gold-catalinarobayo: October 2010

Moderation In All Things, Including Moderation

No, I didn't go to Jon Stewart's party in Washington yesterday. For one thing, as I've already mentioned, I had a prior engagement. For another, what "sanity" does Stewart propose we restore? This country has always been batshit crazy. For yet another, Stewart early on called his project a "Million Moderate March," which leaves me out: I'm not a moderate, and that puts me in good company -- better company, I'm afraid, than Stewart.

I realize that Stewart's call for sanity may be as tinged with satire as Colbert's corresponding call for fear. But only tinged. (This morning I heard someone on NPR say piously that Stewart's closing "sincere moment" showed that satire can go beyond entertainment to have a serious meaning. Duh! Satire is supposed to have teeth, and sink them deep. If it doesn't, it's just mockery pretending to be satire.) That was shown by Stewart's early announcement (also quoted in the Times) that

The purpose, he said, is to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric. He tarred both parties with that charge, mentioning both the attacks on the right against President Obama for being everything from a socialist to un-American and on the left against former President Bush for being a war criminal.

Numerous people jumped on that last clause. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Stewart's exemplary extremes were bogus, citing a McClatchy story which reported that

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

(See also this post at the Comedy Central website, and notice the second comment under it, by an Administrator.)

But, well, maybe that Army general is an extremist. But any number can play that game. To wit: Some extremists say that George Bush should be sainted. Other extremists say he should be flayed alive with hot rakes and disembowelled publicly before being drawn and quartered. As a moderate, I say he should merely be hanged, as Saddam Hussein was hanged with his approval. If you disagree with me, you're the kind of extremist who has ruined political discourse in this country.

Actually, that whole paragraph from the Times was bogus, in the Car Talk sense of the word. What is laughingly known as political discourse is dominated by the corporate media, who by dint of owning the media infrastructure and spending large amounts of money get to define and occupy the Center. The extremists would be those who "reflexively" opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq, who want a single-payer health care payment system (or better yet, a National Health Service), who now oppose Obama's war in Afghanistan, who opposed the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bank bailout, who do not (contrary to recurring corporate media claims) worry about the deficit as much as they worry about jobs, and -- do a lot of yelling, but are mostly not heard except by ourselves. True, the corporate media have given disproportionate coverage and support to the Tea Party Extended tantrum, but that's because calls for "smaller" government, lower taxes for the rich, and the demolition of social services and the Commons, are part of the great Center. (Greenwald also showed that "Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP", not just in its fringes.)

I get weary when the Tea Party is treated as if it were something new in the US. Surely I'm not the only person old enough to remember the "New Right" that gave us Ronald Reagan in 1980, that considered William F. Buckley Jr. a liberal if not a leftist, that was going to sweep away liberalism like a tsunami, stop abortion absolutely, put prayer back in the schools, make us proud of our Flag again, end welfare, limit government, and roll back Communism?

The hysteria of the Democrats, who warn that a Republican victory in November will usher in a new Dark Age, is more than matched by the hysteria of the Republicans, who gleefully anticipate the new Age of Light that will bless the Fatherland when they supplant the Democrat scalawags and give America back to We the People. Just like they did in 1994!

So my right-wing acquaintance (that's RWA1) keeps linking to prematurely triumphalist articles in USA Today, plus the usual Obama ankle-biters from the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and National Review Online. (That WSJ article was mildly amusing. It was an attack on some Democratic house scribe who wanted to depict Barack Obama as a philosopher-president. I hope I needn't reiterate my own low opinion of Obama's intellect, but I'm old enough to remember [as is RWA1] when the Journal was trying to present Dan Quayle as a serious intellectual, a reader of Plato and Aristotle, full of gravitas. Or as Richard Nixon told the New York Times, "He's a very different man than the intellectual midget that has been portrayed in much of the media.… I think he's going to make an excellent Vice President, and I believe that he's going to be a popular Vice President just as soon as the people of this country see him as he is." Riiiight.)

RWA1 also linked to this WSJ story on the birth of the Tea Party Movement, "a good account," RWA1 said, "of the movement without the hysterical baggage in the partisan media." It's nice to have a non-hysterical account of a hysterical movement, I suppose, though Fox News is surely "partisan media" and has been highly supportive of the Teabaggers, as have the corporate media generally. (It happens that NPR's This American Life did a show on the Tea Party, very sympathetic and non-hysterical, just today.) RWA1, who also went berserk over the firing of Juan Williams by NPR, considers himself a sober conservative (but don't they all?), but he isn't that different from someone like Jon Stewart in wishing to see himself as the reasonable, rational middle. And truth be told, they are probably not as far apart politically as either would like to think.

Glenn Greenwald also pointed out something important that I've noticed too.

One other point about this fixation on the "tone" of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious -- much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity -- but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas. The same is true for war criminal John Yoo, who also appeared, with great politeness, on The Daily Show. Moreover, some acts are so destructive and wrong that they merit extreme condemnation (such as Bush's war crimes). I don't think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it's usually the ideas themselves -- not the tone used to express them -- that are the culprits.

I wrote about the acrimoniousness of American political discourse here, and about the way that liberals / moderates confuse calm tone with moderate substance here. And the firing of Juan Williams, which led to a lot of caterwauling in our political discourse, reminded me of a piece that the late Ellen Willis wrote for the Village Voice in 1990 when CBS' cracker-barrel philosopher Andy Rooney was suspended for making some stupidly vicious racist remarks -- but not for making stupidly vicious homophobic remarks. I haven't been able to find Willis's article on the Web, but her argument has stayed with me through the twenty years since. She argued that instead of suspending Rooney, CBS should have required him to have an on-air conversation -- debate, even -- with anti-racist and anti-homophobic writers and thinkers, to actually discuss the issues instead of merely suspending him and letting him make a typically empty apology for offending people. Willis recognized, of course, that such an exchange would never happen in the corporate media, who are dedicated to homogenizing, flattening out, and simply ignoring the issues the world faces. To address them would be, like, upsetting. Extreme. Better just to discuss Michelle Obama's shoulders, and complain for the thousandth time that the Democratic Party hasn't moved far enough to the Center.

[The photo at the head of this post comes from Roy Edroso's alicublog. I like the sign, which suggests that someone at the rally might have had irreverent thoughts about the undertaking. But the New York Times article I quoted above mentions that "Mr. Stewart also promised to supply the crowd with signs if they did not bring their own, including as examples, 'I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler,' and 'Take It Down a Notch for America.'" The sign in the photo seems like more of that, but I still like it. Some other signs can be seen at Band of Thebes.]

Moderation In All Things, Including Moderation

The purpose, he said, is to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric. He tarred both parties with that charge, mentioning both the attacks on the right against President Obama for being everything from a socialist to un-American and on the left against former President Bush for being a war criminal.

Numerous people jumped on that last clause. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Stewart's exemplary extremes were bogus, citing a McClatchy story which reported that

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

One other point about this fixation on the "tone" of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious -- much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity -- but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas. The same is true for war criminal John Yoo, who also appeared, with great politeness, on The Daily Show. Moreover, some acts are so destructive and wrong that they merit extreme condemnation (such as Bush's war crimes). I don't think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it's usually the ideas themselves -- not the tone used to express them -- that are the culprits.

Buzzword of the Day: "Historic"

I happened to have NPR's news report turned on just now, and it began with the newscaster saying that the Democrats face "historic losses" on Tuesday. Considering how often right-wing pundits and propagandists have been throwing around the word "historic" lately in connection with elections, that little word package grated on my nerves. C'mon, every election can't be historic. (Was the 2006 upset that put Democrats back in control of Congress "historic"? Kerry's defeat in 2004? Bush's theft of the election in 2000?)

And then toward the end of the short broadcast, the newscaster announced the death of longtime Democratic hack Theodore Sorenson, who, she said, helped John Fitzgerald Kennedy craft his "historic" inaugural speech. It was almost a rhyme, and an odd overuse of such a vacuous word in so short a time.

Buzzword of the Day: "Historic"

GDXJ Now Offers Long-Term LEAP Options

As if recent price action in the Gold price wasn't enough, there is now a tantalizing play on the Gold miners available for speculators in the junior Gold patch. Long term options (LEAPS) on the GDXJ ETF that expire in January of 2012 and January of 2013 are now available.

I remain a patient watcher of the Gold market and am still largely on the sidelines when it comes to Gold miners. On the next decent spike down in Gold stocks, however, I will be loading the boat with 2013 LEAP option calls on GDXJ. What's holding me back right now is the chart of the ratio of Gold to Gold stocks (using $HUI:$GOLD as a proxy) and what I believe is a short-term bottom forming in the U.S. Dollar. Here's a 10.5 year chart of the $HUI:$GOLD ratio thru Friday's close:

I think we are in correction mode in the Gold patch, just what's needed to cool the sector off a little. I think the next thrust up is going to be big in the Gold patch and I think Gold stocks are going to outperform. I am hoping a good opportunity to buy Gold stocks and more physical Gold presents itself before the year is over. I remain bearish on general stocks/the stock market, but am eagerly anticipating putting every penny of my speculative trading money into 2013 expiration bullish call options on GDXJ. I will be sure to post when I start buying.

Due to some new interests that will keep me busy for a while, posting will remain sporadic. I remain a rabid Gold bull for the long term. The Dow to Gold ratio will reach 2 (and may well go below 1) before the current secular Gold bull market is over.

How I Spent My Saturday Night

... working at the dorm Halloween Dance. This is something I've done for a good many years now, and it's not out of the kindness of my heart (I'll clear about $100 in overtime), but it's not drudgery either. I know the people (though not as well as I did in the past) and like them for the most part, and it is better than sitting at home slaving over a hot computer. The students do the decoration, setup and music; my job is to keep them supplied with lemonade and water, and do the cleanup afterward. The student organizers move the tables and chairs back into place, and I and one other worker do the rest. This is the dining hall, so it has to be ready to serve meals the next morning.

This year's theme was Sweeney Todd, as you can see.

And then we cleaned up and I went home and went to sleep. The end.

How I Spent My Saturday Night

This year's theme was Sweeney Todd, as you can see.

And then we cleaned up and I went home and went to sleep. The end.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Bruce Cumings's The Korean War again, page 196:

In the aftermath of the Chinese intervention, a staff conference with Generals Ridgway, Almond, and Coulter, and others in attendance, brought up the issue of the [North Korean] "enemy in civilian clothing." Someone at this conference said, "We cannot execute them but they can be shot before they become prisoners." To which General Coulter replied, "We just turn them over to the ROK's [the South Koreans] and they take care of them."

As Fred Kaplan put it more recently, in a bootlicking piece on the latest Wikileaks material at Slate:

Finally, the WikiLeaks documents offer abundant evidence that, while some American guards behaved horrendously toward Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi police and soldiers have behaved much worse.
The documents reveal several instances of U.S. soldiers witnessing Iraqi abuses. In some cases, they tried to stop the abuse, to no avail. In one case, a soldier reported an incident to his superior, who wrote on the report, "No investigation required."

That's a rather selective interpretation, apparently. Glenn Greenwald put it this way:

... a key revelation from these documents: namely, that the U.S. systematically and pursuant to official policy ignored widespread detainee abuse and torture by Iraqi police and military (up to and including murders). In fact, American conduct goes beyond mere indifference into active complicity, as The Guardian today reports that "fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks."

Similar things happened in Vietnam, too: just turn prisoners over to the locals, and "they take care of them." Though often enough we just preferred to do it ourselves, in both places.

("January 9, 1964: a South Vietnamese soldier uses the end of a dagger to beat a farmer for allegedly supplying government troops with inaccurate information about the movement of Viet Cong guerrillas in a village west of Saigon.")

Deja Vu All Over Again

Bruce Cumings's The Korean War again, page 196:

In the aftermath of the Chinese intervention, a staff conference with Generals Ridgway, Almond, and Coulter, and others in attendance, brought up the issue of the [North Korean] "enemy in civilian clothing." Someone at this conference said, "We cannot execute them but they can be shot before they become prisoners." To which General Coulter replied, "We just turn them over to the ROK's [the South Koreans] and they take care of them."

As Fred Kaplan put it more recently, in a bootlicking piece on the latest Wikileaks material at Slate:

Finally, the WikiLeaks documents offer abundant evidence that, while some American guards behaved horrendously toward Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi police and soldiers have behaved much worse.
The documents reveal several instances of U.S. soldiers witnessing Iraqi abuses. In some cases, they tried to stop the abuse, to no avail. In one case, a soldier reported an incident to his superior, who wrote on the report, "No investigation required."

That's a rather selective interpretation, apparently. Glenn Greenwald put it this way:

... a key revelation from these documents: namely, that the U.S. systematically and pursuant to official policy ignored widespread detainee abuse and torture by Iraqi police and military (up to and including murders). In fact, American conduct goes beyond mere indifference into active complicity, as The Guardian today reports that "fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks."

Similar things happened in Vietnam, too: just turn prisoners over to the locals, and "they take care of them." Though often enough we just preferred to do it ourselves, in both places.

American Exceptionalism -- The More It Changes ...

I'm reading Bruce Cumings's The Korean War: A History (The Modern Library, 2010), and will probably have some more to say about it as I go along. (If I don't get even further behind in my writing than I am already, that is.)

For now, though, I'm struck by the enduring inability of many educated Americans -- not what my RWA1 calls the "yahoos," but, y'know, real people! -- to recognize that people in other countries have interests of their own, just like we do. Cumings quotes several appalling bits from "the respected military editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin," writing during the war.

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about "women and children slain by American bombs," Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that "we do not come merely to bring devastation." Americans must convince "these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples ... that we -- not the Communists -- are their friends." Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:
The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident ... individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier ... to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare [26].

Bear in mind, first, that when Taylor wrote of "the individual Korean soldier", he meant the individual South Korean soldier more than the individual North soldier. I doubt he meant to exculpate the brutal Commies of their atrocities on the grounds that it was unrealistic to expect them to "follow our most elevated precepts of warfare."

Second, it was not the Koreans but the Americans who leveled the North at Douglas MacArthur's orders. "Soon George Barrett of The New York Times found 'a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war' in a village north of Anyang" [30], in a scene that echoes Pompeii, maybe intentionally:

The inhabitants through throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "betwitching bed jacket -- coral."

"Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of 'sensationalist reporting,' so it could be stopped."

But you know, Americans consider life cheap, as long as it's not American life. Individual lives are not valued so highly in American mores. As a result we can hardly expect the individual American soldier to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare ... You could transpose so much of these stories into contemporary Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they'd fit all too well.

American Exceptionalism -- The More It Changes ...

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about "women and children slain by American bombs," Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that "we do not come merely to bring devastation." Americans must convince "these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples ... that we -- not the Communists -- are their friends." Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:
The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident ... individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier ... to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare [26].

The inhabitants through throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "betwitching bed jacket -- coral."

New York court upholds California parentage judgment in surrogacy case

Surrogacy is illegal in New York (DC also!). That doesn't stop a New Yorker from going someplace where surrogacy is legal to have child. A gay male couple, DP and TR, did just that. They went to California, where a gestational mother became pregnant using a donor egg and semen from DP. Pursuant to a standard California practice, they went to court there, along with the surrogate and her husband, and obtained a pre-birth order naming DP and TR the parents of the twins about to be born. The children were born in August, 2001, and the names of both men appear as the parents on the birth certificates. The twins were born prematurely and hospitalized for over four months. During that time DP and TR relocated to California to be near them until they could be released to travel to New York.

At some point, the couple broke up, and DP filed for child support in New York Family Court. TR argued that, because surrogacy was against the public policy of New York, parentage deriving from the surrogacy arrangement should not be recognized in New York. On October 4, Magistrate Rachel Parisi rejected that argument. She noted first that there is no public policy exception to the enforcement of judgments from courts in other states. Therefore, the parentage judgment was entitled to Full Faith and Credit in New York. She independently relied on a 2005 ruling that New York statutes contemplate that a court will determine parental rights and responsibilities even when a child has been born from a surrogacy arrangement. (That's the law in DC as well; one of the first second parent adoptions granted in DC, in the early 1990s, was in the case of a gay male couple whose child was born in Virginia as a result of a surrogacy arrangement.)

DP's lawyer, Steven Weissman, is quoted in today's New York Law Journal as saying that the decision is significant for the number of New Yorkers who enter surrogacy arrangements elsewhere, and especially for gay male couples who often travel to California because pre-birth orders are available there.

The case underscores the importance of obtaining a court judgment (either of parentage or adoption) any time a same-sex couple is raising a child, even if they are married or in a registered relationship (civil union or domestic partnership). And even here in DC where both women in a lesbian couple are the legal parents of any child born to one of them using donor insemination. Parentage by virtue of a state statute may be challenged elsewhere. Parentage confirmed by a court judgment is entitled to Full Faith and Credit everywhere. I know I've said this often in this blog, but it bears repeating. What seems like a legal technicality, and what may be intimidating and expensive because it requires a lawyer and a court, turns out to be the only guarantee that a child planned as the child of two parents will have two legal parents forever.

Son of Elitism for the Masses

One of my right-wing acquaintances -- let's call him RWA1 to distinguish him from RWA2, though there's not much to distinguish them aside from a quarter-century in age -- just posted a Facebook Like to a National Review article called "Our So-called Experts," by one Jim Manzi. I was going to make a little joke to the effect that the so-called experts would be NR's -- that's the magazine that gave the world George Will and other great intellectuals -- but it was a bit too labored even for me.

So anyway, what have we got here? The topic is really climate change controversy and skepticism about global warming. Manzi claims that, although "public opinion in many major European democracies is surprisingly similar to that in the U.S.",

the U.S. political system is the only one that gives voice to this skepticism. After all, in a democracy, when 40–50+ percent of the population has an opinion on a topic of immense public importance, one of the parties will normally reflect this, if only to get votes.

Manzi sees "significant structural advantages for the non-elites in the U.S. versus the UK, two stand out: open primaries, and lack of membership in a supra-national organization like the E.U." Well, the US is also theoretically subject to "supra-national" constraints like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, and our "open primaries" don't work all that well in the long run at keeping "elites" (Manzi's word) from running things. "Of course," he quips, "the reply of a progressive to this observation is presumably: Bravo, the system is working as intended." "Presumably"?

Unfortunately I must agree that there is a lot of elitism among "progressives," but this doesn't distinguish them in any important way from "conservatives." Manzi, who is "the founder and chairman of an applied artificial intelligence software company... [and] a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute" (which I guess does make him one of NR's so-called experts!), links to an article he wrote for City in which he talks about the limitations of the social sciences in making testable predictions. For an opening example he mentions liberal economists like Paul Krugman and Obama's 2009 stimulus package to support his contention in the NR article that "the elites ... have such a terrible track record of producing social interventions that worked when subjected to rigorous testing." He might also have mentioned Reaganomics and its 1981 interventions that drove US unemployment up to Depression-era levels, a result from which the country has never really recovered. He might have mentioned the neoliberal policies, called Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, championed by Milton Friedman and other elites, which have generated huge corporate profits at terrible cost to most people. Or the deregulation policies, popular among elites of both parties, that brought the US economy crashing down in 2008. Of course, the reply of a conservative to this observation is presumably: Bravo, the system is working as intended.

Manzi might also have mentioned the opposition to genetically modified foods, which is much more widespread, organized and effective in Europe than the US. I don't know how public opinion on the matter compares, but I do know that US corporate elites blocked Congressional plans to require labeling of GM foods here. For our own good, of course.

Manzi quotes (and agrees with) William F. Buckley's disingenuous quip that he "would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty", and concludes: "Our so-called experts in public policy talk a good game, but in the end are no experts at all. They build castles of words, and call it knowledge." Would the elites at the National Review or my RWA1 approve of this claim if Manzi included right-wing "so-called experts"? I doubt it. I, on the other hand, have often expressed my own reservations about our so-called experts and my criticism of elitism. (As an old-fashioned gay liberationist, I'm wary not only of antigay experts but of gay ones.) I could also point to numerous writers on the left (or "cultural left") who've been critical of expertise and argued for more democratic controls on social policy, including that informed by "science." And c'mon, with its billionaire bankrollers and exaggerated numbers drawn from the losing side of the last elections, the Tea Party Extended Tantrum is an elite group itself.

Son of Elitism for the Masses

the U.S. political system is the only one that gives voice to this skepticism. After all, in a democracy, when 40–50+ percent of the population has an opinion on a topic of immense public importance, one of the parties will normally reflect this, if only to get votes.

Oh, If Only I Could Be Eighty Again!

I need to stop fooling around here and finish reading Queer Questions, Clear Answers so I can move on to something more interesting. So here's a video clip by the band Jive Grave.

JIVE GRAVE at rockwood music hall from Geo Wyeth on Vimeo.

I confess I found the bandleader Geo Wyeth at EastVillageBoys, a site that is one of my guilty -- well, not quite pleasures. Yes, I sometimes like to look at pictures of scantily- or un-clad skinny pretty boys (though the "overly friendly park employees" they encounter during their photo shoots interest me more), and the New York queer/art vibe that informs EVB has pointed me to artistes whom I feel I ought to know about, but can't ... quite ... muster ... much ... interest. If I were twenty instead of nearly sixty, would I connect better? I doubt it. Though I read the Voice, I never felt much desire to move to New York or the Village when I was a kid either. But I might just track down Jive Grave's music now that they've got a recording out.

I also liked the conclusion of the interview with Wyeth:

Cole: ... Moving on, when was the drunkest you’ve ever been?
Geo: My friend Keltie has a Bi Bim Bop birthday party every year where we do Karaoke in Korea Town and get Korean barbeque. It’s amazing, but they serve this drink called Soju that is basically grain alcohol (I think it’s literally used to clean the bar at night). Whatever, that is definitely the LAST time I got so drunk I couldn’t remember how drunk I got and I glazed over watching this very impressive girl sing Christian rock. The time before that was New Years Eve at the Grace Hotel, I ended the evening by taking off all my clothes, throwing down my accordion, and jumping in the hotel pool. Then I sliced my toe on a sliding shower door and limped bleeding to the train, but not before spitting in a cop’s face who was pushing around this ag butch dyke in the street - she took the train home with me and promised me courtside seats at a Knicks game (she works at Madison Square Garden).

A middlin' cute gay musician who wears a harmonica holder, drinks soju and goes to GLBT Die-Ins at Grand Central! Maybe we've made some progress after all.

Oh, If Only I Could Be Eighty Again!

I need to stop fooling around here and finish reading Queer Questions, Clear Answers so I can move on to something more interesting. So here's a video clip by the band Jive Grave.

JIVE GRAVE at rockwood music hall from Geo Wyeth on Vimeo.

Cole: ... Moving on, when was the drunkest you’ve ever been?
Geo: My friend Keltie has a Bi Bim Bop birthday party every year where we do Karaoke in Korea Town and get Korean barbeque. It’s amazing, but they serve this drink called Soju that is basically grain alcohol (I think it’s literally used to clean the bar at night). Whatever, that is definitely the LAST time I got so drunk I couldn’t remember how drunk I got and I glazed over watching this very impressive girl sing Christian rock. The time before that was New Years Eve at the Grace Hotel, I ended the evening by taking off all my clothes, throwing down my accordion, and jumping in the hotel pool. Then I sliced my toe on a sliding shower door and limped bleeding to the train, but not before spitting in a cop’s face who was pushing around this ag butch dyke in the street - she took the train home with me and promised me courtside seats at a Knicks game (she works at Madison Square Garden).

A middlin' cute gay musician who wears a harmonica holder, drinks soju and goes to GLBT Die-Ins at Grand Central! Maybe we've made some progress after all.

Oregon Tax Court ruling points the way towards compulsory marriage

Last month the Oregon Tax Court ruled on the constitutionality of an administrative rule allowing same-sex but not different-sex partners to exempt from state tax the imputed value of their domestic partner health insurance benefits.

The challenge was filed by Yvonne Haldeman, a taxpayer with an unmarried different-sex partner who, in 2007, tried to subtract $5313 from her gross income because that was the imputed value, for federal tax purposes, of the health insurance provided by her employer for her partner. (The details of her specific situation are in the opinion of a tax court magistrate who heard the case in 2008).

Haldeman argued that the rule violated the Oregon Constitution's privileges and immunities clause which "forbids inequality of privileges or immunities not available upon the same terms...to any class of citizens." She argued that the class of citizens of which she was a member was unmarried different-sex partners. The background for this issue is the 1998 Tanner case, in which the Oregon appeals court found it unconstitutional to grant health insurance benefits to the spouse of a married public employee but not to a same-sex partner who could not marry the employee. The Oregon Attorney General subsequently concluded that it would violate the state constitution to permit a spouse, but not a same-sex domestic partner, to subtract the value of the health insurance benefit from gross income for tax purposes. The administrative rule at issue defines "domestic partner" as someone under no legal disability to marry the other person but for the fact that each is the same sex and who would marry that person if Oregon law permitted it.

Haldeman argued that the class for purposes of constitutional analysis was unmarried different-sex partners vs unmarried same-sex partners. The Tax Court rejected this, specifically because the rule applied only to those same-sex partners who would marry if they could. Therefore, the Tax Court found the class to be married vs unmarried persons. Tanner found sexual orientation to be a suspect class. It also determined that immutability was not an absolute requirement for suspect class status; rather a class is suspect if its characteristics are "historically regarded as defining distinct, socially recognized groups that have been the subject of adverse social or political stereotyping or prejudice." The Tax Court then determined that marital status was not a suspect class and that neither single status nor marital status has resulted in routine targeting for adverse treatment over the years. The opinion states that Haldeman did not argue that her class had historically suffered prejudice or stereotyping. Rather she argued that the very rule she challenged put her through "adverse social and political prejudice," and the Tax Court disregarded this, stating that she "does not elaborate on this assertion, does not contribute any evidence of her assertion, and does not cite to any case law supporting an argument of mistreatment of unmarried persons."

As a result of the above, Haldeman was not in a suspect class. Applying the rational basis ("any conceivable state of facts") test, the Tax Court found that the rational basis was avoiding the litigation that would likely have followed after Tanner had the state continued to include the value of the benefit in the gross income of an employee with a same-sex domestic partner. The Tax Court did not adopt the reasoning of the magistrate in his 2008 ruling that "it was rational for the legislature to assume that the financial benefit inuring from the exemption provided an incentive for people to marry." Yet the reasoning it did use seems not credible to me. How can the purpose of a rule be avoiding litigation, as opposed to some substantive benefit provided by the rule? As it turned out, the rule did not avoid litigation; after all, Haldeman sued.

I applaud the Tax Court's implicit (unfortunately) rejection of promoting marriage as the legitimate interest furthered by the distinction in the rule. But I question the part of its reasoning that disregards precisely the prejudice and stereotyping that unmarried couples have historically suffered. Once immutability is not a prerequisite for determining a suspect class, there is a strong evidence of the longstanding prejudice against unmarried couples.

Of course this issue feeds into the argument I have been making over many years. The arguments for access to marriage for same-sex couples glorify marriage. They diverge from the arguments made in the past that marriage should not determine who gets benefits. In 2000, Lambda Legal filed a friend of the court brief in 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Milagros Irizarry, a heterosexual city employee denied access to domestic partner health benefits available to same-sex couples. Irizarry lost, but Lambda Legal entered the case even though gay and lesbian employees were receiving the benefits. Lambda Legal took a position against making marriage compulsory for straight couples. I doubt the organization would have assisted Yvonne Haldeman in her case in the Oregon Tax Court.

In fact, Lambda Legal is not representing the different-sex domestic partners who lost their benefits in Arizona. You could read all of Lambda's publicity about the case, Collins v. Brewer, without ever realizing that different-sex domestic partners were receiving benefits and that those benefits were also terminated. In fact, this Lambda press release describes Arizona's action as "eliminating health benefits for gay state employees" when all state employees lost their domestic partner benefits. The University of Arizona recently notified its employees that a court injunction issued in July does not prevent the termination of benefits to different-sex partners.

The fight for domestic partner benefits started in the 1980's as a fight against mandating marriage before an employee could protect the health of his or her family. All the early domestic partner benefits (think The Village Voice and Ben & Jerry's) were open to unmarried couples of any gender. A decade ago, Lambda Legal endorsed that position. Apparently it no longer does.

I'm reminded all the time by leaders in the marriage equality movement that they are fighting for the choice to marry. And I consistently reply that there is no "choice" when marriage is the only way to obtain economic protections for a family unit. Both Haldeman and Collins v. Brewer prove my point.

RENDEZVOUS.

Back in the game in full force now, we've got for you the first taste of our upcoming single with the dazzling Mr. Little Jeans, out next month on Neon Gold. A significant departure from the roaring guitars of debut single "Angel", "Rescue Song" is her most intimate track yet, all soft tones and wintry comforts as the Norwegian chanteuse draws the listener to safety with her gentle, honey-throated vocals. Not content to let listeners relax in the wistful breeze of the original, The Royal Palms arrive on the scene to rework the track into a slow-burning disco epic on what's quickly becoming one of our favorite remixes of the year. The opening stanza is all steady drums and triumphant synth builds that kind of make you feel invincible - like listening to hip-hop by yourself or that last shot of tequila - until they throw a serious curveball at you 3 minutes in when the track drops (literally drops) into a massive four to the floor club monster, flashing lights and howling synthesizers running wild across the mix.

MP3: "Rescue Song" (The Royal Palms Remix) - Mr. Little Jeans [exclusive]

California takes the initiative to meet the needs of LGBTQ youth in foster care

The vast majority of states are officially silent on the issue of both LGBT foster parents and LGBT children in the foster care system. We've gotten so used to opposing the states that ban LGBT foster and adoptive parents that we may sometimes forget the difference between permitting (perhaps grudgingly) and actually supporting and nurturing.

Well along comes California to show the way. Last week the state's Department of Social Services issued an "All County Information Notice" on the subject of serving LGBTQ youth, caregivers, and prospective foster and adoptive parents. Here is the most important part:

All children and youth are best served by professionals that understand and nurture their individual needs. The LGBTQ children and youth do not have unique needs. They do, however, have distinct experiences and stressors generated by society’s misunderstanding and biases. Public and private child welfare practitioners need to increase their understanding and tailor their services and supports in ways that respect these individuals’ experiences. As part of their work, child welfare and juvenile justice professionals also can work to assist birth families, relatives, other caregivers and community partners to understand, affirm and nurture LGBTQ youth.

From there the notice provides specific links to best practices.

The phrasing of the notice is both unusual and important. It is not LGBTQ youth who have special needs. But their experiences of bias and misunderstanding are stressful and so they need understanding, affirmance and nurture from all their caregivers, and they need support and services that recognize what their experiences actually are.

Bullying of young people who are gay or perceived to be gay has been in the news recently because of several suicides. If you go to the websites of anti-gay groups, they, of course, cannot support such bullying. They admit that bullying is bad and should be discouraged. They just don't want any attention paid specifically to bullying based on actual or perceived sexual orientation. Discourage all bullying, they say, and that's enough.

This California policy is such a welcome antidote to that mode of thinking. Foster care programs that are silent on the circumstances of the lives of LGBTQ youth will not meet the needs of those youth. They do need to have the bias and misunderstanding they face named as bias and misunderstanding. They do need to be affirmed. And that is precisely the response anti-gay groups oppose.

Kudos to California. I hope it becomes a model for other states.

Kid -- We Don't Like Your Kind

Back in the Sixties, in his epic Alice's Restaurant Massacree, Arlo Guthrie told how he'd been rejected for military service because of his criminal record -- for littering.

I went over to the sergeant, said, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."

Julian Assange of Wikileaks walked out of a CNN interview yesterday (h/t) when the interviewer insisted on asking questions about "internal disputes within Wikileaks" instead of the issues raised by the latest cache of documents released by Wikileaks last week, on the US war in Iraq, as he had evidently been led to believe it would be.

This exchange increases my admiration for Assange, who remains remarkably calm and rational. He puts the interviewer on the defensive immediately and keeps her there throughout. The interviewer's performance is contemptible; no doubt she was Just Following Orders, as we used to say, and CNN's treatment of these important issues is, as Assange says, completely disgusting. "I'm going to walk," he says calmly, "if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." And then he walks.

Also disgusting has been the conduct of the US government in response to these new documents. First there was the bogus claim, recycled from the release of the Afghanistan documents (via), that Assange and Wikileaks 'potentially have blood on their hands' because the documents put US personnel and local informants and collaborators at risk -- outrageously shameless coming from a government that is wading in the blood of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The claim about Afghanistan has been shown to be false, and so probably will be the current one about Iraq.

I imagine the CNN interviewer really felt as baffled by Assange's refusal to go along with her script as she claimed she was. CNN, like most American media, are basically tabloids, preferring to dodge issues in favor of personalities. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller describes at length how, after the third debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush in October 2000,

the "analysts" at CNN said not one word about the substance of the candidates' exchange but just kept harping on the general "statements" were putatively "trying" to make about themselves through their tone and body language.

Although a waste of time, the postdebate bull session was at least not strongly biased, nor was its anti-intellectualism too pronounced. On ABC there was a far more noxious session on the subject of the third debate.

This session, featuring Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will, "captures perfectly the the barbarous synergy between the right and TV news, each feigning populism for its own elitist purposes." Roberts complained that the issue debated by the candidates wasn't "the important point there. ... Because that's not what comes across when you're watching the debate. What comes across when you're watching the debate is this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak" [pages 68-69]. The irony of four Beltway media insiders denouncing Al Gore for being a Beltway insider, while delicious, was totally lost on Roberts. It's a reminder of how little facts matter, but personalities do matter, to the corporate media. The New York Times' hatchet job on accused leaker Bradley Manning is another reminder.

But even a lot of liberals and progressives distrust Assange and Wikileaks and are willing to focus more on Assange's personality than on US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Assange was accused (inaccurately, if not outright falsely) of rape in Sweden a couple of months ago, I remember some writer (on Salon, maybe? I can't find it) saying that maybe Assange just likes "rough" sex, as some aggressively intellectual or political men do, so maybe there was a misunderstanding between him and one of his partners. This writer had, if I recall correctly, no basis for the speculation that Assange likes "rough" sex; it was as if the writer was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the people who were trying to smear and discredit him, while technically asserting his quasi-innocence. I have no idea what kind of sex Assange likes, any more than I know what kind of sex, say, Dan Choi likes. I'm quite willing to investigate personally in both cases, but until I can do so, I prefer to refrain from irrelevant speculations.

It's also irrelevant whether Assange is "imperious," at one commenter claimed at Salon.com, linking to an article from Der Speigel. If he is, that would not diminish by even one the death toll of American and American-supported violence in Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not affect the value, for better or worse, of the documents Wikileaks has released. If Assange's motives or mental state should be subjected to such scrutiny, why not extend that scrutiny to Presidents Bush and Obama, their administrations, and their many apologists? Obama has told us at length about his father issues, in print. Why not use this information to analyze his relationship with, say, Hamid Karzai? Why not speculate about the psychic health of the Bloomberg reporters who wrote about cash from Iran being funneled to the Karzai regime but managed to avoid mentioning cash Karzai receives from the US, and reported with straight faces a State Department spokesman's rebuke that "Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government"? Oh no, only the US is allowed to interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government. But I'm being facetious.

I imagine there's a lot of stress at Wikileaks these days. The US government, along with others, will try to exploit it. It's standard operating procedure to try to discredit dissidents by calling them crazy, delusional, paranoid. But no one should fall for their game.

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