He scrawls in his notebook a line he heard somewhere. “Maybe I need romance to keep me warm, maybe I just need an electric fan heater.” The abandoned cigarette goes out in the ashtray. He lights another one and places it beside the first. There is a psychotic jazz playing on the tapedeck, but some sort of radio traffic keeps intruding, like someone nearby has something to say that is more important, or maybe what’s important is that someone hears it.
- Me
Apparently, on CNBC last night, conservative plagiarist Ann Coulter said that former President Bill Clinton has “some level of latent homosexuality.” I assume she was just trying to change the subject from her secret obsession with being fucked up the ass by Liberals.
More than a decade ago, I co-organized what at the time was the largest-ever grassroots-based, online petition drive, in opposition to the anti-speech provisions of the Communications Decency Act, which eventually was adopted nonetheless, but also eventually went on to suffer at the hands of the United States Supreme Court.
That landmark effort (which inspired a more comprehensive petition by one of the many organizations fighting the bill, and later landed me in the pages of Rolling Stone, of all bizarre things), was called Hands Off The Net!
Which is my segue into linking today’s Willy Week article on the debate over net neutrality. Because, as the article and sidebars report, the industry group pushing for the abandonment of the net neutrality principle calls itself Hands Off The Internet.
I find it offensive not because I used the phrase over ten years ago, but because back then the phrase was a rallying cry in support of the freedom of expression online and the marketplace of ideas. But today, in the hands of industry flacks, it’s being used to support the opposite belief.
Despite what you will hear from some people, the net neutrality debate is not about passing laws which will prevent network owners and operators from combatting spam, throttling the abuse of resources, preventing denial of service attacks, or otherwise being able to properly maintain the infrastructure of the Internet.
What it’s about is preventing large corporate media and communications companies from being able to serve to you their own content, and those of their partners, at higher rates of speed than the content of competitors or independents.
In the end, with the industry stealing a slogan once meant as a defense of free expression and turning it into one in opposition to free expression, those who still support that principle are left with the alternative: Save The Internet — which, I guess, perhaps more adequately describes the immediacy of what’s at stake.
Thanks to Blue Oregon, I’ve now seen one of the stupidest things Theo has ever published. No mean feat, that.
If we must find asinine names for things, and if we must fill precious column inches with them, how about we come up with an unclever name for unclever pieces like this one from Marc Acito, which I rather suspect is little more than an advance advertisement for a book he’s thinking of writing.
A famous hitchhiker once opined that he never could get the hang of Thursdays. It’s beginning to seem as if I’ve caught some sort of Wednesday affliction, because this is back.
The decision, a concurrence, and three dissents are available online in plain text and pdf formats. I haven’t had a chance to do anything except check what the decision was.
Addendum: From the opinion, we can see the problem with “rational” under the law not necessarily having to actually be “rational” as an everyday human being would define it.
Thus, the State is required to demonstrate only a rational basis to justify the legislation. Under this highly deferential standard, any conceivable state of facts providing a rational basis for the classification may be considered. The legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers the State’s legitimate interests in procreation and the well-being of children.
And then there’s the following, from one of the three dissents.
If the DOMA is really about the “sanctity” of marriage, as its title implies, then it is clearly an unconstitutional foray into state-sanctioned religious belief. If the DOMA purports to further some State purpose of preserving the family unit, as the plurality would interpret it, then I cannot imagine better candidates to fulfill that purpose than the same-sex couples who are the plaintiffs in these consolidated actions.
Which would qualify as “rational” as an everyday human being would recognize it, rather than the perverted version the law apparently utilizes.
Addendum: From that same dissent, by Bridge:
Yet while I wholeheartedly agree with Justice Fairhurst’s conclusions that it is the status of marriage itself that is a fundamental right, that the choice of one’s spouse implicates fundamental liberty interests, and that the DOMA does not even satisfy rational basis review, I write separately, in this significant issue of our time, to set forth additional grounds for holding the DOMA unconstitutional.
Bridge then proceeds, at great length and in great detail, to slam the court for abrogating its “duty under the tripartite system of government to provide prompt relief for violations of individual civil rights.”
“The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up,” writes Jay Rosen (via Greg Hughes). “There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.”
In the comments over there, I agreed with another poster who said they couldn’t “imagine many stories will get a lot of funding at NADN if they are sharply localized.” Although it’s many months since I abandoned my own experiment in reader-funded local political journalism-by-blog, that’s still the nut I think someone’s going to have to figure out just how to crack.
Note: The original version of this post simply blockquoted the above statement from Rosen, but has been altered to its current form.
Thanks to Metroblogging Portland, I now know that the Washington State Supreme Court will issue its ruling tomorrow in the challenge to that state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
One-time readers of Portland Communique know that I might have written (for better or for worse, depending on your perspective) more than anyone else on the matter of this fight in Oregon. In fact, I did weigh in on one of the lower court rulings in Washington which stuck down that state’s ban as unconstitutional, if anyone wants some of the background on the lawsuit in question.
You can see the court’s brief announcement, and the opinion itself should show up on the Washington Courts website sometime tomorrow.
With one hand, Senator S.P.E.C.T.R.E. prepares a law allowing Congress to sue the GOPresident over his use of “signing statements” to declare that the law is whatever he says it is.
With the other hand, Senator S.P.E.C.T.R.E. prepares a law allowing the GOPresident to declare that the law is whatever he says it is.
So, the Morgan Freeman film being made here in Portland requires a rather substantial number of books for his character’s study. Looking down the list of subjects — history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, art, gardening, etc. — all I do can is wonder why Easy Reader would be so exacting and discriminate in his reading tastes.