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Alas,
I'm boycotting the mayor's event tonight
by
IseFire
- Wed 06/23/04; 8:33 pm EST
I was
invited to Mayor Bloomberg's gay & lesbian pride event this
evening. But, I sadly joined a boycott of the event. Tomorrow's
newspapers--or tomorrow's gossip mill, at any rate--will reveal
just how many invitees stayed away.
Bloomy is hardly a Republican's Republican. He was a registered
Democrat until just before he announced his mayoral candidacy. He
said at the time that he would have run as a Democrat, but the party
machine doesn't reward non-machine players, which is 100% correct.
His administration annually publishes a report on how Bush administration
policies hurt NYC. (Ryan Lizza, "Bush to New York: Here's Your
$20 Billion—Now Drop Dead," New
York Magazine.) And just last week, Bloomberg
yanked
the invite of Congressman Bob "Freedom Fries"
Ney (R-OH) to a GOP event, to be in part in Ney's honor, at Bloomy's
home, because Ney idiotically voted against shifting $446 million
in homeland security funds to high-risk cities like New York.
But on June 3, Bloomy vetoed the City Council’s Equal Benefits
Bill, which would have required city contractors to provide domestic
partner benefits. (Such legislation became law in San Francisco
on June 1, 1997.) Worse yet, in 2001, Bloomy had promised that as
mayor he would sign such legislation. Upon signing the veto
he wrote to the city's clerk: “I encourage all companies”
to provide domestic partner benefits. His own company, Bloomberg,
founded in 1981, was a pioneer in offering domestic partner benefits
to its employees, and a key policy advisor in Bloomy's 2001 campaign
was an out gay man, Jonathan
Capehart, an acquaintance of mine and Pulitzer prize-winning
journalist who has since returned to the New York Daily News.
I'm genuinely sad that I wasn't able to go to this event, but as
a message needed to be sent to an enemy of commonsense, Bob Ney,
so--unfortunately--does one now need to be sent to usually gay-friendly
Michael Bloomberg.
It
came from David Brooks!
by
IseFire
- Tues 06/22/04; 11:03 pm EST
David
Brooks just publicity gave John Kerry some
winning insights that could help him beat Bush. Brooks'
column in The New York Times is a must-read, even though
not all of it is on-the-mark. Much of it is.
You will read it.... But will anyone who matters in Kerry's campaign?
This passage is one of the best. It is prescient, perhaps.
Just
as Republicans have to appeal to religious conservatives but move
beyond them, Democrats have to appeal to the secular left but
also build a bridge to religious moderates. Bill Clinton did this.
John Kerry hasn't.
Brooks
understands that Kerry is heading for disaster unless he adjusts
his course. Specifically--and Brooks doesn't say this exactly--Kerry
must begin to demonstrate that he is a person of convictions, not
just a wonk. More to the heart of Brooks' advice: Kerry also needs
to echo, if he can do it genuinely, what has become the distinctly
religious nomenclature of the majority of voting America.
Brooks has seemingly given up the game.
Is
Brooks 1) a closet liberal, 2) a conservative who knows Bush is
bad news and wants Kerry to win, or 3) a conservative who knows
Kerry will ignore his advice anyway, so it matter what he writes
in The New York Times?
What I have long expected to read articulated by a liberal
commentator, or to hear on Air America Radio, or to read on major
progressive blogs; what I attempted to articulate to Wesley Clark's
campaign because I thought Wes could understand the nexus between
religion and the electorate (and because I fear Kerry can't), and
what, for years, I have endlessly stressed here in NYC (as a Midwesterner)
to political associates (raised in the urban East Coast, clueless
about the US west of the Hudson), I have finally encountered. And
not from the Left but from the Right. From Brooks!
There will be more here on politics and religion in the near future.
In the meantime, please read Brooks' column.
The
decline of reason
- part I
by
IseFire
- Mon 06/21/04; 7:33 am EST
Today,
presidential candidate John Kerry rightly said that the Bush administration
places "politics over science," citing the administration's
unreasonable and unscientific rejection of stem cell research. He
might also have cited Bush's opinion that "the verdict's still
out" on whether or not evolution
is true. (True? Gee, I don't know. Is gravity true?)
In
rebuttal to Kerry, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said,
"Only John Kerry would declare the country to be in scientific
decline on a day when the country's first privately funded space
trip is successfully completed."
Schmidt's
monumental disingenuousness is odious. Note, Schmidt: "privately-funded!"
What happened today is not primarily an advance of science, but
of commercialism. Kerry is talking about government funding,
and, by extension, governmental respect for scientific thought itself.
A U.S. spaceship might fly all the way to Venus while the population
of its nation of origin still is brainwashed by religion to reject
natural history, evolutionary science, paleontology, genetics and
more, with profound negative effects on medical science and our
self-awareness as a species.
Kerry
can be criticized only for his understatement. What Bush is really
opposed to isn't just science, but the entire Enlightenment tradition
of our nation's Founders, who valued reason above faith,
who even when invoking a clockmaker
God, had their eyes firmly focused on humanity and the individual,
not the divine, and who developed our republic based on humanist,
not religious, values.
But now the ill-informed beliefs of a growing number of Americans--a
huge segment of our current president's base--threaten those values.
Stork
for Congress
by
IseFire
- Sun 06/20/04; 2:11 pm EST
Jim
Stork, a small businessman and former mayor, is making
an historic run for Congress in South Florida. The Religious Right
is expected to launch vicious personal attacks against him. Please
go to his website
and make a contribution. End your contribution amount with $.07
so it can be traced to Isebrand.com. Thanks!
What's
known in the trade as 'getting it wrong'
by
IseFire
- Sun 06/20/04; 9:48 am EST
Club
Shrub got it all wrong about Iraq: wrong about Iraq having weapons
of mass destruction; wrong about Iraq having Al Qaeda ties.
Yet
for their dangerously wrong statements, which they used to lead
Americans into a pre-emptive invasion of another country posing
no
imminent threat, they've suffered nothing. Americans
seem uninterested in holding their leaders responsible for having
wasted:
*840
U.S. soldiers,
*$118 billion
dollars,
*untold hours of labor on research and intelligence,
*immeasurable amounts of material, and
*the goodwill of a world without whose cooperation we cannot stop
future terrorist attacks.
"We
have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September
attacks." - George
W. Bush, September 17, 2003.
"I
don't think they existed." David Kay, leader
of the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, on the day he
stepped down from his post, January 23, 2004.
"We
have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated."
- Report (Staff Statement 15) of the 9/11 Commission, June 16, 2004.
Republicans
for Kerry
by
IseFire
- Sat 06/19/04; 6:39 pm EST
www.republicansforkerry.org
Arthur
C. Clarke couldn't have written it better
by
IseFire
- Sat 06/19/04; 12:00 am EST
In
the light of the murder of Paul M. Johnson by religious fanatics
in the brutally anti-democratic
kingdom of Saudi Arabia--our supposed ally, or so Dubya Bush would
have us believe--I welcome this story from the Associated Press,
"Astronaut
Hears Daughter Born From Orbit," about astronaut
Mike Fincke.
Science, not prayer, made it possible for Fincke to be in the heavens,
and yet to hear his child born....But into what sort of world? We
should all strive to ensure that Tarali Paulina Fincke's world is
rich with science and poor with religion.
Good comments on religion and 9/11 by Richard Dawkins, professor
of the public understanding of science, University of Oxford:
I
felt a savage anger, and an instant bonding with America. For
all its faults, the USA is a major centre of world civilisation,
in some ways (admittedly not many) the greatest there has ever
been. It was under attack from a pre-medieval barbarism, incapable
of developing advanced technology but happy to parasitise the
technology of the very society it enviously wanted to destroy
with it.
My
first thought was: "Religion strikes again." And so
it proved (when Mohammed Atta's notebook was published). It's
possible for political fanaticism alone to drive people to suicide
attacks, but it's hard. Religion makes it easy because, to the
deluded perpetrators, it isn't suicide at all. It's a wonder that
human bombs, such as those that terrorise Israel, aren't more
common. Perhaps they soon will be in America. And here, if Blair
goes on playing poodle to Bush.
I
was moved by the heroism of the New York firemen; by the faces
of the bereaved; the agonising slow fall of tiny human forms;
the inspirational, hands-on leadership of Mayor Giuliani –
and the embarrassing contrast with President Bush, who spent the
day zig-zagging aimlessly around the country in his private plane,
like a squawking chicken. In the days that followed, my solidarity
with America took a battering as the Bush tendency muscled in,
the nauseating 'God bless America' became the unofficial national
anthem.
I
thought that the defeat of the odious Taliban was handled surprisingly
well. But George Bush's identification of all trouble with a single
abstract noun – 'terror' – is characteristically silly.
The main way I have changed is in my attitude to religion. I used
to think religion was harmless nonsense, entitled to at least
some respect. I'd now drop the 'harmless'. And the last vestige
of respect.
French
investigating Halliburton
by
IseFire
- Fri 06/18/04; 7:41 pm EST
The
French are investigating
possible bribery of the Nigerian government by Halliburton while
Dick Cheney its CEO.
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