Thursday July 15, 2004

Slouching Toward My Lai...(continued)

Brad DeLong says today that Seymour Hersh has either gone completely insane, or the House needs to vote to impeach George W. Bush tonight. That's about right if any part of of this is true:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

(I transcribed some of his speech from this streaming site. Hersh starts at about 1:07:50.)

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.

"The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremely accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."

The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information."

He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.

You can listen to the speech at Sadly, No! if you don't have the bandwidth for the video. As to the moderate Arabs seeing us as a sexually perverse society, I'd really like to see some figures on rape in the Arab world before they start pointing their fingers at the west's sexual liberalism as being responsible for this. Rape is not a consequence of sexual freedom but the conflation of sex with power and status, a thing cultures that treat women as chattle are hardly immune to. It is not personal sexual freedom that leads to rape, but a predatory culture that regards the lives of others as only a means to the ends of the strong. The subjugation of women, the persecution of homosexuals, and a culture that regards rape as the perogative of the strong, are all pieces cut from the same cloth, the same depraved contempt for the human status.

But that is a hard lesson for the United States to teach the world right at the moment. And for that reason alone George Bush should not only be impeached, but convicted in the Senate, and the White House fumigated after he is removed from office. He has not just damaged the credibiliy of America, but the democratic ideal itself. He has set the cause of Liberty and Justice for all back for generations to come. He has taken Liberty's torch, and sodomized Liberty with it.

Gay Staff Members, And Their Tolerant Republican Bosses

A potential Republican candidate for the open Senate seat from Illinois--where the party's former nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew over allegations of sex club improprieties--engaged in "lewd and abusive behavior" while she served as a top official in the White House drug policy office under President Bush, an internal inquiry found last year. In front of her staff Andrea Grubb Barthwell made repeated comments suggesting a staff member was gay and used a kaleidoscope to make sexually offensive gestures, according to the findings of a March 19, 2003, "hostile workplace memorandum" prepared by drug policy office staff and obtained by the Associated Press.

In an interview Wednesday, Barthwell said the memorandum overstates what happened, but she said she was wrong for participating in "inappropriate banter" at a staff birthday party. "As the senior person there it was my job to stop it before it got started and I didn't. I, in fact, joined in," she said. Barthwell said she has not decided whether to pursue the Senate seat, but she said the complaint should not be a factor in her candidacy. "I think it's something that was in the past, something we dealt with, and it was resolved to everyone's satisfaction," she said.

...

The lewd and abusive behavior finding against Barthwell stemmed from a December 19, 2002, staff gathering. Barthwell made comments about a staff member's sexual orientation after the staff member misspoke in an earlier conversation, the memorandum said. "Dr. Barthwell made reference to this staff member sitting on men's laps. A kaleidoscope pointed upward was placed on a chair by Dr. Barthwell as the staff member was about to sit down," it said. "Dr. Barthwell suggested that the staff member would want to cut the cake available for the gathering because the knife was 'long and hard' and he might 'enjoy handling it.' When the cake was cut, Dr. Barthwell referred to the pieces as 'most' or 'beefy' and she said to the staff member, 'I know you like it big and meaty."' The staff member was not identified.

In the interview, Barthwell said the staff member was engaged in the banter and didn't seem uncomfortable. "Had he been the least bit uncomfortable at the time, I would have brought it to a stop," she said. "Because he was an active participant, I didn't." The memorandum, though, said the staff member and at least one other person objected to her comments. It said the staff member felt the comments were "lewd, derogatory, and called into question his heterosexuality." The staff member didn't file the complaint; another colleague did. John Fluharty, a gay Republican serving as an adviser to Barthwell, rejected any suggestion that she is insensitive. "She is a decent, honorable woman who would be an asset in the United States Senate," he said.

The Advocate - Alleged homophobic comments haunt Republican candidate

If there is anything more completely clueless then the gay people who work for republican politicians I can't imagine what it would be. A cinder block can make more use of a brain then one of these.

Wednesday July 14, 2004

Pills

I'm 50 going on 51, and I consider myself lucky that, so far, my only significant health issue is a chronic insomnia. According to my doctor my cholesterol levels are fine, even by the new standards; a fact which I find amazing considering how much of my diet is deep fried. I have no other chronic illnesses or infections, no malfunctioning major organs (not counting whatever piece of my brain it is that regulates sleep) or joints. My eyes are slowly going far-sighted, but I'm told that is a pretty common event in middle age.

I've had a problem with insomnia for nearly a decade now, and I'm here to tell you that not getting sleep is neither good for your health, or your disposition. And if you need to concentrate deeply on the job, as a software developer must, no sleep usually translates into no productivity. My doctor recently prescribed a new sleep medication for me that works a wonder I haven't experienced in years...a good night sleep on a regular basis. It's done wonders for me. The problem is, now I need a pill. Welcome to the American health care system.

This week, I needed a refill. The bottle however, said No Refills Left. Okay...fine...call the doctor's office, get the voice mail system, select the I Need A Refill number, and at the tone leave my name, date of birth, insurance, prescription, and pharmacy telephone number. That was Monday morning. Three days later, I was still fighting with them to get my prescription refilled...my doctor being on vacation, and his partner and staff were cheerfully unconcerned about whether or not his patients got the medications he'd prescribed for them. First they told me my pharmacy had been sent my prescription. The pharmacy said not. That went on for two days. It only stopped, when I actually handed the phone to the pharmacist while I had one of them on the line. Then the story changed. Now it was that the other doctor had my prescription on his desk...but he would get it in the system any moment now. That went on all day today. Finally, this evening, after they'd promised for the nth time to send my prescription to the pharmacy, and failed to do so before their office closed for the evening, I called the emergency after hours line, and got one of the on-call doctors to dig into the prescription refill system, only to find that my prescription had apparently been all ready to send all along. They just hadn't actually sent it. So she did. Moments later the pharmacy called to say they'd filled it. So tonight I can get some sleep. Well that was simple enough.

I walked over to the pharmacy and there was a line and at the head of it was a young man with the same desperate look on his face I must have had while talking to the staff at my doctor's office. The clerk behind the pharmacy counter was looking at his insurance card and shaking his head. The young man's prescription was in the bag waiting for him to pick it up, but something on his insurance card wasn't matching up with something on the bag. The clerk told him he'd have to pay the full price. The young man didn't have the money.

"I come here all the time. It's always twenty dollars."

The pharmacy clerk shrugged, and looked at him like he was a moron.

"I'm an epileptic. I need this medication."

"You have to straighten this out with your insurance company. Maybe they have a 24 hour number."

The pills he needed to control his condition were right there in front of him and they might as well have been locked in a safe at the bottom of the ocean. The clerk, who I'd never seen there before, was looking at him like he was a pathetic beggar. I thought of all the Harry and Louise ads I saw back in the 1990s, and wondered if either of the actors, Harry Johnson and Louise Caire Clark, ever had a problem getting a prescription filled. I wondered how anyone with a conscience could work at a job where they had to dangle an epileptic's medications in front of him, and tell him he couldn't have it. But the clerk looked like he was enjoying it.

The young man left, his eyes angry and desperate. Eventually I got my insomnia medication. As I walked out I looked around to see if I could spot the young man. I thought maybe I'd tell him I'd pay for his pills to get him through the time he'd have to spend fixing the problem with his insurance. But I didn't see him, and you never know how people will take it when a stranger walks up to them tries to butt into something as personal as that. I should be able to get my sleep tonight, and my irritability factor should be back to its usual level tomorrow morning. I'll still want to smack the first drooling moron who tells me that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world though.

Not Even A Majority

Even though the vote in favor of moving the Federal Marriage Amendment was only slightly less then half, and the votes against half exactly, hate lost in a big way today, and I am amazed and grateful. I thought the republicans would manage to get at least a majority, but when it came down to counting votes they could not. While it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, it's at least evidence that the passion that motivates anti-gay bigots is not shared by a majority, even on capital hill. They're saying that if the vote had been on the amendment itself, it would have lost by even more.

Some, I am certain, voted against out of a plain and simple belief in equal justice for all Americans. For others, writing anti-gay prejudice into the constitution was a tangible step further then they were willing to go. They may not like homosexuals, but a hate that intense is more then they can walk with. The bigots were literally claiming this week on capital hill, that fighting same sex marriage was as important, if not more important, then fighting terrorism. To the bigots that may be self evident. What it makes self evident to everyone else however, is how hate can make a ruin of your conscience. I'm sure the spectacle of senators comparing same sex marriage to 9-11 made many people more uncomfortable this week, then ever they were made uncomfortable by homosexuals, or homosexuality.

We're still a way from equality here in America, but a skirmish was won today, that we all may well look back on as marking the beginning of the end of the war.

Tuesday July 13, 2004

Interim Report Of The Committee on the Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope

When NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe cancelled Hubble Servicing Mission 4, thereby condemning Hubble to an early demise, the worldwide criticism was deafening. To placate his critics, O'Keefe formed a committee to study the options for extending the life of Hubble (beyond the life it is expected to have without a forth servicing mission). The worry I had at the time was that O'Keefe's committee would be deferential enough that none of its recommendations would greatly challenge O'Keefe's decision to send Hubble to an early grave.

I was wrong. The committee's interim report was just released, and sent around the Institute a few hours ago. It is a ringing statement of support for continuing the mission of the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is arguably the most important telescope in history. Much of Hubble's extraordinary impact was foreseen when the telescope was being planned...but the list of unforeseen Hubble accomplishments may prove even greater..." That really says it all. Hubble has been ranked by astronomers as second only to Galileo's own telescope in importance, and just ahead of the one used by the astronomer whose name it bears, Edwin Hubble. Its loss will be a tremendous blow to science. There are no new telescopes planned, not even on the drawing boards, that can fully match, let alone exceed, the combined capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is at this moment in time, literally, irreplaceable..

Spread this around as far and as wide as possible, if you feel as I do, that the work of the Hubble Space Telescope is vital, and important and should continue. This is probably not the post to go into how I feel about the Bush administration's approach to science, though anyone regularly reading this blog knows how I feel in that regard. You also know that I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. I don't speak for the Institute, but obviously I have an interest here. But that interest predates my association with the Institute by decades, and began when I was a kid in the 60s, raptly watching the Mercury astronauts go into space. I would not be working for STScI now, if I did not believe in the importance of space exploration for the future of the human race. I had a decent living as a software professional. When my time at the Institute is past (there are impending layoffs that have nothing to do with the cancellation of SM4), I will go on to other things. But Hubble has peered into the heart of distant galaxies, examined bands of dust circling nearby stars much like our own, has gathered light from near the beginning of time, and because of this our knowledge of our universe, and of ourselves, has grown immensely. If you think that to question, and to learn, is what makes us human, is what makes life sweet, if you think that the work Hubble does is important, not only for its beautiful imagery of the cosmos, but for the enrichment of the human spirit, then please help this interim report to get as much attention as possible.

July 13, 2004
The Honorable Sean O'Keefe
Administrator
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC 20546-0001

Dear Mr. O'Keefe:

At the request of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Research Council recently established the Committee on the Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope.1 The committee's statement of task charges it to assess the viability of a shuttle servicing mission, evaluate robotic and ground operations to extend the life of the telescope as a valuable scientific tool, assess telescope component failures and their impact, and provide an overall risk-benefit assessment of servicing options.2 The statement of task includes the possibility of transmitting an interim report to NASA prior to the submission of a final report.

The committee thanks you very much for your generous allocation of time in meeting with it on June 22, 2004. The information that you conveyed on the decision-making process that you and NASA followed when arriving at the Hubble-related decisions in January and in March 2004 was very important for us to hear directly from you. The additional information that you provided on NASA activities related to the shuttle return-to-flight program and robotic engineering in the broader context of long-term human space exploration was very useful, as was the extensive question-and-answer dialog that you enthusiastically engaged in with the committee.

Because you and your NASA colleagues have made clear to the committee that there is some urgency in issuing any recommendations related to Hubble, we are providing you with this interim report.3 It offers three principal findings and recommendations. These are based on the committee's collective knowledge as well as input from other experts, both internal and external to NASA. This interim report does not address any one request in the statement of task in its entirety, but rather touches on aspects of task components 1, 2, and 4. Here the committee considers the degree of importance that a Hubble servicing mission would have for science, as well as some of the key factors involved in selecting a servicing mission option. Its aim is to provide useful guidance to NASA that can be utilized during the time that the committee (as well as NASA) continues to investigate the servicing options in greater detail. The work of the committee will continue during the coming weeks, and we expect to finish drafting a final report

by late summer or early fall. The final report will address in detail all four of the requests in the study's statement of task.


Importance of a Hubble Servicing Mission

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is arguably the most important telescope in history. Much of Hubble's extraordinary impact was foreseen when the telescope was being planned. It was predicted, for example, that the space telescope would reveal massive black holes at the centers of nearby galaxies, measure the size and age of the observable universe, probe far enough back in time to capture galaxies soon after their formation, and provide crucial keys to the evolution of chemical elements within stars.

All of these predicted advances have been realized, but the list of unforeseen Hubble accomplishments may prove even greater. Hubble did discover "adolescent" galaxies, but it also saw much farther back in time to capture galaxies on the very threshold of formation. Einstein's theory of general relativity was bolstered by the detection of myriad gravitational lenses, each one probing the mysterious dark matter that pervades galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Gamma-ray bursts had puzzled astronomers for more than 20 years; in concert with ground and X-ray telescopes, Hubble placed them near the edge of the visible universe and established them as the universe's brightest beacons, outshining whole galaxies for brief moments. Perhaps most spectacularly, Hubble confirmed and strengthened preliminary evidence from other telescopes for the existence of "dark energy," a new constituent of the universe that generates a repulsive gravity whose effect is to drive galaxies apart faster over time. The resulting acceleration of universal expansion is a new development in physics, possibly as important as the landmark discoveries of quantum mechanics and general relativity near the beginning of the 20th century.

Closer to home, Hubble has zeroed in on our own cosmic past by uncovering virtual carbon copies of how the Sun and solar system formed. Dozens of protoplanetary disks have been found encircling young stars in nearby star-forming regions of the Milky Way. The sizes and densities of these disks show how surplus dust and gas collect near infant stars to form the raw material of planets. Dozens of large, Jupiter-like planets have been discovered, initially by other telescopes but recently by Hubble using a new and more precise method. Measuring the tiny drop in light as a planet transits the disk of its parent star, the new technique could lead to a method for discovering Earth-like planets—a discovery with tremendous long-term implications for the human race.

Riveting as they are, these scientific returns from Hubble are far from their natural end. With its present instruments the telescope could continue probing star formation and evolution, gathering more data on planetary systems, revealing planetary and cometary phenomena in our own solar system, and exploring the nature of the universe at much earlier times. However, two new instruments, already built for NASA's next planned servicing mission (SM-4), would amplify the telescope's capabilities by allowing qualitatively new observations in two underexploited spectral regions. Such rejuvenation via new instruments has occurred after every Hubble servicing mission, and the next one promises to be no different. Wide Field Camera-3 (WFC3) would increase Hubble's discovery efficiency 4 for ultraviolet and near-infrared imaging by factors of 10 to 30. The UV channel coupled with the camera's wide field of view will image the final assembly of galaxies still taking place in the universe. The near-infrared channel of WFC3 favors discovery of the very youngest galaxies, whose light is maximally red-shifted. The available UV, visible, and near-IR channels will combine to give a sweeping, panchromatic view of objects as diverse as star clusters, interstellar gas clouds, galaxies, and planets in our own solar system.

The second new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), will increase Hubble's observing speed for typical medium-resolution ultraviolet spectroscopy by at least a factor of 10 to 30, and in some cases by nearly two orders of magnitude. Ultraviolet spectra carry vital clues to the nature of both the oldest and the youngest stars, yet UV rays are totally invisible from Earth's surface. COS will fill important gaps in our understanding of the birth and death of stars in nearby galaxies. Even more impressive, COS will use the light of distant quasars to spotlight hitherto undetectable clouds of dispersed gas between nearby galaxies, thereby mapping in unprecedented detail the properties of the so-called "cosmic web."

FINDING. Compelling scientific returns will result from a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that accomplishes the scientific objectives of the originally planned NASA servicing mission SM-4.

RECOMMENDATION. The committee urges that NASA commit to a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope that accomplishes the objectives of the originally planned SM-4 mission, including both the replacement of the present instruments with the two instruments already developed for flight—the Wide Field Camera-3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph— and the engineering objectives, such as gyroscope and battery replacements. Such a servicing mission would extend the life of this unique telescope and maximize its productivity.

Other potential options to extend the useful life of Hubble—for example, by servicing components such as batteries and gyroscopes but without replacing instruments—will be studied by the committee as part of its charge. However, such a reduced level of servicing has not been featured in the repair strategies that the committee has heard about to date. The scientific impacts of reduced levels of servicing below that envisioned in SM-4 will be considered in the committee's final report.


Servicing Mission Options

A wide range of factors must be considered when assessing the risk and effectiveness of HST servicing and deorbiting options. These options range from robotically attaching a deorbit module to Hubble to performing a mission (human or robotic) that replaces both scientific instruments and also services or repairs a number of engineering components. You discussed many of these options with us on June 22. One essential task is to enable the ultimate safe deorbiting of the spacecraft so that humans on Earth will not be at risk during its reentry. The present plan is to launch and robotically attach a deorbit module to the telescope around the year 2013.5 Consistent with this plan, NASA issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) on June 1, 2004, for a Hubble disposal vehicle.6

Another risk concerns robotic servicing and possible replacement of telescope instruments. You told the committee that a robotic mission "will be really tough." NASA has proposed that a deorbit module might be attached to the spacecraft at the time of robotic servicing, although the recently issued RFP does not specifically require either servicing or instrument replacement.7

The committee has been given detailed information on the plans for robotic servicing currently under consideration by NASA at its Goddard Space Flight Center. A subgroup of the committee visited Goddard and examined the current activities. The robotic servicing development effort at Goddard was officially initiated in 2004 and is a very recent undertaking. While considerable advances have been made in just a few months, there has been little time for NASA to evaluate and understand the technical and schedule limitations of robotic servicing.

The committee was gratified by your assurance that the robotic efforts will be adequately supported by the required resources in a timely manner. During the next year the robotic servicing mission project will have to achieve key milestones (including a critical design review in the summer of 2005) that will clarify the feasibility of a robotic servicing mission. Substantial resources will be required in Fiscal Year 2005 to accomplish this.

The committee finds the proposed robotic mission to be highly complex due to the inherent difficulties with supervised autonomy in the presence of time delays; the integration of vision and force feedback in six-degree-of-freedom assembly and disassembly tasks with high-degree-of-freedom, dexterous manipulators; and the coordinated control of the high-inertia HRV 8 with a long-reach robotic arm grappling with a high-inertia payload. Robotic emplacement of a deorbit module and replacement of instruments and subsystems on Hubble will require a rendezvous with a non-cooperative vehicle 9 together with a human in a telerobotic loop that has a substantial (on the order of 2-second) time delay.

The committee was informed about several current U.S. and foreign space programs that involve various concepts for robotic spacecraft rendezvous, capture, and servicing. Related U.S. experimental programs are currently scheduled for November 2004 (U.S. Air Force) and September 2006 (DARPA 10 ). The committee has been informed that NASA is participating in some aspects of the DARPA program but this does not yet include a commitment to Hubble robotics servicing mission demonstrations. To the best of the committee's current understanding, difficult challenges of the Hubble robotic scenario (such as the time delay and a non-cooperative target) are not currently covered explicitly in either the Air Force or the DARPA programs. Based on information provided to the committee and the knowledge of members who have deep experience with shuttle flights and spacecraft servicing, the committee believes that the proposed robotic mission to Hubble will essentially be an experimental test program that is expected to accomplish specific programmatic objectives at the same time.

FINDING. The proposed Hubble robotic servicing mission involves a level of complexity, sophistication, and technology maturity that requires significant development, integration, and demonstration to reach flight readiness.

RECOMMENDATION. As an early step, NASA should begin immediately to take an active partnership role that includes HST-related demonstrations in the robotics space experiments that are now under way in other agencies in order to ensure that the returns from these experiments can be beneficial to a potential robotic Hubble servicing mission.

The four HST shuttle servicing missions already completed have demonstrated that crew servicing and instrument replacement can be highly successful. Of course, there is risk to the astronaut crew in any human flight mission. As you informed the committee, some 25 to 30 additional shuttle missions are planned to complete the International Space Station (ISS). Based on its current assessment of the conclusions and recommendations contained in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report 11 and the Stafford-Covey reports (latest dated May 19, 2004),12 the committee concludes that a shuttle flight to the HST is not precluded by or inconsistent with the recommendations from these two NASA advisory groups.

The committee finds that the CAIB report makes clear distinctions between missions to the ISS and non-ISS missions. The CAIB report notes that the degree of difficulty is somewhat greater when conducting a non-ISS shuttle mission.13 This is partially due to the fact that a non-ISS mission such as one to Hubble would not have as long a "safe haven" opportunity as would a mission docking with the space station. The shuttle repair capabilities at a non-ISS location would also be less robust than at the ISS itself. Even so, the CAIB report does not prescribe operational constraints on how to conduct a non-ISS mission, but rather only general risk mitigation steps that should be followed. The CAIB consciously accepted lower risk mitigation efforts for non-ISS missions (such as a mission to Hubble).14

The committee was cognizant and most appreciative of your extensive discussions with us related to the ownership that you, and NASA, have for the shuttle return-to-flight and for astronaut safety in the nation's civil space program. You stressed that total elimination of risk in crewed space flight is "impossible" and that you and NASA are "not risk averse." From information it has received, including the risk information to date, the committee concludes that there would be little additional investment in time and resources required over the next year for NASA to keep open an option for a human servicing mission to Hubble.

According to briefings received by the committee, the risk assessments for viable Hubble servicing alternatives, both human and robotic, have not yet been completed or reported by NASA. The Hubble project office is currently investigating risks associated with robotic mission scenarios. Additionally, the committee was told that probabilistic risk assessment results for shuttle flights should be available in the fall or winter of this year. Such a study will be important in improving the comparisons between the risks of human flights to the ISS and to Hubble.

FINDING. Because of inherent uncertainties in the early stages of development of a robotic mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the uncertain current status of the shuttle return-to-flight program, the key technical decision points for committing to a specific service scenario are at least a year in the future.

RECOMMENDATION. At the same time that NASA is vigorously pursuing development of robotic servicing capabilities, and until the agency has completed a more comprehensive examination of the engineering and technology issues, including risk assessments related to both robotic and human servicing options, NASA should take no actions that would preclude a space shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

We would be pleased to brief you and your staff regarding the views expressed in this letter. We remain committed to completing our final report in an expedited fashion.


Sincerely, Louis J. Lanzerotti, Chair

Committee on the Assessment of Options for Extending the Life of the Hubble Space Telescope


----
1 The committee roster is provided in enclosure A. Additional background material on the motivation for the study can be found in enclosure B.

2 See the statement of task in enclosure B.

3 Information about the independent review of the committee's report under the supervision of the NRC's Report Review Committee is provided in enclosure C.

4 Throughput multiplied by the area of the field of view.

5 This is the earliest date at which Hubble would be expected to reenter the atmosphere without intervention.

6 The RFP can be found at the following URL: http://www2.eps.gov/spg/NASA/GSFC/OPDC20220/HST%2DDM%2D0002%2DGDJ/listing.html.

7 The RFP requires only submissions for a vehicle to provide end-of-life controlled reentry or other safe disposal of the HST; the RFP invites but does not require that submissions include life extension or servicing capabilities.

8 Hubble Robotic Vehicle.

9 A non-cooperative vehicle is a vehicle that is not equipped with transponders or active sensors, meaning that it cannot respond to electronic interrogation from other spacecraft or emit signals enabling its identification or localization.

10 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

11 Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume 1, August 2003, NASA and the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.

12 Return to Flight Task Group Interim Report, January 20, 2004, and Return to Flight Task Group Second Interim Report, May 19, 2004.

13 CAIB Report Recommendation R6.4-1, p. 174.

14 Ibid.

Still A Few Liberal Voices Left In This Country...

I'm going to hand the talking feather to Amy Isaacs, national director of Americans for Democratic Action, because she says it so well...

The self-proclaimed "uniter" and his congressional cohorts are doing it again: dividing the country in time for the fall election season.

The issue this time is gay marriage. The proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is a willful attempt to play politics with the U.S. Constitution. The amendment would invoke a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, thus inserting bigotry into history's most inclusive and democratic document.

President Bush said: "Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all."

A ban on same-sex marriage fails miserably in serving the common welfare. It simply creates a subclass of individuals. Not only are same-sex couples denied the right to marry, thousands of benefits that other couples enjoy, ranging from pensions, health insurance and hospital visitation to inheritance, are not available to same-sex couples.

The intent of our Constitution has been to protect and expand the rights and protections of individuals. This proposed amendment seeks to limit and restrict individual liberty by discrimination.

The Federal Marriage Amendment is an unnecessary and counterproductive approach to the debate on same-sex marriage. Most important, it is inconsistent with the history and tradition of our Constitution.

Marriage is a union of two people and traditionally has involved a man and woman. Opponents of same-sex marriage often cite tradition as a reason to ban same-sex marriage. However, traditions change and tradition is not an adequate rationale for preserving bigotry and injustice.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

The Federal Marriage Amendment does not represent "the progress of the human mind" but rather the fear and hatred of progress so prevalent in those who would have us mirror our "barbarous ancestors."

Chief Justice Earl Warren, in delivering an opinion declaring Virginia's "tradition" of banning interracial marriage unconstitutional, said, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival." The statement is equally valid for heterosexual and homosexual couples alike.

Even Vice President Dick Cheney feels this sort of discrimination is bad. "The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. And I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one else's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. . . . I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area," Cheney said during the 2000 election campaign.

"Traditions" evolve or dissolve; however, there is certainly one tradition we should embrace: the American tradition of equality and progress.

America should follow the tradition of progress by allowing gay couples the same rights and protections as others. America should follow the tradition of protecting rights and promoting equality rather than that of discrimination.

Amy Isaacs is the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, the nation's oldest liberal political association.

Monday July 12, 2004

A Friend Isn't Someone Who Steals Your Wedding Ring And Sells It For Money To Finance His Political Career

Gordon Smith is a republican. Imagine my surprise.

"I intend to be your champion on many issues in the future, if you want me," Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, a leader in efforts to make attacks against gays a federal hate crime, said while addressing his comments to gay and lesbian voters.

"But on this one, I have to be able to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and be true to myself," he said.

His conscience is clean. An empty conscience usually is.

We'll be hearing a lot of talk this week, from people who claim that they have nothing against gay and lesbian Americans, they just want to protect marriage. In fact, by voting for the Federal Marriage Amendment, they are saying that they regard our intimate relationships as fraudulent imitations of the real thing, that they honestly believe we are not capable of the kind of spiritual body and soul love that heterosexual couples experience, that as far as they are concerned the truth is that homosexuals don't love, they just have sex.

Smith is not, and cannot be our champion in any actual sense, because he does not respect us as his fellow human beings, does not acknowledge our shared humanity at its most fundamental level; our human need, and our human capacity, to love. He either does not see that kind of intimate romantic love as possible to homosexuals, in which case he is a bigot, regardless of whether or not he thinks beating the crap out of us ought to be discouraged, or he knows we experience intimate love the way heterosexuals do, and yet is willing to throw acid on our relationships in order to further his political career, in which case he is a gutter crawling thug posing as a decent man. Which is the worse I leave as an intellectual exercise to the reader.

Remember, this amendment not only prohibits the states from enacting same sex marriage, even if a state government want to for its citizens, it also prohibits any sort of civil unions or domestic partnerships that carry with them any of the rights of marriage. It is a broad attack on the rights of same sex couples. Any statements to the contrary are false on their face. Anyone who claims this amendment does not eradicate all the rights of same sex couples are lying through their teeth. That is exactly what it does. Here is the text:

SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

"...the legal incidents thereof..." Right there is the bullet the republicans want to put through the hearts of gay and lesbian Americans. Repeated attempts to remove that language, and leave in the rest about marriage consisting only of the union of a man and a woman have been doggedly resisted, which proves if nothing else does the intent of this amendment's authors, despite their protestations to the contrary. To support this amendment, you must believe that same sex couples ought to have no legal rights whatever. There is no other honest way of reading this text. So when you hear someone claiming that this amendment doesn't prevent the states from enacting civil unions, you know two things about that person: one, they are bigots...two, they are liars. And if they start talking about the moral decline of American society in the next breath, laugh in their face.

Errata...

On review, I had to make one small change to the caption of this week's cartoon. What passed the senate a couple of weeks ago wasn't a hate crime law, but a hate crime bill. Big difference. A bill is not a law, until both houses of congress pass it, and the president signs it. The chances of this republican government actually including gay and lesbian Americans in its hate crime laws is nil squared. As has been observed elsewhere, the senate most likely passed that bill to give the ersatz republican moderates cover to gay bash all week this week on the Federal Marriage Amendment. We don't hate gays, we just treat them like human garbage.

Ironic, since as the republicans have decided on political gay bashing as a vote getting strategy, the incidents of actual anti-gay violence are, unsurprisingly, on the rise. It isn't only homosexuals who are at risk in this climate:

The Independence man seriously injured while helping a victim of gay-bashing has a long road ahead to recovery, his friends say.

Matthew Ashcraft, 19, came home from University Hospital on June 28, two days after he was hit on the head with a baseball bat outside Woolly's on Monmouth.

But he might headed back to the hospital because he can't keep any food down and still suffers migraine headaches, said a friend from Alexandria, Brian, who declined to give his last name.

Ashcraft suffered serious damage to his left ear, Brian said, and will probably need several surgeries to repair shattered bones. A police report said Ashcraft's injuries included a fractured skull, cranial bleeding and a blood clot on his brain.

Doctors have estimated his chances for full recovery at 50 percent, Brian said, but any recovery will take three to six months.

"He's a very, very sweet guy," Brian said. "All he wants is for people to realize that violence is not the answer."

His friends were expecting Ashcraft to attend a benefit at the bar late Wednesday night, but didn't know how long he would be able to stay.

Another friend, Danny, who lives in Deer Park, Ohio, said he organized the benefit - a drag show and auction - to help cover Ashcraft's medical expenses, because the teen has no medical insurance.

"He's our hero," Danny said. "He went beyond the call of duty to help a person out when he really didn't have to."

The three men were on their way into Woolly's just before 11 p.m. on June 26 when they came upon two men taunting Leon Hughes, who was walking the bar's dog. "They said, 'Come here, faggot! Why don't you and your little faggot dog come here?'" Hughes said.

Ashcraft is not gay, Brian said, but feels very protective of Brian and other gay men. Brian said he begged Ashcraft not to get involved, just to call the police, but Ashcraft replied that he knew if he didn't, Hughes would get beaten up. Ashcraft stepped in, and the fight moved across the street, where he was hit with a baseball bat.

The sound of the blow sounded like someone had shattered a beer bottle on the ground, Danny said. It has caused him nightmares for several days, he added.

Gay bashed because of the republican fueled climate of hostility toward homosexuals and no health insurance, something else you can lay at the feet of the republican party, after it deliberately and cynically opposed any health care reform during the Clinton years on the grounds that it would benefit the democrats with the voters more then it would them. That kid's fractured skull and the massive debt his medical bills are going to drive him into are the exhaust from the tailpipe of the republican political engine.

Sunday July 11, 2004

The Don't Question Authority Party.

The joke of the ages, the propaganda coup of all eternity, is that the republicans have managed to make liberalism a synonym for totalitarianism in popular culture. Somewhere beyond the grave, Hitler is laughing his ass off, while Orwell just cries.

I came across a link to this New York Times editorial, regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar assessment of Iraqi weapons, and found it strangely familiar...

The report was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.

These assertions formed the basis of Mr. Bush's justifications for war. But the report said that they were wrong and were not a true picture of the intelligence, and that the intelligence itself was not worth much. The freshest information from human sources was more than four years old. The committee said the analysts who had produced that false apocalyptic vision had fallen into a "collective groupthink" in which evidence was hammered into a preconceived pattern...

Ask any gay or lesbian American what this sounds like, and the answer you'll get is decades of right wing anti-gay hate mongering. Facts? Facts? We don't need no stinking facts. From Irving Bieber's study in the 1950s, purporting to show that homosexuals were sick, by studying only homosexuals who were in therapy (almost a quarter of his subjects had already been diagnosed as schizophrenic) to his protege Joseph Nicolosi's reparative therapy quackery, to Jerry Falwell getting up on a podium with Anita Bryant, looking a roomful of reporters in the face and telling them that "A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you", to Paul Cameron's junk science pamphlets purporting to prove that, among other things, the average lifespan of a homosexual is 43 years, to Stanley Kurtz' recent machine gun lying about the effect of same sex marriage in Scandinavia, the history of the right wing assault on gay Americans is paved with lies. And when confronted with irrefutable evidence of falsehood, they reliably dig their heels in deeper, and refute it anyway. Usually with another barrage of different lies, but often enough, and astoundingly, with a barrage of the exact same lies all over again.

Sound familiar? Dick Cheney, rushing to tell the press that there was a solid connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, immediately after the 9-11 commission announces there was no such connection. Can't find those weapons of mass destruction? Saddam had them, it's been proven. No it hasn't. What about those three metric tons of growth material? There wasn't any. And how about that vial of botulism they found in that refrigerator? One vial isn't a weapons program. No, but three metric tons of growth material is. But that growth material doesn't exist. And what about those documents proving Saddam tried to buy nuclear material from Niger. Those were forgeries. I suppose you think those three metric tons of growth material were forgeries too. There was no growth material. You should support the president, not the terrorists.

And so on. This is a pattern of relentless machine gun lying to try and bury a truth that doesn't suit them, that anyone who has engaged the fight for Gay and Lesbian equality knows all too well. This is the right's, and for the past decade and a half at least, the republican party's standard operating procedure. When in doubt, lie. When not in doubt, lie some more. They get away with it, because our mainstream news media regards balance as telling both sides of the story uncritically, even if they know one side is lying through its teeth.

We, your gay and lesbian neighbors, are going to be enduring this republican pattern of lie-repeat, all week this week as Bill (R: Dead Cat) Frist and the republicans wave their anti-gay marriage amendment. They'll be spending much of this week inciting passions against innocent Americans, in the hope that it'll get them some votes they'll be badly needing come November. And never mind that anti-gay violence is hitting record levels all across the country. We'll be hearing over and over again, every filthy lie in their play book about homosexuals and homosexuality, every blatant falsehood about what marriage is, what it has meant over the ages, what it means to a free people, and what extending it to same sex couples means. Expect the republicans to insist that their amendment won't take any rights away from gay and lesbian Americans. Expect them to say that same sex couples can protect their unions in other ways, besides marriage. Expect the news media to forget to mention the fact that this amendment will deny gay and lesbian Americans the ability to do precisely that, in addition to denying us the right to marry. In Virginia, the republican author of a recently passed law that denies same sex couples the right to even hold a joint checking account, looked reporters in the face and swore that his law doesn't do, and wasn't intended to do, what it does, what it was intended to do, with the same confidence that Dick Cheney could look reporters in the face and still insist that Saddam and Al Qaeda were working together on 9-11, and never mind that this claim has been called categorically false by the 9-11 commission twice now. Facts? Facts?

The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.

By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to deliver.

Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and the international community will see the committee report as another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical about the government's assessment of danger.

There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will have to believe that the president is acting against a real threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.

This administration has not made it easier for people to have that confidence...

But why would they want to? Listen to them call anyone who questions president Junior's policies, anyone that is, exercising the basic right of the free citizen of a free country to question their government, a traitor. Look at that for a minute. Really look at it. Questions are things that preoccupy independent minds, and with the Bush gang and the republicans it is: you are either with us or against us. You are either part of the herd, or you are a danger to it. All a herd needs are a few slogans to keep it together. Anyone who tells us a fact, is telling us that they have wandered away from the herd. The proper response to that isn't to dispute their facts, but enforce herd discipline.

This is the republican view of how government works, of how society works, how religion works, and it is a categorical denial of everything this country ever stood for, everything the first American revolutionaries laid down their lives for. If a modern day republican had been standing within earshot of Patrick Henry's declaration, he'd have shot him dead. Liberty, by their reckoning, is anti-god, anti-family, and anti-American. And the mark of the beast, is a preoccupation with facts.

When you get into an argument with one of these, and find yourself amazed at how doggedly they dispense one lie after another, in the face of one irrefutable fact after another, realize you are not having the argument with them you might think you are. They are not arguing the point at hand, but renouncing, utterly denying, the right of the human mind to question. They are demanding that you shut up, return to the herd, and do as you're told. You are not supposed to ask questions, just obey. Repeat the slogans until you have them memorized. Repeat the slogans. Repeat the slogans. Repeat the slogans. If you repeat a fact instead, well, that just means you've been asking questions...haven't you...

Monday June 28, 2004

No Talking Feather...

Yeah...I haven't posted here for a while. This has been a busy couple of weeks where I work (The Space Telescope Science Institute) and with layoffs coming down the pike at the end of July, we're all trying hard to make ourselves indispensable.

This round of downsizing at the Institute by the way, was always in the cards. After the forth servicing mission, which has been canceled, which was among other things, to install some new instruments on Hubble have already been built, new development on Hubble was to come to an end. The spacecraft was to continue on with its existing software and hardware until the scheduled end of mission, in 2010. Time was we were hoping for a fifth servicing mission, which would have extended Hubble's lifespan even longer. Now we're looking at an early end to the mission. But in any case, the coming layoffs were planned before the cancellation of SM4, because there was to be no new development work done on Hubble. Staff that did new development on Hubble systems, would need to be trimmed, and only maintenance work would be done thereafter.

There will be layoffs this year, and next, and the year after that, and then they reckon the workforce at the Institute will be at a sustainable level. But if we don't get some sort of SM4, be it manned or unmanned, Hubble will probably stop being usable for science in just a few years, and then that last year of staff reductions at the Institute would have to be severe. But that's still a few years in the future.

So my thoughts for the next several weeks are going to be mostly consumed with work related issues, and that's why my posting here is probably going to be a tad thin for a while.

I couldn't let this pass without comment though...

Of particular concern even for the nonreligious is the effect gay marriage could have on two of our founding principles – religious freedom and freedom of speech. Once the courts recognize gay marriage as equal in all ways to heterosexual marriage, then everyone else - including churches - has to recognize gay marriage as equal, too.

Any opposition will be deemed hateful by definition, and anyone who opposes gay marriage will be a hatemonger. Given that many religions and denominations teach that homosexuality is a sin, church attendance alone could suggest you're homophobic. To the extent that one believes or preaches scripture, one is a bigot.

Hence some of the deep concern among legal professionals, as well as theologians. A secular world that ratifies homosexual marriage would provide a legal foundation that would open the floodgates to civil litigation against religious leaders, institutions and worshipers.

In such an environment, churches might be sued for declining to provide their sanctuaries for gay marriages, for example. Ministers could be sued for hate speech for giving a sermon on moral behavior. Churches that protest homosexual unions could face revocation of their tax-exemption status.

The delicate balance between church and state, in other words, is teetering on a high ledge at this moment. It's ironic that those who oppose churches' involvement in state concerns nonetheless have no compunction when it comes to the state dictating what churches can do. Even nonreligious folk should be concerned.
Kathleen Parker - Gay marriage places church and state in historic clash

Gotta love it. President Smirking Fratboy Jackass goes to see the pope and complains to him that "Not all the American bishops are with me" on cultural issues, anti gay political action committees organize hundreds of fundamentalist church congregations to support the federal anti same sex marriage amendment, the catholic church is threatening to withhold communion to any politician who doesn't oppose same sex marriage, and Kathleen Parker says that same sex marriage is a threat to church-state separation. I'm sorry...since when did her kind believe in church-state separation...?

Laws against mixed race marriages were thrown out by the Supreme Court years ago and yet there is no law, and thanks to the first amendment, and that separation of church and state that Parker and her right wing gang think does not exist, there can be no law, forcing any church to marry a mixed race couple. Parker is well aware of that, but like others of her kind she shrinks from no lie she thinks can incite religious passions against homosexual Americans. She has the morals, the same easy contempt for humanity, of a concentration camp guard. From the American political gutter, Parker and her kind use the human gift of language to piss on the human race.

Wednesday June 23, 2004

Our Feckless News Media

Brad DeLong sees the unintentional self parody in what he calls, rightly, our "feckless" news media. He quotes an entry in The Volokh Conspiracy blog, which I'll quote myself, because it's a good example of that self parody:

The Volokh Conspiracy - Archives 2004-06-15 - 2004-06-21: Huh? Kerry was asked:

Is the support for Roe v. Wade a critical point, a litmus test, for any court appointee you would make?

Kerry answered:

To the Supreme Court of the United States, yes.

The Kerryism edited version, which I assume is supposed to be equivalent to Kerryism's original point but better put (remember their original charter, which is "translat[ing]" Kerry's words "into plain English," by removing "caveats and pointless embellishments") is:

Yes.

But that's not what Kerry wanted to say! It would be a stupid thing to say, both from a policy perspective (even if he firmly supports constitutional abortion rights, why should he turn it into a litmus test for district court judges?) and from a political perspective (if he does set up such a broad litmus test even for district court judges, he'd look like a fanatic).

What exactly is the point of the Kerryisms? At first, I thought -- based on the column's introductory installment -- the Kerryisms were meant to show that Kerry throws in lots of unnecessary verbiage. But here, this was a necessary proviso.

Another possibility is that "Kerryisms" has evolved into an attempt to show simply that Kerry uses a lot of qualifiers, instead of giving very simple answers. But often, as in this case, the right answer isn't simple. It's actually not terribly complex, but it's not one-word simple. Is it really good to fault a politician for refusing to oversimplify? Should we want supposedly smart media outlets mocking politicians for trying to be precise?

The only other option that I see is that the column has descended into self-parody. ("Question: What's the ratio of a circle's circumference to the diameter? Kerry's real answer: 3.1415926. Our answer, shorn of caveats and pointless embellishments: 3.") But surely it can't be intentional self-parody. So I ask again, what's the point?

DeLong goes on to lambaste two reviews of Bill Clinton's new book that are so completely inept you have to just about believe that newspaper publishers and editors don't think there are any adults left in the United States. This one in particular, from the ostensibly liberal New York Times, is telling:

The second comes from another review of Clinton's My Life: Michiko Kakutani's. She sneers at Clinton's "messy pastiche of everything that [he] ever remembered and wanted to set down in print; he even describes the time he got up at 4 a.m. to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria's new president on TV." That, to her, is the low point: Clinton thinking that an audience might possibly be interested in a place like Nigeria! And--she is clearly thinking--could there be anything more a total boring and uninteresting waste of time than getting up at 4 A.M. to watch a broadcast from Lagos?

Well, here's the sum total of what Clinton has to say about Nigeria (that I could find, at least) in his book. It's two paragraphs:

p. 856: I got up at four in the morning to watch the inaugural ceremonies for Nigeria's new president, former general Olusegun Obasanjo, on TV. Ever since gaining independence, Nigeria had been riddled by corruption, regional and religious strife, and deteriorating social conditions. Despite its large oil production, the country suffered periodic power outages and fuel shortages. Obasanjo had taken power briefly in a military coup in the 1970s, then had kept his promise to step aside as soon as new elections could be held. Later, he had been imprisoned for his political views and, while incarcerated, had become a devout Christian and had written books about his faith. It was hard to imagine a bright future for sub-Saharan Africa without a more successful Nigeria, by far its most populous nation. After listening to his compelling inaugural address, I hoped Obasanjo would be able to succeed where others had failed.

pp. 920-921: I flew to Nigeria to see President Olusegun Obasanjo. I wanted to support his efforts to curb AIDS before Nigeria's infection rate reached the levels of southern African nations, and to highlight the recent passage of the African trade bill, which I hoped would help Africa's struggling economy. Obasanjo and I attended a gathering on AIDS at which a young girl spoke of her efforts to educate her schoolmates about the disease, and a man named John Ibekwe told the gripping story of his marriage to a woman who was HIV-positive, his becoming infected, and his frantic search to get the medicine for his wife that would enable their child to be born without the virus. Eventually John succeeded, and little Maria was born HIV-free. President Obasanjo asked Mrs. Ibekwe to come up onstage, where he embraced her. It was a touching gesture and sent a clear signal that Nigeria would not fall into the trap of denial that had contributed so much to the spread of AIDS in other countries.

Plague, coups, famine, revolution, and--we hope--steps toward development and democracy. For Nigerians, the stuff of life and death. For President Clinton, the potentially most important country in Africa that he needs to know about as he tries to use his policy levers to make a better world. For an elite journalist like Michiko Kakutani, it's boring--and it is a gross violation of etiquette for Clinton to use two paragraphs in his book to try to teach Americans a little about Nigeria and give them a President's eye view of this piece of Africa.

It is self parody and it's damming. If you've ever wondered why so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11, here it is. Too many people calling themselves journalists, don't give a good goddamn about anything that wouldn't make the top story on Entertainment Tonight.

And that indifference is killing our democracy. Go...now...read this essay at The Washington Monthly, about how our news media doggedly refuse to acknowledge why the nation is becoming more and more polarized:

There's something similar about the way the national press has been describing the polarization of our political culture over the last few years. It is a cliché to observe that the parties have drawn further apart, the center no longer holds, and partisans on both sides have withdrawn further into mutual loathing and ever more-homogenous and antagonistic groupings. Where the analysis goes wrong is in its assumption, either explicit or implicit, that both parties bear equal responsibility for this state of affairs. While partisanship may now be deeply entrenched among their voters and their elites, the truth is that the growing polarization of American politics results primarily from the growing radicalism of the Republican Party.

This is the sort of reality that most journalists know perfectly well to be true but cannot bring themselves to say, though this increased polarization drives them crazy. Almost without exception, mainstream reporters in Washington see moderation and bipartisanship as inherently virtuous. (Indeed, reverence for these qualities is essentially the defining belief of the Washington establishment.) Read almost any account of bills becoming law, and you'll notice the reporter's obvious affection for centrists who work both sides of the aisle. Yet they are unable to honestly explain to readers what's causing the decline of bipartisanship, thanks to another form of press bias: The desire not to seem biased. As practiced by the modern press, "objective" journalism requires avoiding the appearance of favoring one party over the other--even when the facts merit such a treatment. That's why, when news stories discuss polarization, they bend over backward to avoid laying the "blame" on the political right.

The republicans have been waging a scorched earth war on American democracy for decades. They want nothing less then a one party government, no different in style from the way the communist party once ran the Soviet Union. They have no use whatever for democracy, they have in fact, nothing but contempt for democracy: they are the right hand of god, if not gods themselves in their own estimation, and gods do not count votes. There is no way to report that story with any sort of equanimity without accepting the morally reprehensible position that totalitarianism is no different then democracy. But if the press has its way, by the time the average American realizes the threat the republicans pose to our democracy, it will be gone.

Monday June 21, 2004

Quiet

Deathly quiet, you might say. Brood X class of 2004 is gone, at least around here. Literally. The streets are quiet. What was a din of cicada song just a couple weeks ago, has returned now to normal. The usual birds, the occasional insect buzz, and the background city noise. Cicadas brood X is gone.

Literally. All that is left of them now, right at this moment, are the eggs, waiting to hatch. You can see where, in the tips of tree branches dying off where the females cut slits to lay their eggs. It's almost like autumn came early to some trees, and just at the tips of their branches.

Of brood X there is nothing but the eggs now. It is the silence between worlds. This is the thing I find most remarkable about the little red-eyed flyers. The whole population dies off. For the species to continue, it has to make this one last leap across the endless silence. In a few weeks the eggs hatch, and tiny ant sized nymphs make their way back into the earth to start it all over again. Presumably there are zillions of eggs in trees across the Ohio valley to West Virginia and Maryland, waiting to hatch, so the danger isn't very great. But there it is. They are all gone. Now, there is just the Silence. In a few weeks, they'll make their return from extinction. And most of us humans won't notice that fact for seventeen years.

Tales Of The Liberal Media

The headline reads: WICS anchor under fire for criticizing gay activist, but calling it 'criticizing' doesn't quite capture the moment...

"I've been an activist for a long time, nearly 30 years. I deal constantly with reporters, and this is the first time I've ever seen someone with such unprofessional behavior," [Rick] Garcia said, adding that he's never complained about a reporter before.

Garcia said he was at the Capitol when he saw [WICS-Channel 20 anchor Julie] Staley and Channel 20 cameraman Curt Claycomb standing near a man and two children who were signing the book. Staley was working on a story about the book being at the Statehouse.

"There was no one around, so I got in line and signed the book with my memory of Ronald Reagan," Garcia said.

His entry was, "My memory of President Ronald Reagan: Thousands of American men, women and children were dying from HIV and AIDS during his administration. The president did nothing. The president said nothing. Not until the very end of his second term was he even able to utter the word AIDS. Reagan's silence and his administration's policies contributed to the suffering and dying of thousands of men, women and children. I mourn the president the way he mourned these men, women and children - with silence. May God forgive him, I can't. Rick Garcia."

Garcia said he then left to run errands at the Statehouse.

Staley told the Chicago Reader the tape in her camera had run out and she was on a break. She said she decided to sign the book herself - she told the weekly that she, her family and her husband's family were all Reagan supporters - but when she saw what Garcia had written, she thought it was cruel.

"I was very incensed," she told the magazine. "I loved Ronald Reagan."

She also told the Reader that WICS's cameraman told a security guard about Garcia's remarks.

Garcia said he rounded a corner to see Staley, Claycomb and the security guard standing together.

"'There he is,' she screeches at me. She is livid. And she starts saying, 'You're tasteless. You're classless.' She was clearly upset. I told her that speaking the truth is not tasteless. The guard asked me, 'Why don't you show some respect?' Then she started saying, 'You're a loser, a big loser.'"

Staley told the Chicago Reader she wouldn't deny making the comments.

Well, that's what happens when you put a remembrance book out where people can write their remembrances in it. People will write their remembrances in it. And people remember a lot of about Ronald Reagan. And his followers. Their turning their backs on people with AIDS was of a piece with the rest of their bar stool prejudices. And if Julie "loved Ronald Reagan", there was probably a reason for that.

Look under a rock...find the maggots. Julie's employer, WICS-TV in Springfield, Illinois, is owned by Sinclar Broadcast, one of the top GOP contributors among TV/Radio and stations.

Hey...even a TV anchor has a right to an opinion...right. Well...yeah. Now try to imagine that anchor dispassionately reading a news story that didn't follow the republican party line in some way. Hell...try to imagine her employer broadcasting it. As of March 29, 2004, Sinclar had made $65,434 worth of campaign donations, with 98 percent of that going to the GOP.

Friday June 18, 2004

Culture Of Rape

I watch very little network television these days, but last night I found myself flipping channels before bed, and watched a scene from the last half hour of the CBS series Without A Trace. If you're not familiar with it, it's a series about some FBI agents who specialize in missing persons cases. Maybe (well, not maybe...) what got my attention was the cute young guy that two of the FBI agents were questioning. Cute was being questioned about the disappearance of his father. Cute had been involved in drugs, and the FBI agents figured he knew something about what had happened to his father, so in order to make him talk, they threatened him with rape.

Well...not in so many words. But it's the kind of scene you see all the time nowadays on cop tv shows. Suspect won't talk...suspect needs a little encouraging...suspect is told what'll happen to him in prison if he doesn't cooperate. Last night in Without A Trace, our clean cut FBI agent heros told their cute young suspect, I forget the exact lines of dialogue right now, that guys like him were prime targets of prison rapists, and that if he knew what was good for him, he'd start talking.

Now whether or not this is actually standard interrogation procedure for the FBI is something I can't say, although I recall that it wasn't too long ago that Canada refused to extradite someone to the United States on the grounds that our criminal justice system not only turns a blind eye to prison rape, but in fact uses it as a tool to keep prisoners under control. Whether that's true or not, prison rape here in the U.S. is common enough that the fact of it can be readily used as a plot device in popular entertainment, a fact which you'd think would be profoundly shameful to any civilized nation, but apparently not us. The hero may not be a rapist himself, but he can be perfectly willing to let others do it on his behalf, and still be the hero.

And that's something worth thinking about while this and that new bit of evidence of our conduct in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq comes to light. Popular culture here in the United States not only accepts rape as a punishment, it expects the hero to use it as a tool when necessary. I watched it last night. Two FBI agents, as portrayed on television, threatened a cute young guy with rape if he didn't talk, and the only discomfort either one of them showed with that conversation, was when the lead character restrained his partner from actually taking a swing at him. Cute later turned out to be innocent. Oh...Never mind...

The Whole World Is Watching... In Iraq, a fifteen year old boy was raped by translators while American soldiers took pictures. The teenaged son of a member of Saddam's military was taken by American soldiers, stripped and driven around in the back of a truck until, mud caked and trembling, he was displayed to the father, along with the threat that he'd be thrown in with the other prisoners to be raped if the father didn't start talking. In Iraq now they're saying that the student is gone and the master has arrived. Here in America we're busy telling ourselves that it was just a few bad apples, while we entertain ourselves by watching tv police use rape as a tool to fight crime.

Tuesday June 15, 2004

Why We Fight...

Two books came in the mail today, Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage, and David Carter's Stonewall - The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution. I was going to read Rauch's book first, but began flipping the pages of Carter's and became mesmerized:

While McCarthyism encouraged the toughening of laws toward homosexuals because they were believed to be security risks, America's Puritan tradition was producing hysteria over child molestation. Homosexuals were believed to be the main culprits. As right-wing demonization of homosexuals proceeded apace, the negative qualities attributed to them overlapped until it became a common assumption that any homosexual man or woman was so beyond the pale the he or she must also partake of the most forbidden ideological fruit of all: communism. Homosexuals thus became handy scapegoats for both of these postwar obsessions. Antihomosexual laws were correspondingly made more severe.

States passed new laws that either stiffened the penalties for homosexual sex or created new categories to criminalize. For example, California governor Earl Warren thought the sex offender problem so serious the in 1949 he convened a special session of the state legislature to deal with issue. That session passed laws that increased the penalties for sodomy and invented a new crime: loitering in a public toilet. The name of anyone convicted of spending too much time in a toilet was registered with the state. Twenty-nine states enacted new sexual psychopath laws and/or revised existing ones, and homosexuals were commonly the laws' primary targets. In almost all states, professional licenses could be revoked or denied on the basis of homosexuality, so that professionals could loose their livelihoods.

By 1961 the laws in America were harsher on homosexuals then those in Cuba, Russia, or East Germany countries that the United States criticized for their despotic ways. An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years - or even life - in prison. In 1971 twenty states had "sex psychopath" laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and in seven states they could be castrated. At California's Atascadero State Hospital, known soon after its opening as "Dachau for Queers", men convicted of consensual sodomy were, as authorized by a 1941 law, given electrical and pharmacological shock therapy, castrated, and lobotomized. Gay Law author William N. Eskridge Jr. summed up the legal status of homosexuals at the beginning of the 1960s: "The homosexual...was smothered by law".

-David Carter, Stonewall - The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution: pg 15

Something to say to the next blathering idiot who demands to know why homosexuals are marching during Father's Day weekend. On the one hand you can look at that and take some comfort in how far we've come. On the other hand you can look at it and see right there why we have to keep fighting, why our enemies are still so vehement in their opposition. That "before Stonewall" period is the good old days for them; a time when the police and the courts knew how to treat homosexuals. Many of them can remember it as though it were yesterday; a halcyon time, before the long haired hippies came along and ruined America for everyone. When it was a man's world, provided the man was both white, protestant and heterosexual, and women submitted gracefully to their husbands. Movies, books and magazines were censored to keep indecency out of view, bastard children were born somewhere discreetly out of sight and put up for adoption, and perverts were routinely rounded up locked away. America was the most powerful nation on earth, a land of freedom and opportunity, as long as the freedom and opportunity you wanted, was the freedom and opportunity America was willing to let you have. Nowadays they rant in the newspapers about the "anything goes" culture, and vow to take America back from radical individualists. They want to bring it all back, not just the sodomy laws, but the constant fear of discovery, and the knowledge, branded into the consciousness of gay America, that discovery could mean a cascading loss of everything...your family...your home...your job...at the end of which could easily be prison, and maybe the surgeon's knife.

Why Even Gay Radicals Have To Fight For Same Sex Marriage

The struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights has always been about the dignity and legitimacy of our intimate relationships. That dignity, that legitimacy, that sanctity, has always been the ground our enemies will fight to the bitter end, to deny. Every fight since Stonewall, for even the smallest of basic civil rights, from the right to care for our loved ones, and be with them in the hospital, to the right to hold a job, or have a roof over our heads, has been, ultimately, about this fight.

We could have been forgiven if, once upon a time, we thought we could win our rights piecemeal. So conditioned for generations to believe that homosexuality was a sickness, the news from Hooker and Kinsey that we were as human as anyone left us both liberated, and uncertain. We thought we could walk step by step to equality. First this right, then that, and soon, with enough of us out and visible, people would see the humanity in us, and take down the rest of the barriers to our hopes and dreams and joys. But the ones open to this kind of steady, persistent persuasion were never the problem, had never built the barriers to confine us, to exclude us, had never made monsters out of us to begin with. Mostly, they didn't care. Yes, they could be roused against us with lies, but they had no personal investment in those lies. For them, lies could always be replaced by truth. Increasingly now, those who were always open to the truth about their gay and lesbian neighbors, are standing with us in our struggle, leaving only that bitter enemy that has always known the truth. You can say the fight is about treating a minority with fairness and compassion. You can say it's about the right of adults to make their own choices in their intimate affairs. You can say it's about liberty and justice for all. But at its irreducible core, it's about the dignity and legitimacy of the love between same sex couples.

And this is why our enemies have made every step in our struggle for equality, a fight over same sex marriage:

Doug Kilgore has heard the complaints resonating from people throughout York County [PA] for about a month.

The overwhelming majority of those complaints question whether a proposed countywide human relations commission should expand discrimination laws to include sexual orientation.

"This issue is pretty emotional for people," Kilgore said.

At their weekly board meeting last week, Kilgore and his fellow county commissioners were reminded of the opposition when they were asked by Roy C. Jones of Dover to pledge not to expand protection to include homosexuals.

Jones, chairman of the York Area American Family Association, asked the commissioners to protect the sanctity of marriage as a union between "one man and one woman." He said he is not alone in his beliefs; that most people in conservative York County support his values.

"Make no mistake about it, radical homosexual activists are ignoring the rule of law and using local human relations governing bodies and subsequently local courts to cloud the original intent and go after the institution of marriage and dismantle it piece by piece," Jones said.

Gay rights focus of concerns - The Evening Sun (Hannover, PA)

This has always been the pattern. We fight for the right to hold a job, our enemies say we'll use that as a tool to get same sex marriage. We fight for hospital visitation rights, our enemies say it is tantamount to condoning same sex marriage. We fight for the right to own or rent a home, our enemies accuse us of trying to force society to accept same sex marriage. And when the Supreme Court finally eliminated the sodomy laws that were long the core of legalized anti-gay persecution in America, our enemies shout that what the court really did was pave the way for legalized same sex marriage.

Every small step along the way to equality, has been a fight over same sex marriage, which is to say, a fight about the dignity and legitimacy of our love. Whether you believe, as I do, that same sex marriage is a completely logical thing, or you think marriage is a purely heterosexual construct that has nothing to do with gay liberation, you are still forced to deal with it. Our enemies say we cannot be equal in the eyes of the law, because we are not equal in fact, because our intimate relationships are a sterile, pale imitation of their's, because our feelings of love and devotion are not real, but perverted, empty mockeries of the real thing. As Orson Scott Card once averred, we are only playing house. Our enemies have been right all along about one thing: the fight to win job protections, or equal housing opportunities, or hospital visitation, is also a fight for same sex marriage. And that's because you can't fight any of those battles, without standing for, and fiercely defending, the honor and the dignity and the legitimacy of our love.

Sunday June 13, 2004

There You Go Again...

It is truly pathetic watching Deep Thinker Steve Miller, over at the Independent (sic) Gay Forum, accuse gay activists of distorting history regarding Ronald Reagan. Never mind that once again he turns to that September 18, 1985 press conference and this time excerpts just the bit where he claims to be willing to spend billions on AIDS research. Never mind that, just a year later, in 1986, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science produced a 390 page report that called the Reagan administration's response on the epidermic "woefully inadequate". Never mind that it wasn't until C. Everett Koop's own "Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" was published - without letting the Reagan White House see an advance copy, did the issue of serious AIDS research funding get traction in Washington. Koop's report, with its explicit no-nonsense language and calls for sex education and condom use was vilified by conservatives and...

President Reagan observed his ritualistic silence, though the PHS officials who had approved the report's printing without White House clearance quickly found themselves exiled to bureaucratic Siberia.
-Randy Shilts, "And The Band Played On", pg 588

Never mind all that. Let's turn to Miller's other pathetic exercise in Ronald Reagan whitewashing: The Briggs Initiative.

Miller, like a lot of other excuse makers, claims Reagan's public opposition to the initiative which would have banned homosexuals from teaching in California's public schools, was key to its defeat, and proves he was no gay basher, and quotes columnist John Nichols:

Convinced by activists David Mixner and Peter Scott that the initiative represented an unwarranted threat to free speech rights and individual liberties, Reagan declared that the initiative "is not needed to protect our children -- we have the legal protection now."

That's not just a sloppy reading of history, its a deliberately dishonest one. Here's how Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney tell it in Out For Good:

As soon as Mixner and Scott arrived at Reagan's office, it was clear that Reagan had been briefed on the topic and was curious to hear what they had to say. The meeting dragged on beyond the scheduled fifteen minutes to more then an hour. Mixner and Scott made all the points they had discussed at dinner with Bennet and Abbitt: the bill would allow students to blackmail teachers, it would destroy school discipline, and it would waste taxpayer money in pointless litigation. As Mixner recounted it, Reagan stirred in his chair when they talked about school discipline. He and Peter Scott exchanged glances, so they returned to the point again and again.
-Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, "Out For Good", pg 387.

Mixner and Scott later heard from Reagan's office that he would almost certainly not support the initiative, but could not guarantee that he would come out against it. Then in August Reagan issued a statement of opposition, which did indeed say that the initiative "has the potential of infringing on basic rights of privacy and perhaps even constitutional rights." But whose was he talking about?

"What if an overwrought youngster disappointed by bad grades imagined it was the teacher's fault and struck out by accusing the teacher of advocating homosexuality?" Reagan's statement asked. "Innocent lives could be ruined..."

As opposed to not innocent lives of course. You hear time and again about some sort of libertarian streak that was supposed to exist in Ronald Reagan, but it's a myth. I was an active libertarian myself during the first years of his presidency (which in the end, helped to cure me of it) and it often frustrated me back then how he would borrow this and that from the political language of libertarians, like a bag lady tossing random stuff she picked up off the street into her shopping cart, without a care as to what any of it really meant. He was an actor-president, and the libertarians had good lines, so he stole them. (Like he stole that "I've paid for this microphone" line from Spencer Tracy.) Reagan was a died in the wool right wing extremist, who played the part of a jovial, humane, down-to-earth moderate conservative. People bought it, because he was good at it. But it was a hoax. His opposition to the Briggs initiative being a case in point. It wasn't the treat to individual liberties that moved Reagan, it was the threat to school discipline.

And Reagan wasn't the only public figure who saw it. If anything defeated the Briggs initiative, it was the growing realization that it threatened heterosexuals too. Grassroots gay activists, knowing from the Anita Bryant campaign that they couldn't win by appealing to fairness and the rights of gays and lesbians, hammered on this one point.

Briggs had crafted what he thought was a simple law that could ride the wave of anti-gay initiatives, begun just a year before with Anita Bryant's Dade County Florida crusade, and lift him to higher office. But like others of his kind, he overreached. "Public Homosexual Conduct" was sweepingly defined in the initiative as "advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting of private or public homosexual activity directed at, or likely to come to the attention of school children and/or other [school] employees". In his zeal to go after any and all traces of homosexuality in the public schools, Briggs went too far, even for his own party. But even before the initiative, his own party had a dislike for him.

Bigger guns came into fight the Briggs Initiative as well. Republicans had long been embarrassed by Briggs's antics in the state senate, so G.O.P. legislators lined up against Prop 6 in the hope that defeat might finally shut the senator up. Former Governor Ronald Reagan - who had promised to veto any decriminalization of gay sex during his eight year term as governor - went on record against Prop 6. observing "Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles." Briggs brushed off the rebuff, saying Reagan was part of "the whole Hollywood crowd." Gay insiders however, credited Reagan's help to the fact that he had no small number of gays among his top staff. [it was one of these deeply closeted gays who set up the meeting that is recorded in Out For Good] Former President Ford came out against the measure, saying it represented an unconservative expansion of state power. The Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of San Francisco took firm stands against the measure. Boards of Education throughout the state also voted opposition to the initiative, fretting over the considerable sums - an estimated $12,000 per teacher - it would take to hold the hearings the would determine whether teachers were guilty as charged. Many heterosexual teachers, meanwhile, promised to clog the school boards with hundreds of confessions that the had violated the "public homosexual conduct" clause...
-Randy Shilts, "The Mayor Of Castro Street", pg 243

Saying Reagan single handedly defeated the Briggs Initiative with a public declaration of his opposition, is of a piece with the claims that he single handedly won the cold war. It's bullshit. Saying that he did it out of a libertarian concern for individual rights and privacy is only piling it higher and deeper. It was nothing of the kind. You can say a lot of things about the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal California's sodomy laws while he was governor, but that he had the slightest concern with the rights and privacy of gay and lesbian Americans isn't one of them.

And what other governor who became president can we say that of?

It's often said of Reagan that he lived in his own fantasy world, and behaved as if the fantasy world was real, and the real one wasn't. True of the man...perhaps. But without a doubt it's true of his idolaters. Miller for one. And if Miller and his kind are pissed that those of us who aren't living in their fantasy world aren't paying their silver screen idol more respect, the reason is that the rest of us are fucking sick and tired of jackasses who think facts don't matter. Yeah, they do. You throw your support to a man who vows to keep the sodomy laws of his state on the books, and what do you know, he becomes president and he keeps right on swinging at gay and lesbian Americans. Next thing you know he's trying to add an amendment to the constitution prohibiting same sex couples from legally marrying. Even in states that say it's okay. Conservative principles? States rights? He's such a nice man...a good man...a friendly, decent man...he's no bigot...we can trust him...

Facts matter. Tens of thousands died under Ronald Reagan, who might not have under a president who really was the kind, decent, optimistic man he seemed. The legacy of decent man of the people George W. Bush may be the exile of gay and lesbian couples from the protections of the law for generations to come. None of that should be a surprise to anyone who looks...really looks...at their careers. Facts matter.

Saturday June 12, 2004

By Our Standards He Was A Great Man

Nebraska, the first state to write into its constitution, not only a ban on same sex marriage, but a ban on any legal recognition of same sex couples, civil unions, domestic partners or otherwise, whose governor, Mike Johanns, vetoed real estate reform legislation because it included language aimed at protecting gays from discrimination, may soon induct a leader in the "pervert purge" in the early 1950s who, along with McCarthy, cost thousands of homosexuals their government jobs, into its Hall of Fame.

Senator Kenneth Wherry was co-chair of a Senate subcommittee in 1950 that investigated the "employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government." There, during the McCarthy hysteria, he led the charge to purge homosexuals from the government. According to an article in Nebraska History magazine, titled 'Homo-Hunting' in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism, between seven to ten-thousand real or suspected homosexuals lost their jobs during the 1950s because of Wherry's crusade. This of course, makes Wherry Nebraska hall of fame material:

In a secret ballot, that turned out to be probably illegal, the Nebraska Hall of Fame commission voted to add Wherry to the Hall of Fame. The only public comment that was allowed on the Wherry nomination, was that of Wherry's nephew, Dan Wherry, who had nominated his uncle. Though there were people present who wanted to oppose the nomination the committed closed the meeting before they were allowed to speak.

The law is that at public meetings, votes must be conducted in public. So now the Hall of Fame committee is voting again. But of course, no public comments will be allowed.

At public meetings - including those of the commission - voting must be done in a roll call in open session, and a record of votes must be kept, the attorney general's opinion states. That's why the commission must vote again publicly, but it won't allow public comment again, [commission member] Sommer said Monday.

Public comment was allowed at the commission's April meeting, he said before declining to answer further questions.

Well...yeah...if you count only allowing the man who made the nomination in the first place to speak. Naturally all this fussing over a few thousand homosexuals who had their careers, and possibly their lives destroyed by the witch hunt, is distressing some of the commission members...

Commission member Mildred Curtis voted for Wherry. She is the widow of Nebraska Sen. Carl Curtis, a good friend of Wherry's. She says she is upset people in the homosexual community are upset.

"Considering it's been over 50 years," she said, "they should stop and think about the times and the culture that he was living.

Heaven forfend that she should. No point after all, in thinking about what those times were like for homosexuals, while she and her fellow Nebraskans are busy trying to bring them back. What the hell is so wrong with protecting gays from discrimination in home ownership, that an entire bill to reform the real estate laws had to be vetoed when a line protecting gay people from discrimination was added to it? Ah, for those good old days, when homosexuals didn't even think they had rights, let alone demand them.