Does This Have To Do With The Fact That Hillary is Now Trailing?

though of course they'll never admit it
Fox: '24' on shelf until next January

One fallout of the Hollywood writers strike is that fans of Fox's drama "24" have to wait until next January to see Jack Bauer again.

The network has committed to air a full season on consecutive weeks and had been planning to start last month. If it had started airing new episodes soon, the season finale would not have taken place until the summer, when TV networks rarely show their high-profile programs.

Even though eight episodes for this season had already been filmed before the beginning of the writers strike, producers would have had to ramp up production soon to complete the season.

So "24" represents this television season's most prominent casualty due to the writers strike.

A January 2009 start seemed the best way to comply with viewers' wishes that a season's episodes run without interruption to conclusion, Fox said on Thursday.

I have another solution- how about you just run the show during the summer as well-plenty of consecutive weeks there.
sigh, seems like Hollywood wasn't ready for a lesbian President after all...

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When Barack is President...

Every day there will be hands across America ! =)

I can't hardly wait!!!

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Barack Obama: Man of Words

or as forcefully as one can denounce something through a written statement, that as Jasmyne Cannick points out was originally "only posted under the LGBT section of Obama's site and not under his general newsroom where all of his statements and press releases are" and
Here's the statement, before we get any further along
"

I have clearly stated my belief that gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens. I have consistently spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts of our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country.

I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin's views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division."

Tough but fair words indeed but as Earl Ofari Hutchinson points out nowhere does that statement say that Barack won't appear on stage with Donnie McClurkin, which would be a far more powerful endorsement of McClurkin's views than this statement is a denouncement of. The whole actions speak louder than words thing. And more importantly the tour is of course still going on as planned. You can't expect a candidate to actually give up those potential votes, do ya?

And even if these words were meant to announce his disagreement with Donnie McClurkin (another thing that peeves me; at what point do people stop going by names like Donnie and go by Don or Donald, like a grown up?) he has said nothing about other acts on the bill including, as Jasmyne Cannick shows, Mary Mary who equates homosexuals with murderers (but it's okay that they don't agree with the gay lifestyle, they still love them.. and they want their gay fans to correct their lives and change it) and other homophobic artists.
How about instead of the "hate the sin, love the sinner" b.s., we work to get people to question what exactly is sin?
(It’s what Dumbledore would’ve wanted.)
As a commentator said "Obama certainly won't openly fan the flames of religious driven intolerance against gays. He will continue to fervently denounce it. But without a direct and forceful challenge to those such as McClurkin to do the same, they're just words. And politicians are masterful at using words when they want to win"

and as another writes " So is it (a) good that McClurkin and his usual audience will get exposure to Obama's pro-gay acceptance views, or (b) bad that the Dem hopeful is selling out LGBT people in order to capture a specific vote? Well, that's open for debate. On one hand there's an opportunity to open some hearts and minds, but on the other there is the fear that a President Obama may sign an anti-gay measure with which he doesn't agree just so that he doesn't piss off some potentially supportive 'mo foes"

Finally to a man who harps on having the "judgment to lead" I would merely ask what were you thinking? Why didn't you see this sh*tstorm coming? Where was your judgment when you allowed a concert in your name to include such proponents of hateful and hostile views? Or is it simply politics as usual?

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The Way To Win The White House

and it is so simple I'm sure everyone has overlooked it. Thankfully the minds at the Onion News Network have released the results of a new poll to light the way

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

It's BS! That greatest of human inventions. I love b.s. It was the only thing that got me through college.
But elections are not like the university years (except for trying to appear smart but not too smart so you can be one of the cool kids and figuring out how to badmouth people in eloquent ways) and so James Boyce at the Huffington Post thought of a new strategy to win the nomination, or at least get a huge advantage, which I had never thought of (because I haven't been able to decipher the ever changing primary playdates)

Instead of focusing on Iowa and New Hampshire and pouring so much of your money in those states, start campaigning in and focusing on big states like Texas, for example ,which has almost twice as many delegates up for grabs as the first 4 primary states do. 299-147. (or California which has 441 Democratic delegates)

The strategy makes sense logically, for candidates to bypass those smaller states but there is a problem. The problem is momentum and the idea of backing a winner. Those early states are critical because they are a proving ground to see if candidates can pass the (looks like/smells like/acts like a) winner test and so even if Texas' primary is earlier and more delegate important no one, or at least very few voters will vote for someone that has already been tainted and tarred with the loser brush. People want to be associated with a winner and so they will latch onto that moving train and add themselves as coal to speed up that train until it reaches an unstoppable velocity. They don't want to feel important and not waste their vote on someone they view as not viable. So they will compromise a little on their principles and jump on the bandwagon so that down the road they can say the president has always had their support. (it's a lot better than having to scrape a "Brown '92" bumper sticker off.)

And so while the Take Texas strategy makes sense (and as we already know Democrats in Texas love John Edwards) if there is one thing we all should know is that the electorate rarely does things that make sense. Rather a good number of them are drawn to "shiny", which is why you must campaign in states that many people couldn't pick out on a map so that you can broadcast an ad trumpeting your win to the televisions of those less informed voters before they get off their couch and go vote because they want to get away from work for a few minutes. And so, as the ONN reports we should "all hail the idgit vote"

In The Know: Candidates Compete For Vital Idgit Vote

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Barney Frank is Dead to Me

here is his press conference from yesterday where he tries to defend the Democratic Leadership's decision to strip transgender protections from ENDA

I hate the fact that I can see his point and how in some ways he's right that there may be a few vulnerable districts and candidates, but it is a personal issue for me, though I am far from a one issue activists and I still think it's bullshit (as I've mentioned a time or two.) I just expected more from the democrats, I expected them to fight for equality, or at least throw a punch, not just wave a white flag before war is declared. When I was listening to Barney huff and croak out words (while looking sloppy and nervous) I was thinking of something that I couldn't place before I remembered it was a section of Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor. will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited .for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God- given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six- year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."

I understood some of the political reasons for Democrats to separate the bills and I could respect them because politics is a fucked up zero sum game. I just didn't realize trans bias was so ingrained in the "equality" movement until I read Monica from TransGriot who wrote an amazing article about the division between transgendered people and LGB advocacy groups; some highlights (or lowlights if you had faith in the equality of groups fighting for "equality")

Why does the transgender community hate HRC? It’s a question I get frequently asked in GLBT settings. Considering the recent GLBT family feud erupting over ENDA, it's an appropriate one to ask as well.
The roots of the animosity start after Stonewall. In an effort to appear more 'mainstream' to the straight community, Jim Fouratt and friends bounced Sylvia Rivera and other transpeople out of New York’s GLF (Gay Liberation Front). Jim Fouratt’s anti-transgender comments culminating in a 2000 one at a Stonewall observance in which he called transpeople 'misguided gay men who'd undergone surgical mutilations' also added insult to the injury.

In a pattern that persists to the present day, The GLF had protections for transpeople removed from a proposed 1971 New York GLBT rights anti-discrimination bill under the pretext that it wouldn’t pass with such 'extreme' language....
In 1979 Janice Raymond poured more gasoline on the fire with her virulently anti-transgender book The Transsexual Empire. Raymond also took it a step further in 1981 and penned a quasi-scientific looking report that was responsible for not only ending federal and state aid for indigent transpeople, but led to the insurance company prohibitions on gender reassignment related claims. Germaine Greer’s anti-transgender writing combined with Raymond’s led to involuntary outing and harassment of transwomen in lesbian community settings. It also sowed the seeds for the anti-transgender attitudes in the lesbian community that persisted through the late 90’s.

The problem is that the senior gay leadership is still influenced by the Fouratt-Raymond-Greer negative attitudes towards transpeople. That sentiment is concentrated disproportionately in California and the Northeast Corridor. The early gay and lesbian leadership also sprang up from those areas as well.
One thing they didn’t take into account was how deeply entrenched the anti-transgender attitudes and doctrines were amongst gay and lesbian leaders. Barney Frank (D-MA) is a prominent example of it. They still persisted in holding the view that transgender people were ‘crazy queens’ who would cost them their rights. Gay leaders were still trying to use the 70’s assimilationist strategy to counter the Religious Right campaign against gay civil rights...
The predominately white and bicoastal-based gay and lesbian leadership were cavalierly dismissing their concerns about GLBT unity and the Religious Right threat, they arrogantly demanded that transpeople work to pass gay-only rights bills.

According to legal scholar Kat Rose, such laws have the effect of creating a regime in which the same gays and lesbians who fought to prevent trans-inclusion have the de facto right under the resultant non-inclusive law to discriminate against trans people. It also allowed them to keep their leadership ranks and employee populations in these organizations transgender-free without fear of facing discrimination lawsuits.

When transgender leaders would balk at those demands or point out the hypocrisy of leaving us behind, they would state they would ‘come back for us’.
So far the only states in which the gay and lesbian community has ‘come back’ for transgender people are Rhode Island (2001), California (2003), New Jersey (2006) and Vermont (2007). In New York they are still having a difficult time passing GENDA after transgender people were cut out of SONDA by gay rights advocating the same 'we'll come back for you' incremental rights spin.
The first gay only rights bill, passed in Wisconsin in 1982 has been that way for 25 years now. There's no indication by the GLB leadership in that state if they'll move to rectify the omission of their transgender brothers and sisters or if they'll assign it a priority as high as the one they place on marriage equality.
We also heard the excuses during the 90’s to justify the gay and lesbian strategy that ranged from ‘the country needs more education on transgender issues’, we need 'incremental progress'...

We're also pissed that the same people who demanded (and still demand) that we accept 'incremental progress' when it comes to trans rights hypocritically have no intention of accepting 'incremental progress' when it comes to legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

In conclusion, the drama between the transgender community and HRC (which sadly flared up last week after Rep. Frank introduced a non-inclusive ENDA) is a forty-year-old stew flavored with historical hatred, arrogance, political miscalculations, communication failures, misunderstandings, mistrust, and Machiavellian duplicity.

Well fuck them too. I guess all of us trannies in order to support ourself and protect against employment discrimination, should maybe just hope to find our own congressman who'd let us run a prostitution service out of their apartment. Oh wait...

I fucking hate politics. I'm moving to Europe.

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Note to Self: Scientologists Will Cut You

no seriously, they're just like the Wu-Tang Clan-Nothin' ta Fuck Wit (mp3)
As I'm sure you heard the guy who was trying to extort Tom Cruise was found dead over the weekend, an apparent suicide.

Now I'm not saying it wasn't a suicide brought on by a lifelong struggle with depression or that he didn't have other enemies but... sounds kind of fishy.
and after seeing this YTMND slideshow (a horribly reliable and responsible source of course) The Un-Funny Truth About Scientology, on the "methods" that Scientologists use against their enemies, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a two bullet wound suicide. Scientologists are mad scary and I kinda think I shouldn't talk about how they seem like a criminal organization or even badmouth that new Lions for Lambs movie (the ads for which looked horrible ["Yes or No?!"] and emphasized Tom Cruise as a three time Oscar nominee- the first time I've ever heard a commercial make reference to multiple failed Academy Award nominations. Not surprisingly it's from the new Tom Cruise run UA) or point out the Battlefield Earth was unfathomable in its suck or....* so I'll think for my own self interest I'll have to agree with Mitt Romney that the brilliance of the source material


was obviously corrupted and ruined by those baby rapists.
But seriously, Scientologists are pretty fucked up (though if it wasn't for the whole alien b.s. I think i could actually legitimize it in my mind.) Oh well, no matter

and in an effort to make up for my displeasure with how this post turned out enjoy this :New Mexico Catholic Bishop Reports Invasion of ‘Gentle Little People’ in Masks. Which is one of the more enticing hooks I've ever seen. But seriously it sounds like a wonderful trip....

*that tom cruise and john travolta are still gay

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If You Were Keeping Score at Home

Mike Nifong the man, and UNC alum, whose naked ambition was most responsible for this only got a day in jail. Paris Hilton, as you might remember was sentenced to 45 days, served 23 and suffered the hatred of the millions when she was transferred to home arrest after 5 days in jail. And she didn't ruin 4 families lives, the reputation of a city and a University or cost me a 2006 Lacrosse title.
In case you were wondering. About justice or whatever...
It's alright though, his life is fucked and everywhere around the country his name is synonymous with

(he's an asshole)

(just something I remember; before all of that mess broke I remember walking to Brightleaf or the Joyce and passing his campaign signs in the grass and always assumed with a last name like Nifong he was asian. I think that fact still confuses me a little.

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Careful There, Your Guilt is Showing

Editor & Publisher had a really thoughtful article on another way that He That Won't Be Named has been cheating all these years. Through that ridiculous arm armor he wears. I've been saying for a while that it gives him an advantage because it allows him to crowd the plate and effectively take away the inside part of the plate from the pitcher and also increases his area that can be hit. I guess in that way its within the rules of the game but its still b.s. (which is why I strongly advocate throwing at his head!) Of course that theory was perhaps shaded by my extreme hatred towards him so perhaps I'm biased. But Editor & Publisher seems to be quite a reputable site and organization (I mean look at how nice and classy that ampersand is in their name) and they lay out a list of mechanical and physical (as in physics) reasons why that armor gives him an advantage; you can read it on their site I'm too lazy to write them all here. But I fully agree with all of their assertions and it is shameful that The Disgrace To Humanity and the Game has been allowed to do all of this shit for so long with impunity. I hate him.

This next bit is not nearly as dry; Home Run Derby has a clip of The Unnatural in the on-deck circle and if his teammates actually did like him wouldn't one of them mention his fly was open. It's a video of a clip on a computer so it's already small enough (I don't think they have MLB's expressed written consent, shh!) but if you look at his groin its visible. Don't worry you can't see anything naughty, side effects of steroids and all.

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End of the Week Links (thats nowhere close to rhyming, is it)

Just some random stuff

• This is when you know God wants you dead, when you're struck by lightning from a cloudless sky. I feel sorry for his family though.
• I, for one, welcome our alien overlords.
• I also welcome our Zuckerberg overlord, because Facebook is taking over the world.
  
• Yeah,I don't think this would ever happen in the States.
• Bullshit has been called.
  
• I'm calling bullshit on this too.
  
• And this Ladies, Gentlemen and all those in between, is the ugliest dog in the world. He's from Jersey, of course. Warning, he is like incredibly ugly, like think a cross between The Fly and one of the Gremlins.
  

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