicated time and effort to qualifying this referendum should hold their heads high. The children in California schools and their parents owe a debt of gratitude to each of you for attempting such a huge task.

We hope that you will be there for the next battle.

While we did not overturn this very bad law, we built a small army of dedicated volunteers that collected an incredible amount of signatures. There will be a next battle. Despite the overuse of the term "tolerance," there is little tolerance for those who do not endorse the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lifestyles. And there will be more laws passed that advocate for these and attempt to silence any opposition.

What tripe. They pass themselves off as so noble. Of course they omit the depths they stooped to in trying to get signatures for the petition such as telling basic lies about what the petition was about and then trying to push the following mess in area churches:

I didn't post this yesterday in spite of the fact that several pro-gay blogs did simply because I wanted concrete confirmation. Having dealt with religious right tactics, I was very wary of a Trojan Horse tactic. But there is no need to be wary any more.

These folks and all of their lies about "indoctrinating children" lost and lost hard. And that includes the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage.

Let this be a lesson to us all. There are times when all of the money, influence, and connections in the world can't make lies true. And if those of us who are fighting these lies hold fast to our principles and never stop fighting, we win.

For true information about the Fair Education Act, go here.

Military Dad Surprises Daughter At Spelling Bee After She Nails 'Sergeant'

Get a tissue!

Skin Cell Regeneration from a Bioreactor - Very Cool

Skin Cell Regeneration from a Bioreactor
by Chris Higgins - October 11, 2011 - 3:49 PM

Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/103309#ixzz1acfn9Rk4
--brought to you by mental_floss!

This is so cool! My younger and favorite brother, Paul, was burned on his face, neck, and arm this last Auguest the day after we left Ohio for home. He is doing fine and his beautiful face is almost back to normal. His arm will be scared. It has taken weeks of painful recovery and we all learned about the treatment of bad burns. I hope this "skin gun" gets in the hands of every burn unit world wide.

Here’s a clip from National Geographic Explorer, showing Dr. Jörg Gerlach’s experimental “skin gun,” a tool used in regenerating burned skin using the patient’s own skin cells from other parts of the body. This technique, though experimental, can heal in a matter of days, rather than the weeks (and the associated scarring caused in that time) typically necessary for other techniques like skin grafts.
Gerlach: “We isolate cells from the healthy part of the skin — the patient’s own cells — which can be taken in a water solution, and that solution is prepared for cell spraying.”
The whole approach is part of Gerlach’s work on bioreactors; his approach involves not just the applicator gun, but also a system for growing cells and a special wound dressing that helps with healing. In the video below, we see one example of a man who had second-degree burns over much of his face, right arm, and right shoulder which was treated with the experimental technique — and to my eye there’s virtually no scarring. Let’s hope this works for others!
Warning: there are a few images of second-degree skin burns in this video, though they are not shown with the intent to gross you out. If you’re not cool with seeing a bit of post-burn flesh, don’t watch. Just in case, I put the video (with its poster frame of a second-degree-burned hand) after the jump: