Vermont is now the fourth state to recognize marriage equality. Unlike Iowa last week, it was legislature, not the courts, that legalized gay marriage in Vermont. The best part of this, of course, is that it really fucks with the heterosexual supremacists. Screaming about activist judges is of no use here, so how would they respond? Apparently by crying and getting confused. First up is this choice press release from the Anal Sex Family Research Council:
Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins today condemned the vote of the Vermont State Legislature to overturn the Governor’s veto on same-sex “marriage” as well as the vote by the District of Columbia City Council to recognize same-sex marriages performed in the 50 states.
“Same-sex ‘marriage’ is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well. Time and again, we see when citizens have the opportunity to vote at the ballot box, they consistently opt to support traditional marriage,” said Perkins.
Well, as long as you’re being reasonable, Tony. Let met get this straight. Last week when the Iowa Supreme Court overturned a law banning gay marriage that was passed by the legislature, that was another example of activist judges overturning the will of the people. But this week, the legalization of gay marriage by a state legislature is further evidence of a grand homosexual scheme to destroy democracy. If legislative action isn’t democratic, then what the hell is? Ballot initiatives? And what happens when a ballot initiative legalizes gay marriage? No doubt Tony Perkins will find some way to decry it as undemocratic, and it will be a sight to behold.
Next up is a video being pushed by the National Organization for Marriage that is just a tad overwrought:
Got that? Allowing gay people to marry infringes on homophobes’ right to….well I’m not sure. Apparently anything that interferes with their effort to completely shield their children from things they find objectionable is an affront to their civil liberties. Or something. Shit, this argument is so fucking stupid that it’s insulting. The same exact argument can be made against allowing interracial couples to marry. I mean, what about those poor racist parents who have to watch their children go to schol and learn that white people and black people can get married. The horror! Oh hell, let’s go back even further. What about the rights of many American men in 1920 when women were given the right to vote? There they were, just trying to raise their children, and all of a sudden their sons are exposed to radical notions of gender equality. And they couldn’t even make shitty internet videos complaining that their freedom was being taken away.
Fuck these people. The tide is turning and they are on the losing end of history. This is just the death rattle.
Last week the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit again ruled against the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a blatantly unconstitutional law enacted in 1998 to, ostensibly, protect the little kiddies from sex on the internet. That’s right, 1998. COPA has been never been enforced, and it has spent it’s entire life getting the living shit beat out of it in court. The ACLU sums up the legal history:
Previously, a federal district court and a federal appeals court found the online censorship law violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, effectively banning enforcement of the law in June 2004 and sending the case back to the district court to determine whether there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute, such as whether commercially available blocking software was still as effective as the banned law might be in blocking material deemed “harmful to minors.” In March 2007, a district judge once again struck down COPA; the government again appealed, and today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the ban.
COPA is so unconstitutional and has been brutalized so badly in court that supporters of the law are almost extinct. But leave it to Janet LaRue, formerly of Concerned Women for America, to step up and defend the indefensible. I’m not going to fisk her entire article, mostly because there isn’t much in the way of substance in it to tackle. Instead, I’ll just take on the main thrust of the thing, which is that COPA is a great law that protects children from the evil porno that infests the intertubes: Read the rest of this entry »
According to OneNewsNow, Barack Obama should be investigated for getting a sweet mortgage deal (bold is mine):
According to the Judicial Watch complaints, Senator Obama (D-Illinois) received a home loan of $1.32 million from Northern Trust at a rate of 5.625 percent — although two different surveys indicated that the average going rate that day was around 6 percent.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton contends that Obama got a special below market “super super jumbo” loan because he was a United States senator. “…[W]e filed ethics complaints with the Senate Ethics Committee concerning the receipt potentially of an illegal gift,” he said. “The other issue is that it may be an illegal campaign contribution by a corporation in that it is a substantial financial gift to Barack Obama of at least $125,000,” suggests Fitton.
Notice something, he’s comparing Obama’s rate to the average. Average implies that plenty of people have mortages with higher and lower rates than the average value. Anyway, FiveThirtyEight has an excellent take-down of this particular nugget of nutjob stupidity (bold is mine):
The culprit is this piece from the Washington Post, which alleges that Barack Obama received a “discount” on his 30-year home mortgage when he purchased his house in Hyde Park in 2005. Obama’s mortgage rate was 5.625 percent; the Washington Post cites databases stating that the average rate on comparable properties was 5.93 percent.
So Obama’s rate was 30 basis points better than the average. However, the amount of the loan and the nature of the property are not the only factors that determine a mortgage rate. Another major consideration is the creditworthiness of the borrower. According to current rate quotes from myFICO.com, a borrower with very good credit can expect a mortgage rate about 30 basis points better than someone with pretty good credit, and a borrower with excellent credit can expect about a 50 basis point discount.
Unless the Washington Post has access to Obama’s FICO score — and unless it has rented an apartment to him, it probably doesn’t — it is missing a pretty important piece of information on what Obama’s mortgage rate ought to have been. What was Obama’s FICO score? I don’t know, but considering that…
* Obama had just gotten a $2.27 million book deal from Random House — about $1 million more than the value of the mortgage.
* The Obamas each had exceptionally secure jobs that paid them a combined annual salary of about $500,000 per year.
* The Obamas had just sold their condo, on which they had realized a $137,500 profit.
* The Obamas were prominent public figures whose political futures depended in part on maintaining a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
* The Obamas are known to be relatively thrifty and have no credit card debt but substantial savings.
…I would think that the Obamas were exceptionally creditworthy. So indeed, Obama received a “discount” — the same discount that any borrower in his position would have received.
This is incredibly basic stuff, so the people propagating are likely just throwing every dumbass smear they can at Obama in hopes that some portion of the mathematically/financially illiterate public will buy it and decide to vote for Geritol Johnny.
I’m pretty frustrated right now. I’ve spent a good chunk of the evening writing a lovely post about a cool paper, but now that I’m trying to insert some figures, I can’t. Wordpress is having none of it. I’ve tried two browsers, Firefox and Opera, but to no avail. I’ll try to fix it tomorrow, but if any other Wordpress users have experienced this and have suggestions, please post them.
Update: Well, I figured it out for Firefox, at least. Apparently you can only have a single tab open to insert images into a post. Why this is so is beyond me, but I know it’s dumb.
Bryan Carisone, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Raritan, N.J., “absolutely loves” his new GMC Denali XL, an extra-large sport utility vehicle with televisions built into the leather seats. But in June, one week after he bought it, he pulled into a station on a near-empty tank and watched the total climb higher and higher — to $109.
“It just about killed me,” Mr. Carisone said.
OK, so the price of gas has been rising rapidly for many months, beginning well before June. Mr. Carisone bought, in June, an “extra-large sport utility vehicle”, and is then bewildered and dismayed that it’s going to cost him over $100 a week to fuel it. Ahhhhh…schadenfreude.
Sorry about the paucity of posts recently. I’ve spent the long weekend out and about, so I haven’t been at the computer much until now. Anyone else see the Nadal/Federer match today? Hands down the best match I’ve ever seen. Anyway, I should be getting back to posting more regularly now.
This time it’s from the contemptuous Matt Barber, the male mouthpiece for the Concerned Women for America. Barber is perhaps one of the most dishonest people alive, with a bountiful history of distorting reality to support his ballistic hatred of homosexuals, thereby assuaging his own deep-seated insecurity. Matt’s goal in his latest column is to defend his identification of gay marriage as an “abomination”:
In so doing, four black-robed Dr. Frankensteins have loosed that paradoxical abomination tagged “same-sex marriage” on the countryside.
Abomination, you say? Isn’t that a bit strong?
Nope. God used it. And I’ll give just one example of many as to why He did.
Well, someone stole the gravestone of Ian Curtis, the deceased vocalist for the venerable rock band, Joy Division. Why? There certainly isn’t any market value for it. I can only imagine some hipster dufus plans on showing it off to his friends in some pitiful attempt to earn scene-points. Pathetic.
Bill O’Reilly has a new book coming out in September. It’s an autobiography called, no shit, “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity”. Yeah, he’s a bold fresh piece of something.
Gerlach is the blog name of a biophysics graduate student at Yale University. His research utilizes NMR spectroscopy to study protein structure and function. He hopes to entice at least five people to read this blog at some point.
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