Today's Cultural Warfare Update

Starting next week, it's pretty likely that these will get fewer and further between; it'll depend upon how my classload really ends up working out, but the odds are good that I'll be stepping back a bit from the three-days-a-week posting schedule. It's not that it's gotten less important, and I will continue to monitor this stuff - but I might have fewer posts. Between this and classes, classes come first.

Or maybe everything will work out fine and I won't have to cut back on anything. We'll see!

And now, today's news.

Faith and Freedom network continues to savage Tim Eyman, blaming him for the failure of Referendum 65, making accusations of incompetence, of failure to live up to agreements, and blaming him for associating Referendum 65 with lesbian and gay marriage rights, something they did at every opportunity on their own website; they also attack him for using the "no quotas" language that fundamentalists used constantly in six (failed) anti-gay initiatives in Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho in the 1990s;

Joseph Fuiten (of FFN) makes his own run at Tim Eyman, attacking his ethics and his motives;

Republicans Rep. Todd Akin, Sen. John Kyl, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan introduce bill to prohibit courts from hearing Pledge of Allegiance cases; includes ACTION ITEM to get your legislators to co-sponsour it;

Focus on the Family reports on abortion-ban efforts at the state level; they want more South Dakota comprehensive bans; includes a fairly generic ACTION ITEM to support state bans;

CBS hopes to call bullshit on fundamentalist mass complaint campaigns against "indecency," saying people who didn't actually see an item in question shouldn't have their complaints counted; they're specifically referring to ACTION ITEM-generated mass complaint bombs against a couple of their programmes, and note that there were no actual complaints from actual viewers of the programmes in question;

Iowa Republican makes Focus on the Family happy by introducing (and getting approved in committee) an amendment specifically barring funds to a Los Angeles GBLT centre; they do things like provide services to the elderly and addiction recovery services, but since it's queer-targeted, that's enough for FotF to be "relieved" that they got written in as a specifically prohibited organisation;

FotF hopes the Episcopal church USA will ban future GBLT bishops;

Focus: "Sex-Ed Advocates Tell Congress to Abandon Abstinence Ed"; I mostly include this one because of the subtitle, which I quote here: "Democrats introduce a bill to cut funding for purity";

FotF loves Ann Coulter's new book, Godless, which pretty much endorses the "God vs. Satan" approach to US politics - basically prints her version of their line; I imagine they particularly like her condemnation of evolutionary theory and her grouping of marriage rights with genocide and sex with animals;

FotF condemns breast cancer groups for supporting breast cancer detection done at Planned Parenthood clinics, bring up the old bullshit that abortion causes breast cancer;

FotF upset that churches are being told not to violate nonprofit law in political campaigning;

South Carolina passes biology standards requiring schools to "teach the controversy," which generally consists of using "intelligent design" and creationist bullshit attacks on evolutionary theory as discredit attacks, regardless of their validity;

Concerned Women for America's Jan LaRue writes condemning the Senate for not voting to pass the anti-marriage amendment;

CWA: Vote in all of President Bush's judicial nominees right now;

CWA's Robert Knight condemns the Senate for not passing the anti-marriage amendment, particularly attacking Democrats;

CWA endorses, pushes the so-called "Pledge Protection Act" to remove challenges to it from the scope of Federal courts;

CWA quoted in townhall.com article pushing judges as the only important thing for the rest of the Senate year;

Family Research Council joins in the "judges uber alles" chorus;

American Family Association pushes lesbian and gay adoption bans;

Virginia lesbian drops anti-gay discrimination complaint against videotape duplicating company; now the anti-gay Liberty Council is suing to have the county ordinance declared to be unconstitutional, claiming the state does allow counties to pass GBLT anti-discrimination ordinances;

LifeSite applauds Poland for firing a teacher after he distributed copies of Compass: a manual on human rights education with young people which included talk about GBLT equality; there is also now discussion of banning the book; LifeSite is thrilled; includes ACTION ITEM to support the Polish actions;

James Dobson: Not banning GBLT marriage is "unconscionable";

Colombian Senate passes limited GBLT partnership law; LifeSite is, of course, pissed;

TVC is also on the "Pledge Protection Act" bandwagon;

Focus on the Family Canada starts pushing abstinence-only education, tho' they're not calling it that in Canada;

FotF Canada decries allowing a married lesbian couple to be both listed as a child's mothers;

Canada Family Action Coalition condemns allowing a married lesbian couple to both be listed as a child's mothers;

Focus on the Family Canada: Religion and State need each other, should be intermingled, not separated.

( Articles and excerpts below )

Oh yeah

Young FrankenSteve. CLICKIE!

Running out of home equity, Americans return to credit card use to fuel spending. Fun!

I made a couple more icons, kind of on a whim. One for ysabel:

I'm HARDCORE!

And one for me!

THAT was most unpleasant

I still need one for when I feel like I'm lecturing. I can totally picture the Molly icon I want for it in my head, but unfortunately, they haven't shown any animation with the right pose yet. Dammit!

referral to longer writing

In early April, the Burke-Gilman trail got partly covered in a landslide! It wasn't all that much mass, fortunately, but it took a bit of cleaning up by the city. I didn't get pictures right away, but I took these later in the month:


Hillside--;


One of Many Little Caverns
I don't know if those little caverns were part of the cause, if those filled up with water and eventually the whole thing gave, or what. But there were a bunch of them. Of course, right as I was taking those, the camera batteries said "nuh-UH!" And now it's already kind of overgrown, so that's what you get.

Today's (Thursday's) miles: 2.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 897
Miles out of Rivendell: 437.2
Miles to Lothlórien: 29.2

Over on her LJ, firni asked a reasonable question about real estate valuation prospects and the "housing bubble" over on her journal. My reply got kinda, um, long. Long enough that I'm pointing to it; it's about 1500 words, the length of my medium-sized articles for Microsoft. One of the interesting things about it that brought it back into mind today is this commentary today which contains relevant data on the timing of the slowdown in house paper valuations and the surge to revolving credit debt which started up in April. It's too early to call that a trend, but the numbers there certainly seem to line up well with the numbers here, in this separate report.

Meanwhile, Minyanville has some very interesting speculation about a wave of 1990s Japanese-style deflation. I don't think I see how we get there from here - not yet - but savers would do well in that environment.

Taken on Goat Trail Road, on the way to the shops, at the end of April:


Yellow Shaggy