After that, I decided to drive home and celebrate. And when I came home, I saw the first polls for Californias hate amendment, proposition 8. Let’s just say the elation was gone. It took me a while to get over the disappointment – I’ve been moping around, more or less.

But this afternoon I made the decision that this is not going to happen ever again. I’ll dedicate what spare time I have to help building a grass roots effort that will be able defeat proposition 8 and all similar efforts. I’m still not over the fact that “all men are created equal” is so hard to understand for some.

Anyways – this is not going to turn into a daily or even weekly thing on this blog. It deserves a separate effort. But until that is up, I’ll ask for your help from here:

Please help out. If you can spare an hour tomorrow at 2pm, be at the Los Angeles LDS temple at 10777 Santa Monica Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Beverly Glen.

We’re planning to protest the fact that one religion thinks they can enforce their version of morality on all Americans.

If you’ve missed yesterday’s debate “That One” moment, you should really watch it

via DailyKos

• How come the Feds are injecting $630 billion without any bill or congressional oversight? If they can do that anyways, why do we need a bill?

• This whole thing smells like the story of the guy who cried wolf.

  Politicians, and especially our current administration, have lied to the American public so often that we won’t believe them if they tell us there’s a grand emergency. After everything we’ve been through in the last few years, most Americans doubt their word there’s a need for this. To them, it’s just a ‘fat-cat’ bailout, so they’re overwhelmingly opposed. Or at least the vocal minority that calls their elected representatives is. (Looking at my 401k, I tend to disagree. But I’m not an economist, so what do I know…)

• What’s up with the strange voting pattern?

  One explanation that makes a lot of sense is that both parties played games – commit enough votes that it passes, but not enough that the public sees your party as the offending party. And at the last moment, a lot of Republicans got cold feet and backed out. Passing or not passing a bill like that based on political calculus is sickening, so I really hope I just have an overactive imagination.

• Overall, I’m not certain blocking the bailout isn’t a good thing.

  If you’re going to spend $700 billion, you might want to think things through. And as I understand it so far, the ‘compromise’ bill the Democrats achieved wasn’t much of a compromise.

• There are plenty of armchair economists who have ‘better plans’. Can we instead get some people who really understand the issues? And that certainly excludes Paulson and Bernanke – it was their job to see this coming. Pretty much every financial predicition they made was wrong since they’re in office.

• How much are $700 billion?

  Beats me – but there’s a nice graphic showing a stack of $315 billion

• So $700 billion is the price tag to save our economy? Where can we get that kind of money?

  Well, if you look at the 400 richest Americans and they all gave half their money, we’d be set. And even the poorest of them would still have around $650 million left over – probably enough to survive. I’m not proposing this as a solution – but maybe we should think a bit about the fact that we have a society where 400 people can make or break our entire economy.

Oh, and if you want to learn more about this whole thing, here are good starting points:

• One of the better written explanations
• The definitive podcast on the history of the crisis

However, all is not well. A few people who make it their business telling others how to run their lives have proposed a ballot item for the November election. The goal is to make same-sex marriage unconstitutional, to revoke the privileges that just have been granted. I can’t even fathom why – same-sex marriage hurts nobody, and takes nobody’s rights away.

If you’re living in California, I ask you to fight for this piece of justice – it’s been a bleak 7 years for civil rights and equality. Let’s not lose yet another chance of being a more civil society.

Equality Now is running a campaign, if you’d like to volunteer or donate money(http://www.eqca.org/issuespac/donate). And even if you can’t do that, please show that you don’t begrudge other people their happiness and vote ‘NO’ to the hate amendment.

Oh, and if you’re a Democrat, do me a favor. Look at your candidates, and what they stand for. Don’t vote because of the gender or skin color your choice does or doesn’t have. It’s kind of silly to pronounce that we’re finally not electing a white male and then base your decisions on the exact same criteria that have created the long list of white males in office, no?

And no, “electability” doesn’t count either. This is about making your voice heard, not about strategic games. Vote for who represents you best, whoever that is.

The Senate Majority Leader could have forced a ‘traditional’ filibuster, where Republicans would have been required to speak nonstop. Not necessarily on the issue, but it would have required the effort. And it would have made it immensely clear to the public that Republicans are blocking Habeas Corpus. With the current solution, not so much – just a minor blip on the news radar.

But since even invoking cloture is kind of painful – what with actually having to sit there and vote – our invertebrates in Washington came up with a much better idea. Let’s just unanimously agree, before voting, that the vote requires a 60-40 majority, or it doesn’t pass. That’s what happened yesterday with Senator Webbs bill to give combat troups more rest time. Can’t have rested troops, after all. And in the process, we throw out the whole idea that a simple majority is enough to rule. Let’s instead hand power to the “unitary executive“, which really is just a fancy name for “dictatorship”.

What will it takes for Democrats to finally stand up for their beliefs?

Tags: bill of rights, habeas corpus, civil rights

As such, I’m saddened by the current state of affairs. While struggling to find the words to express my anger and sorrow, I ran across an article by Keith Olberman who put things much more succinctly than I could hope to do.

So let me just repeat what I consider the core of the article:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war.

I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.

I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors.

I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent.

I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought.

I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents.

I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that Vice President, carte blanche to Mr. Libby, to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to Grand Juries and Special Counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation, with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison, and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that those accusations are wrong – but without letting justice take its course, without answering subpoenas for documents, without honestly answering inquiries, we will never know.

And since today is Independence Day, do yourself a favor and read the Declaration of Independence, or at the very least, this small part of it:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

But let’s keep this in perspective for a moment, and look at what else happened in the world today.

• People in Darfur keep dying, at a rate of about 130 deaths per day
• The Taleban move towards Kabul
• Infants die at a rate of 75 a day, in the U.S.
• 190 people are raped every day, in the U.S
• 100 deaths a day from car accidents, in the U.S
• 150 deaths/day in the U.S. from toxic substances like asbestos
• Worldwide, 18,000 children die of hunger every day

In the light of all this, do we really need 24/7 coverage of this single event, interviewing friends and families of the victims on national TV and radio and talking heads supplying their “expert” opinions? Is there nothing else we should focus on?

Kathy Sierra has recently been subjected to some hate speech of the ugliest sort. Why do people feel the need to resort to sexual references and death threats? Why do they feel the need to attack people who are nothing but genuinely nice? (Granted, I don’t know Kathy in person, but her writings are nothing if not full of respect and love for other people.)

I’m even more at a loss to understand how this can happen on websites that are associated with some major names in blogging. How can those people not stand up and protest this abuse of their sites?

Maybe we are indeed better off in a world where people are forced to take responsibility for their actions. I keep hearing the “fear of repercussions argument” – but in the long run, everybody who ever effected major change spoke publicly. Gandhi spoke out. Martin Luther King spoke out. Abraham Lincoln spoke out. Jefferson wasn’t exactly quiet.

I’d love to hear counter examples so I can go back to my more idealistic world view – but right now, I think anonymity serves no purpose except to shield perpetrators of crimes.

Addendum: Seth Godin just said it much better than I could

There are technical reasons for that, actually. It’s not just a bunch of 16 year olds having fun, as opposed to, say, Rockstar. Clothing in Oblivion is modeled separately from the bodies. And since some of the female costumes actually have a V-neck, they need some cleavage. So the underlying model has some sort-of breasts. The only part that got modeling love is the part actually visible in the V-cut of the dress. The rest looks, well, hideous.

But, of course, in our current climate, even a hint of breast (Oh noes! Nipples!) is too much. Now, I could say a lot about strangely skewed values of a world where necromancing, vampirisim, and dead people on stakes are OK for kids, but nipples are to be restricted to 18 year olds, but I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’d like to give you some food for thought: Every Barbie you buy in the next Toys’R'Us can be undressed, and, shockingly enough, is actually flesh-colored under her dress. (She wears painted-on panties, like the Oblivion model). We give those toys to 3-year-olds without thinking. If the same thing happens in a video game, it’s shattering the morals of the nation and needs to be restricted. So when will Mattel receive its first “M” rating?