Perry vs. Schwarzenegger

I know this blog has already asked anyone to produce any logical reasoning as to why same-sex marriage should not be allowed. I also know that no one has yet produced anything to discuss. Therefore I find myself reading fascinatedly about the court case currently taking place in California known as Perry vs. Schwarzenegger. This is the challenge to the infamous Prop 8 thing run and promoted by those opposed to same sex marriage. Its now in its 8th day and is likely to go on for another two weeks. I thought I would provide some links to those who are writing about it. This will also provide some logic into how those against are thinking. I welcome all discussion on this blog.

A site with background info.

Here is a site with daily summaries. (Note: this blog is not exclusively about the case)

Of course we live in the world of Twitter.

Another blog following the trial.

Thats what I have for today. I will post relevant articles as I find them or as the readers here post theirs in the comments section.
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Tuesday and they are off to the polls

Its special election day in Massachusets and it may spell the end of the filibuster proof majority. If so it means a lot of things. First, it means that Americans are actually ok with the status quo. Apparently things are great, because why else would you vote for the party that got us into this mess and whose only policy idea(s) are lower taxes and a family norm that never really existed? Is it to spite the democrats because they weren´t able to instantly change things for the better? If so then its a pretty childish way to do it. Very childish actually.

To think that we could have passed a government run health care the first try is like imagining that the day Castro dies, everything will instantly be great in Cuba. Its overly simplistic and if voters are mad that reality wasn´t black and white then they should re-evaluate how they perceive reality. Give the man a chance and don´t go back to the garbage we just dumped. Thats what dogs do.

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Monday of Worry

This is an odd Monday. I am sitting here at my desk in Berlin listening to the cars making their way through the snowy seats and thinking about politics. Right now I wish that I didn´t care about politics or about any of the issues out there. That I just did my job, got my paycheck and lived frivolously in the land of consumerism. As long as my piece of the pie was big enough then who cares about anything else right. Anyway I mean whatever party is in will do ok anyhow. Right?

Unfortunately this is not the case. I do care about issues. I do care about people getting stepped on and who have no one looking out for them. I do care about religious majorities forcing their lifestyles on others. I do care about all the lies that are printed in newspapers. The purpose of this post is to talk about the special election for the Senate seat in Massachussets. The Republican candidate is apparently ahead at the moment and the election is tomorrow. If the Democrats lose this one, there will only be one thing to say: it is their own fault. They have not shown what they are capable of and have all but given away health care reform because of it. If the Republicans win they are not going to stop talking about it for the next five years (at least).

Who is Scott Brown, the Republican candidate? He is your usual right winger: obssessed with making sure only heterosexualls are treated equal, all talk about pro-life, and of course against everything that Obama stands for. He is the kind of reason I left the US. While I may have had some hope for that country after the Presidential election, it seems that the usual suspects are creeping back in and if they get back the power, the whole place is going back to the gutter.

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The revolution will not be televised-and that is too bad

In the US at the moment there is a court battle looming in California that will likely make its way all the way to the Supreme Court. This means that whatever outcome it has, it will have an impact in all states. Let me repeat that: it will have an impact in all states. The court case comes as a response to a slight majority of California voters stripping away the law allowing same-sex marriage. This was known as Prop 8. It was an overturning of the California State Supreme Court which had found that marriage as a right could not be limited to heterosexuals.

Now what I am hoping will happen is that this goes to the Supreme Court and that it finds that a group of citizens cannot strip the rights of another group of citizens. However its going to be a long way there. There was some hope that the trial would be shown live on youtube which I would thoroughly enjoyed. Why? Watching these people, who claim that traditional marriage is under threat, try to make up a lot of garbage to appeal to the bigots in American society. I have asked before on Facebook and I will ask again here now, can anyone come up with a decent argument why homosexual marriage should not be allowed that is not based on religion? If you are able to, then please post it here. Otherwise, I am going to continue concluding that this is all about hating a group of people based on their sexuality.

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Sarah Palin given a rope by Fox-the hanging she´ll do herself.

Fox News has gone out and hired Sarah Palin. This means they have become that place where has been conservative governors go to die: they´ve already got Huckabee so I guess Romney is next. She already noted on O´Reilly that people are against her because of her "commonsense, conservative solutions." For those who need a translation that is newspeak for "I ain´t got any."

As far as it being sexism that is the reason for her detractors, that is probably the funniest thing I have heard. If a male had said all the stupid types of things that Palin has said, he would also get the same amount of reaction out of people. Dan Quayle is a good example. My question for Fox News is why they feel like they need to offer Sarah Palin a rope to hang her career with. She´s played coy about whether or not she is going to run for president and now with her joining the right wing network it seems that she is resigning herself to position of the pundit.

Knowing what she does know, she should provide hours and hours of amusement for the American and world media as they devour her tasty soundbites. Now for the question of the day: if you wanted to commit political suicide why would you do it this way?
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America as Gods country

Its a common illness that afflicts some Americans where they have started to believe that their nation is some kind of new promised land from the judeo-christian god. I am always fascinated when I come across this type of idiocy and arrogance. Most often because its reminiscent of the type of propaganda that was being spewed by Nazis like Joseph Goebbels. Lets move past recent history though and go back to the civil war era. Lets go to a place called Sand Creek. Lets introduce a man named John Chivington, a US army colonel as well being a Methodist Preacher.

In 1864 he and his men massacred 133 Indians of which 105 were women or children. I am not going to go into full detail here but I want to point out some of the highpoints of this great American deed; that they cut of private parts and displayed them on sticks as well using male genitals for tobacco pouches. I hadn´t heard about this before but having learned about it made me so sick that I had to share it.
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Liars!

We now have three quite well known Republicans coming out with the out-of-this-world claim that there were no terrorist attacks under "W." Dana Perino, Mary Matalin, and now most recently Rudy Giuliani have made this ridiculous statement. Are they pretending to be stupid or are they assuming that the American people are so dumb that they can´t remember 9/11 and Richard Reid´s rather big shoes? What is even more pathetic is that the media can´t even call them out for their idiocy but just sits there and lets them talk. To the three above mentioned persons I will say this to your face: bunch of lying snakes!
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I love it, I simply love it

Reading and thinking about politics can really be best described as a pill that is a downer. Today however the approach taken will be that it is best to smile at one´s adversaries and to approach problems as things that can be solved as opposed to unmovable objects.

Let us begin with something my brother noted: that no matter which party is in power in the US the country will not disappear or change all that much. This is actually true for most democratic nations. Spain is a good instance, Zapatero and socialists have been in power for a while and they have not made Spain into a communist country. That is why the next time I hear these people moaning about the US becoming a communist country I am going to laugh my ass off. What would be nice in the US would be the conservative party actually having ideas beyond what they call "traditional families" and lower taxes. Actually what would really be amazing is if the libertarian wing truly jumped away from the conservative wing and started their own party. Then we could see who the intolerant people are.

A funny thing happened the other day in Washington: a transgender person was appointed by the president to a high position and these conservatives went well ape shit. How can he do this they asked? He is just doing this as a token gesture, or he is killing his voters off by turning off those independent conservatives, they screamed. I love it. Keep screaming so that we know who the intolerant are and we can then stop listening to them. Here is the article by the way on the transgender thing.
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Potential Work?

Sometimes I wish I could work for a right-wing institute say like the famous or infamous (depends on the source) CATO institute. I would be able to sit around all day dreaming up paranoid theories about how the world is slowly being destroyed and how the US is not what it once was and so on. I would be able to sit around and draw up plans for invading countries that didn´t do things just the way we said they should. I would use such ill-thought through theories as Samuel Huntington´s Clash of Civilizations.

His is truly a sad state of affairs. Ideology will not be what we fight over, it will be our cultures that are clashing. Sometimes I wonder if Huntington ever left the rock he was born under. Of course that is ignorance on my part no doubt. As is typical with anyone who reached as high heights as Mr. Huntington did, I am sure he was what republicans would call one of those Ivy-League elitists. However just because he went to a fantastic school does not make him the old wise man. To imagine that several cultures cannot live together at the same time, is to imagine that we are all so inflexible that eventually we will just kill each other for these differences. Instead history will happily point out to any reader just how often cultures can share time and space. Perhaps it is a right wing view like that of CATO and others that is incapable of allowing others to share it with them. Wouldn´t that be a shock? That the intolerance was waiting right there at home the whole time.
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2010: Every minute counts

There are the elections coming up in 2010 and everyone is saying the democrats aren´t going to be doing so well. Things aren´t going so well in the US at the moment and now there is this narrative that the Democratic party won´t be able to hang onto its majority. Its been a rough year for a president, but Obama has done remarkably well for having the decks stacked against him. Of course a lot still remains to be done, but from my position it still looks better than what we had before.

Now suppose that the Republicans get back in power. What then? They have not presented a single solid policy to turn anything around. In fact, their policy will be either the same as that of G. W. or they will continue to swing further to the right. This will be very dangerous for the United States as well as for the rest of the world. This religion of the Republicans that free market capitalism is the answer to all of our problems is the most ludicrous religion around. No other religion would even make such a claim. If the Republicans get back in then there is going to be another four years of failed policies instead of waiting for those that the new President will put in place. Are Americans really that impatient that they will run right back into the arms of yesterdays failures?
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2009: year of the conspiracy

The last year was an excellent time for conspiracy theories. Up to this point there has been no real reliable assessment of why these lies and half-truths are allowed to flourish and go on being believed by the idiots in todays society. Perhaps instead the focus should be on why humans are capable in believing in something so obviously false and yet not let it have any effect on the rest of their lives. For instance the Birthers. Here you have a group of people who believe that the U.S. President was born overseas and is therefore not fit for command, even though his birth certificate has been shown publically and verified by neutral groups. Yet most of these idiots (because that is what you would have to be to believe in this) have jobs and houses in the suburbs and families and so on. In other walks of life they are something like normal (normal is always a relative concept) yet when it comes to this one thing they are incapable of accepting the truth.

Another conspiracy theory that has been making the rounds is the one about Acorn stealing the election. A fantasticly exciting theory, but for the fact that there is nothing there. Or the stolen-climate-change-emails-disproves-global-warming. Except that now that the dust has settled there is still no proof that anything was done that was illegal of wrong. No matter these conspiracies will still be with us in 2010. Today I have come to present the newest conspiracy theory making the rounds on conservative american blogs (oh ye bastions of fear mongering and lies). If one takes the time to read the full article, one will also be amazed to discover why it isn´t even news at all. Here it is, and a Happy New Year.
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