short thoughts on filibuster

• republicans used the filibuster more than anyone else.
  
• but now they want to get rid of it.
  
• however, what'd happen in the future, should a democrat be president?
  
• republicans would no longer be able to filibuster.
  
• that they no longer see it as necessary means they no longer see a possible future in which they are not in power.
  
• this is either monstrously arrogant, monstrously short-sighted, or some combination of the two.
  
• i personally would never dismantle such a tool for short-term gains at the expense of long-term safety. especially since the logical result of this
  
• would be a country forced to wobble back and forth along political lines until the country collapses
  
• instead of following a middle line, which the filibuster is supposed to ensure
  
• by encouraging people to nominate those judges who would decide issues most fairly.
  

and another thing? this whole "ooh, activist judges forcing other people to accept special interest groups?" you mean like activist judges abolished slavery and gave black people the right to vote? that kind of activism? you mean defending the freedom of the individual and reducing the power of 'big government' to control the lives of individuals? of course, they have to be individuals approved of by republicans... not just any individual who walks his own self in off'n the street.

odd things i've written in an hour

.............also titled: you should see me dance the polka

ah, ma petit, this is Boris, he has been my boyfriend for four hours, ever since he kindly gave me sugar for my coffee... Boris? Boris? Come back! Come back!

Shall i compare thee to a queen from Maine? 
Thou art more lovely, with or without sleep; 
the sky has paled and dark'd like your stained cheeks 
and summer's brightness fades to winter's deep... 
sometimes too hot the limelight burns the skin; 
sometimes too cool's the moon for heated tears, 
but though you grieve and show repent for sins, 
still are thy eyes as vast as when in cheer. 
No queen from Maine could hope to match your face, 
marked as it is by lines from joy and sorrow; 
nor shall she brag thou wanders't in her shade, 
when it's your touch that turns the dawn to morrow. 
So long as men can breathe and fingers feel, 
so long - heaven!

surdus: it came in from the drain and she caught it with a cup and we had incredible teamwork - i opened the toilet, she threw it in, i flushed (three times)
surdus: roachie go BYE BYE
surdus: cock? fine! big cock? sure? cockroach? ROACH THIS, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!
surdus: *machine gun fire*

****pls note no roaches repeat no roaches harmed in making of dis blog

incredible bs of the day

from ap news, a report of riots in afghanistan by people angry at americans. the reaction of president karzai is so unconvincing it hurts:

President Hamid Karzai, who travels to Washington this month for talks with President Bush, played down the violence.

"It is not the anti-American sentiment, it is a protest over news of the desecration of the holy Quran," Karzai told reporters after talks with NATO officials in Brussels, Belgium.

Yes, the desecration of the holy Quran... by americans. and don't tell me it doesnt have a history of resentment behind it.

sorry pacts, more politics

this has to be the dumbest anti-gay marriage argument i've seen, courtesy of thomas sowell:

Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the rights they already have.
People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to cancellation at any time.
Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it, whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad, or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions that marriage laws take out of our hands.

Uh-huh. Of course our DECISION to enter into the partnership of marriage isn't relevant, because really whatitallabout is:

The issue is not individual rights. What the activists are seeking is official social approval of their lifestyle. But this is the antithesis of equal rights.
If you have a right to someone else's approval, then they do not have a right to their own opinions and values. You cannot say that what "consenting adults" do in private is nobody else's business and then turn around and say that others are bound to put their seal of approval on it.
The rhetoric of "equal rights" has become the road to special privilege for all sorts of groups, so perhaps it was inevitable that gay activists would take that road as well. It has worked. They have already succeeded in getting far more government money for AIDS than for other diseases that kill far more people.
The time is long overdue to stop word games about equal rights from leading to special privileges -- for anybody -- and gay marriage is as good an issue on which to do so as anything else.
Incidentally, it is not even clear how many homosexuals actually want marriage, even though gay activists are pushing it.
What the activists really want is the stamp of acceptance on homosexuality, as a means of spreading that lifestyle, which has become a death style in the era of AIDS.

As an "activist" i can tell you i don't give a damn about their approval. nor should anyone else. i care about being allowed to engage in a government-recognized relationship with another person, because without that recognition i can't sit by their bed as we celebrate our deathstyle. By the way, more straight people die from aids than gay people. is straightness a deathstyle? discuss! convert!
and by the way, mr. sowell, i don't want to "convert" children. they're too sticky. disgusting how that works. but i can understand why the mind of a pedophile such as you would be concerned about this. why do you seek approval for your deathstyle?

get out ya cameras, folks

Fag Dwarves have been sighted on Fire Island.

As defBef says: "Why is he trying to toe-fuck a duck?"

i'm in love

marry me, ajai raj, wherever you are. gay marriage is fun. no kidding. Plus, I'm a good cook.

Seriously, this guy's coulter encounter reminds me of something i experienced back in college. we had a huge gay pride rally thing. bunch of pompous white boiz and gayls sitting in an auditorium listening very seriously to any idiot who could write or make up some personal story about their sexuality and spout it. Thing is, that last sentence was their opinion, not mine; in my observation most of those people were pretty sincere. some of them were being pretty damn brave. for many of them it was their first time publicly speaking about their identity (not sexuality; some of them hadn't even had sex yet. identity, as a person, trying to find themselves through other people. think about it.)

anyways, the braveness wafting through the room stopped none of the gay and lesbian support group members from quite literally bashing everyone. verbally. not to their faces, of course, but i found my own face growing slowly hotter and hotter as they minutely critiqued a laundry list of people (i'm not talking little shit, i'm talking "oooh, she got abused by her daddy, wasn't it funny the way she said this" type of critique. in other words, very much coulter crap.)

i finally got up the courage to speak past my very red face and say i didn't think it was a good thing to make fun of people for having the courage to speak up about their lives at the event we had just spent four weeks planning in order to, you know, give people the opportunity to have the courage to speak up about their lives. i tried to start a dialogue about why we (read: they) were doing this. nobody wanted to address it. i ended up leaving and fuming over feminist texts, and i remember very vividly joanna russ's critique in "what are we fighting for" about how women sometimes hurt or malign other women (those are the bad ones! not me!) in order to somehow make themselves more acceptable to "polite society" - read white, straight, powerful, what have you. and i wondered if something similar wasn't happening here.

and then you have coulter, a woman, a powerful woman, a writer woman with short skirts and plastic surgery poontanging her conservative rhetoric left and right on the stage. bashing the people who had fought to give her the right to sit on stage and be a powerful woman who could get published, wear short skirts, and pay for her damn plastic surgery. and this one kid, ajai, stands up and punctures her bubble of self-congratulation - float on the pain of others, girl! - with invective so unbelievably painful to her - despite her own dependence on swearing to make, you know, "points" - that she has to have him arrested.

i guess i feel sorry for her more than anything else. and again - ajai? you out there? i make a pretty damn good gnocchi.

today's rant

i'm getting pissed off by the sheer number of people who, when i say how much i like my new job, absofuckinglutely have to add "oh, well, it's new, right, haha." i suppose they're trying to make conversation, but it's pretty damned demeaning. yeah, it's new, and therefore fresh. it is, however, a job pretty close to my heart... not only for advocacy issues, either. i've not felt this excited about work, ever, and the feeling is pervasive. it's not going to go away when the first flush of new things fades; it has, oddly enough, a place in my head which parallels drawing and writing; i can concentrate on this for hours, you know? i got in the groove in my old job now and then, but i've actually "woken up" and looked round only to find the whole office empty several times now... and me with a lot of work done.

it's kind of scary. i'll admit it. i'm a novice! but it's also wonderful to be doing something where i have to be active and creative and engaging... and not just to save someone ten cents, either. i'd thank the Lady, but She says that "praise" is etymologically similar to "prattle" for a reason, and would I do her the favor of getting back to work and not wasting her ears with this crap?

honestly. goddess.

in other news, my friend roger's still in town and enjoying his visit. roger is pretty special, you know; he's one of the few hearing people i've met who have no attitude or caution around deaf people. and he doesn't really have any awareness that there usually is an attitude. or he does, but he doesn't. you know? (here I go prattling again.) I mean that he isn't self-consciously non-possessing of attitude. He just... acts naturally. It's nice. We helped my friend Jen move into her new apt this past weekend and all my friends were pretty comfortable round him after, when we fell worn-out on my futon and sucked down lots of chinese food. romper room friend fun!

roj bought me some paper to matte a few drawings. they look *quite* nice. must take photo, put on blog. when have time. busy busy.

party for a friend's birthday last night. won't forget the look on her face - she ain't dumb, she knew a surprise was coming, but she had the very *cozy* look of someone realizing she's safe and warm and with a bunch of relatively insane but (at the moment) nonviolent friends :)