Dancing with Myself

Republican Romney criticizes Obama on abortion, and other tidbits to chew on

What an asshole.  Romney I mean.  Obama still gets a pass for now.

I'm not too thrilled about making nice with the Republicans who immediately pissed all over his shoes with the bailout bill, but he and his people have shown a lot of smarts these past two years, so I figure he's got a plan.

This THIS is complete and utter bullshit!  If your bank needed $50 Billion to keep from going bankrupt, nobody in the fucking place deserves a bonus.  NOBODY!

On a slightly different note, one of our great ones died this week:  John Updike.  Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle eulogizes the great man in today's Chronicle.

And call me old-fashioned, but 14 kids is way too many.  What kind of person takes a chance on having 8 children at once when she already has 6?  This woman is sick, and her doctor should be questioned by his peers. 

And now I'm going to go drink Liberally with a few friends. 

Jon Stewart on Fox News

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Fox News Fear Imbalance

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Say it loud, say it proud: President Barack Obama!

Already the change is palpable.  This from the White House website:

Support for the LGBT Community

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

-- Barack Obama, June 1, 2007

• Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported and made up more than 15 percent of such crimes. President Obama cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability. As a state senator, President Obama passed tough legislation that made hate crimes and conspiracy to commit them against the law.
• Fight Workplace Discrimination: President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees' domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. The President also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
• Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.
• Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage: President Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.
• Repeal Don't Ask-Don't Tell: President Obama agrees with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and other military experts that we need to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited. The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Additionally, more than 300 language experts have been fired under this policy, including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. The President will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.
• Expand Adoption Rights: President Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.
• Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.
• Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.

The Feast of St. Martin

Monday is the holiday dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr.  I'm not sure it has ever resonated in our cultural  identity as much as it does this year.  Dr. King's faith in America is going to be realized with the swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America.  Hallelujah!

Obama was not my first choice for the Democratic Party's nominee.  My favorite fell to the wayside early on.  I started the campaign not liking Hillary all that much, but by the time it ended, I liked her just fine.  She got better towards the end of the campaign.  So did Barack.  I always considered Obama too establishmentarian for my tastes.  I'm quite sure I never bought into his "change" meme.  I thought he was far too clever in his avoidance of the most important issue affecting my life -- Prop. 8.  I heard it mentioned several times that he was against Prop. 8, but I never heard him say it.  What I did hear him say was that marriage is between a man and a woman.  When Obama accepted Warren's invitation to speak to his church kinda sorta at the same time as McCain, Obama gave the Yes of 8 folks that nice little sound bite which they used against us, just as we all knew it would.  I don't doubt Obama was against Prop. 8.  I just wish I could have heard him say it himself.

Does anyone doubt that there would be no Obama if there hadn't been a King?  Dr. King saw the possibilities of the American dream even in the darkest moments of personal despair.  When he marched in Selma, he believed he had as much power to knock down the barriers of racial hatred as Joshua did at Jericho when he brought the walls down with his trumpets.  He had faith.  The power of his faith kept hope glowing in the hearts and souls of millions of people. 

So this Monday I am celebrating the Feast of St. Martin's with friends.  There is a soul food potluck at the Eagle in San Francisco and also food for the soul as my friend Fundi performs selections from his book, Moving on the Road to a Man-Song Sanctuary, available at Books, Inc. and Anarchist Books, as well as Amazon.com., and if I can ever figure out how to edit his performance at the Mix last Tuesday, I'll have a YouTube video up for your enjoyment.

Thank you, St. Martin, for helping us to keep faith.

An Auspicious Year

Coming out of BART this morning, I noticed a very long line of people along the side of the now empty Federal building at the United Nations Plaza.  The first thing I noticed about the line, after first noticing it because of its length, I determined that everyone in the line was Asian, mostly Chinese and Vietnamese.  I asked one of the vendors selling vegetables what the line was for.  Live chickens, he told me, and then I noticed a truck with this load.

I've lived in San Francisco for 30 years.  I've worked next to this Farmers Market for most of those 30 years.  I have never seen people line up for live chickens in this great a number.  Periodically animal rights activists find out that the Chinese often buy their dinner while its still alive, be it a chicken or a fish, and totally freak out and demand the city close them down.  I guess they (the animal rights activists) are okay with animals being butchered at meat factories.  Buying chicken at Safeway is so clean and anticeptic.  I'm willing to bet that if everyone did have to kill their own chickens, we'd eat it a lot less often.  A friend tells me this story about an old Chinese woman attempting to get on a Muni bus with a live chicken, but was stopped by the driver who said, "You can't bring a live chicken on this bus."  So she stepped off the bus, wrung the chicken's neck, and got back on the bus saying, "It not live now.  It dead." 

Anyways, I digress.

There was also a smaller truck selling pheasants.  There is a gruesome procedure performed on the pheasants.  Before putting the live pheasant into a paper bag, the beak is cut off.  I guess pheasants fight back a little more than chickens. 

But like I was saying, in 30 years I've never seen people line up like that for live chickens.  I immediately went to a friend at work and asked about it.  He explained to me that the Chinese New Year begins January 26.  This will be the Year of the Ox, and the Chinese are hedging their bets by beginning this new year by slaying the fatted calf, only poultry is substituted for the calf. 

There was a cartoon in the S.F. Chronicle last week depicting a conflicted guy who was half Chinese, half Jewish.  He was confused having three new year's to celebrate.  Gung hay fat choy, y'all.

Checking In from Checking Out

I pay $4.95 a month for the privilege of not blogging on any sort of regular basis at this blog address.  If I'm not going to be any more serious than that, I'm wasting my money.  With that in mind, I'm going to  be migrating back to my original blog address using Blogger.  When I switched four or so years ago, Typepad had certain features not available on Blogger, but now the situation is switched and you can actually do more on Blogger than Typepad.  I have three other blogs on Blogger, so I'm comfortable going home, so to speak. 

Of my several blogs, the one which has given me the most satisfaction has been My Mother's People.  Check it out.  I recently uploaded my first YouTube video.  It's a slide show of family pictures set to the music of Hershel Frazier, one of my distant cousins.  He wrote a song called "I'm a Redbone."  It's as hokey and country as they come, and I am so very proud of it, of Hershel, of my family, and of the success of our efforts to build positive associations around the word Redbone.  Anyways, check it out.

In my California reality, I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, just like the rest of the word, waiting and watching and hoping as Barack Obama becomes President.  The closer he gets to the job, the more ridiculous the current President looks.  What an idiot.  Isn't it a shame the way Bush-Cheney and their Republican fellow travelers have totally screwed us these past eight years?  AND NOBODY'S GOING TO FUCKING JAIL!    I'm as embarrassed as I am ashamed.  We allowed them to duck responsibility for 911 happening on their watch.  We allowed them to wage an unnecessary war in Iraq which caused untold misery on the Iraqi people, not to mention putting us into half-a-trillion dollars in debt, just as the world's economy went to hell in a hand basket.  AND NOBODY'S GOING TO JAIL!   What's up with that?

Good luck, Mr. President-Elect.  I should warn you, however, that the Republican Party is a collection of scumbags who really, really want to see you fail.  They would rather see the country disintegrate than to see you succeed.  Trust me on this one:  they're a bunch of fucking creeps.  Also watch your back because the Democrats aren't much better. 

Anyone suffering from the recession?  I have a few friends who are newly unemployed.  My employer asked us to take a voluntary unpaid furlough day each month for the next six months, but if California doesn't get it's financial house in order -- I may find myself working for I.O.U.'s.  I'm not sure if my bank will "loan" me the money to pay my mortgage, utilities, taxes, etc.  Once before we were paid with I.O.U.'s and some banks "cashed" them, so to speak, but that was back in the day when bank's routinely extended credit to the state, knowing they were good for it and all.  Now, who knows?

We are all in this together.  Obama gets that.  What a relief after eight years of assholes like Bush and Cheney.   Still, you know what I find absolutely incredulous?  Knowing what we know about Bush and his cronies, our Democratically controlled Congress immediately gave a TRILLION dollars to Bush crony, Sec. of the Treasurer Paulson just because he jumped up and down and said the sky was falling!  And we didn't even tell the son-of-a-bitch to save his receipts, and have stupidly accepted his disclaimer that he didn't even keep the canceled checks. 

God save us.  Don't count on it though.  I have it on good authority that God is an overweight Black Lesbian who is totally pissed off at us.

Happy New Year!

So much happened in 2008.  So much, in fact, that I needed some help in digesting it all.  That is until a friend sent me this YouTube video wherein Uncle Jay explains it all.