How I did

Let's see how I did with my predictions:

(1) Obama did win with 300+ electoral votes--and he won all the state I said he would.  Didn't get North Carolina.  I was right about the attempted voter suppression but Obama's victory was too big to be derailed by Republican criminal voter suppression. 

(2) The Democrats did great in the Senate, increasing their majority by two seats.  Akin and Mourdoch were crushed.  Hooray!  Wisconsin elected the first out lesbian senator--Tammy Baldwin.

(3) The Democrats did increase their membership in the House but fell well short of a majority.  I was off there.  Alas, Michele Bachmann and Steve King won.  But don't despair:  the nutcases Allen West and Joe Walsh were defeated.  New gay members were elected; present gay members were re-elected.  This is a triumph for gay people.

(4) All the gay marriage ballot measures won.  Gay marriage is now legal in Maine, Maryland, and Washington.  In 2009 Maine voted to overturn gay marriage law--a bitter defeat for gays. But decent people in Maine fought back and three years later they've won.  Hooray!  I was wrong about Maryland:  the victory was big!  And that victory is due in large part to Barack Obama publicly supporting gay marriage.  He changed the game among black voters.  Thank you, sir.  All measures carried with clear majorities that parallel the national majority now favoring gay marriage.  Gay marriage and marriage equality are now mainstream American politics.  The proposed anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendment in Minnesota failed by a clear majority.  Forty years of anti-gay hate mongering in that state have been utterly defeated.  This is a truly sweet victory.  And there's great news in Iowa.  State supreme court justice Wiggins was retained after a vicious, slanderous attack on him because he voted for gay marriage equality three years ago.  Further, the state senate remains Democratic; majority leader Mike Gronstal refused to present to the senate a Republican state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; he's still majority leader and he's sworn never to present such an amendment to the senate while he remains leader.  Gay marriage in Iowa is now secure.

I think I did pretty well.  I quit listening to the barrage of news media and blogger BS in the last month of the campaign.  All that blather about Romney's momentum was absurd; the polls reflected nothing of the sort.  The TV pundits are know-nothings; same for political bloggers. Why anyone cares what they think is beyond me.  The national polling was off; Obama won a clear majority of votes; there was no deadlock or tie. The battleground states polling was spot on: Obama was always ahead in those states and always had a winning electoral vote count. The polls told anybody who wanted to see that Romney was trapped inside his base of the Old Confederacy and couldn't find a way out.  He was NEVER a viable national candidate.

This has been the watershed year for gay Americans.  We're now mainstream citizens, no longer fringe or freak or marginal.  We're a mainstream part of the only truly national party, the Democrat Party.  The cause of marriage equality is now mainstream politics.  Anti-gay is losing politics.  Period.  I remember the dark days of 1977 when the hate campaign against gay people was raging across America. We were aliens in our own country.  The religious right wingers have used anti-gay hate for 40+ years.  They've done enormous damage to gay people and to the country in general.  They've divided communities and families--all for raw political power and nothing else.  Their time has come and gone.  It's a new day for gay people in America. 

We persevered, we fought back, and now we've won. How's that for the American dream come true? 

Here are my predictions

For the record:

(1) Obama wins with 300+ electoral votes.  He wins Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.  Maybe North Carolina.  This despite some pretty astounding vote suppression shenanigans on election day.

(2) Democrats increase their numbers in the Senate by 1 or 2 seats.  They win Indiana.  We get the first lesbian senator in Wisconsin.  Akin goes down the crapper.

(3) Democrats increase their numbers in the House but fall just short of a majority. Michele Bachmann is defeated.  Steve King in Iowa is defeated.  Tea Party kooks get clobbered.

(4) Marriage equality wins in Washington state (big margin), Maine (big margin), and Maryland (narrow margin). The anti-gay constitutional amendment in Minnesota just barely fails by a few hundred votes.  Democrats keep control of the Iowa state senate and thus prevent Republicans from pushing an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment through the legislature.  Iowa Supreme Court Justice Wiggins is retained.  2012 becomes the watershed year in the struggle for gay equality.  From here on the anti-gay forces get chewed up and spat out.  They're finished as a political force.

(5) The Republican Party ceases to exist as a national party and becomes a collection of regional factions with irreconcilable differences.  The 44-year-old Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon--wedge issue race-baiting and inflaming the racial hatred of angry white males--dies an ignoble death.  Leaderless, agenda-less Republicans descend into intra-party civil war.

You read it here first.  Cross your fingers.

Who's ahead?

Are you getting frustrated with the deluge of polls--national and local?  I am.  I've really just about had enough of these ridiculous polls that claim Romney is ahead by .7% or Obama is ahead by .6% with a error margin of +/- 3%.  Hello?  Nobody can know who is ahead when the tallies for both candidates fall withing the margin of error.  The margin of error is the "we can't tell" zone of a poll.  All you can properly say is that both candidates are statistically tied. 

If Smith tallies 47% and Jones tallies 46% and the margin of error is +/- 4.5%, Smith is NOT ahead of Jones; neither is Jones trailing Smith.  The only proper interpretation to be made is that Smith and Jones are statistically tied.  You can't claim an accuracy finer grained and more detailed than that which the polling results permit.  If you do, then you're a fool because there's simply no statistical basis on which to make that claim.  The uncertainty (otherwise known as the margin for error) simply won't let you make such a precise claim.  Imprecision rules.

Right now in the battleground states Obama and Romney are in statistical ties in many races, like Ohio.  No possible poll can tell you who is "ahead" (whatever that may mean).  People who claim otherwise--like bloggers and other internet bloviators--are idiots.  They don't understand elementary statistics.  Tune them out.  Also tune out the all-too-confident chatterers on TV news shows or on YouTube or on whatever venue you find them.  They can't know what they claim to know.  Nobody can.

Unless something causes a sudden break away from one candidate to the other, we're going to have to wait until November 6 to find out "who's ahead."  For now, it's neck and neck.  And that's all you can say about the race.  Period.

The Five Stages of the Romney Campaign

Where are we in the Romney campaign?  Denial?  Anger?  Bargaining? Depression?  Acceptance?  We seem to be in a mish-mash of all five.  Romney is denying that there's anything wrong with his campaign.  Republican pooh-bahs are angry that he won't take their sage advice. News media blowhards are bargaining that the debates will keep his campaign (and their jobs) alive.  The Republican rank-and-file are getting really depressed.  Nobody yet (except for me) accepts that Romney is one of the walking dead and these last five weeks of the election are purely pro forma.  Unless in the October 3 debate Barack Obama tells the nation that he really is (1) a crypto-Muslim, (2) Kenyan, (3) Indonesian, (4) Saul Alinsky's love child, (5) a Communist, (6) a Socialist, (7) a Liberal, (8) an illegal alien, (9) Satan's little helper,  and (10) the anti-Christ, the campaign is finito.  Obama wins; Romney loses and takes the entire Republican ticket down with him.  You don't win a national campaign in the last weeks of the election.  You win months before election day when you persuade people that you are a serious candidate with serious things to say.  Maybe it takes months for your message to settle in--Americans are very slow thinkers--but you lay the foundation for victory a long time before you claim it on election night.

Romney is a house built on sand; he has no foundation.  He ran as the default candidate.  You don't like Obama; then by default you'll vote for Romney.  He made no case for himself; he proposed nothing; he offered no vision.  You'd think that somebody who has spent his life in corporations at least would have adopted that fatuous corporate happy-talk about goals and aspirations and team-work. But no, Romney can't manage even that inane level of discourse.  It's just:  here I am, vote 4 me.

Nope, the nation ain't buying what Romney's peddling.  They know a knock-off when they see one.  He's fake.  Not just skin-deep fake.  He's fake all the way to the bone.  He lies.  He distorts. He flips and he flops.  He says whatever the moment seems to require.  There's simply nothing genuine about Mitt Romney.  Republican primary voters smelled the stink of fakery he emits; that's why they didn't vote for him; he won the nomination solely because he had more money than anybody else and outlasted his poorly funded opponents.  Can't do that in a national election.  Not even when the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson are your sugar daddies.  A national candidate has to have substance.  Shadows have more substance than Mitt Romney.

This election is over and done with at the presidential level.  Congress is another question.  Romney's failure is poisoning Republicans all across the country.  The Senate, once thought to be a Republican chamber in waiting, has now moved beyond them.  Contests that a month ago were no-contest are now heating up with Republicans fighting to keep their own seats.  The House is in play.  I'm out on a limb here:  I think the Democrats will take the House with a tiny 5-7 seat majority.  Some governorships and statehouses will fall to the Democrats.  On the Wednesday morning after election night, we'll wake up in a country that has only one national party, the Democrat Party, and a regional party, the Republican Party, that is quarantined to the states of the Old Confederacy and a scattering of small central and western states.  The Republicans are trapped by their base of angry, embittered white males.  The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon is now their prison. 

It's possible that we've seen the last Republican president.  The party may shatter into two:  one party for the reactionary fundamentalist whites-only kooks; one party for secular conservatives.  Neither would be a national party capable of winning elections and governing.  Looks like we're in for a generation of Democrats in the White House.  Given a party full of Todd Akins and Michele Bachmanns, that's not such a bad future.  If you're inclined to disagree, pause for a few moments and ruminate about this:  President Rick Santorum.

Gutted like a fish

The case for Proposition 8 has just been gutted by one of the two witnesses who testified in favor of it--David Blankenhorn, founder of some preposterous pseudo-think tank called "Institute for American Values." You might remember that almost all the witnesses the pro-Prop 8 side wanted to call ran away and hid because they didn't want to be identified in public with the anti-gay haters (apparently their anti-gay hate was a private thing). Only Blankenhorn and one other witness had the guts to persevere. Not a good career move that.  Plaintiff co-counsel David Boies absolutely shredded Blankenhorn on the stand, so much so that Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Blankenhorn--called as a supposedly expert witness--was in fact an expert in nothing but peddling his own opinions and struck his testimony from the record. 

Well, this media hound is back and now he's evolved.  In a New York Times op-ed he's announced that he's willing to accept the inevitability of gay marriage.  How big of him.  He still thinks it's crap but he's sniffed the air and that sweet smell of victory ain't coming from his side.  So he's jumped ship much to the chagrin of the pro-Prop 8 gang who are desperately trying to cobble together a viable appeal. 

I'm willing to bet a dollar that Blankenhorn's now ex-friends among the anti-gay crusaders are just itching to get this treacherous, two-faced SOB in a dark alley and slit his throat.  Take a number, guys, and get in line.  There's no honor among bigots, especially among bigots of the religious right. 

Every day now there's some new blow against the anti-gay right.  They're falling apart.  November is their Waterloo.  They're going to lose big and bad in four states.  And then the Supreme Court will invalidate Prop 8 and DOMA.  And then it's all over but the victory parade.  Gay Pride 2013 is going to be a celebration to remember!

Deja vu all over again

In Washington state Referendum 74 has now qualified for the ballot.  This referendum asks voters to approve or reject a recent law that permits gay marriage.  This may sound familiar because in 2009 voters were presented with Referendum 71 in which the civil unions created by law in 2007 were upgraded to "marriage in everything but name" status.  Despite howls of outrage from people who think that the lives and rights of gay people meaning nothing, that ballot measure won 53% to 47%, the first general election victory for gay civil unions in the country.  Now Washington voters are being asked to remove the preposterous and phony distinction between civil marriage and civil union.  The most recent poll has 54% of Washington state voters agreeing with the new law.

This referendum is one of four watershed ballot measures in November.  Maryland will vote on keeping its new gay marriage law; Maine will vote to restore a gay marriage law that was rejected by voters in 2009; Minnesota will vote on a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man-one woman thus outlawing gay marriage.  Given the sea change in opinion that has occurred since 2009 and the great change in support among black voters since Barack Obama's announcement of support for gay marriage, all four ballot measures can be won.  Current polling in each state indicates that the pro-gay voters outnumber the anti-gay voters.

I'd say that the anti-gay demagogues have made the fundamental error that all demagogues make:  they believe that they can whip up mob hate time after time whenever and wherever the situation demands. They never consider the inescapable truth that sooner or later the mob tires of its hates and dwindles away.  True believers never understand that only they are 100% committed; everybody else is usually along for the ride while it's fun but will jump off the train when some new entertainment beckons.  There's a world of difference between demagoguery and dedication.  The gay haters are demagogues; gays are dedicated to their rights and equality before the law. The demagogues have run their course.  Nobody's listening to them now.  Their lies are hollow.  They've foretold doom and gloom too often.  Nobody believes them.  They convince nobody.  Mostly now only fossilized prejudice keeps the anti-gays in business.  There's no passion, no conviction, no confidence on their side any more.  Even they know that their cause is lost.  In November the whole world will see their ruin.  I can't wait!

DOMA DOA

This week a three-judge panel of the 1st circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down as unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996. This was the infamous Republican election-year attack on the human rights of gay people cowardly signed into law by that treacherous sack of shit Bill Clinton. The act was authored principally by then-Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, a man with so much respect for traditional marriage that he's had three of them himself, the first two of which ended in divorce. Barr later repudiated DOMA while he ran a frivolous campaign for the presidency as the nominee of the Libertarian party, a party affiliation he repudiated in 2012 in favor of renewing his previously repudiated Republican party affiliation in a failed attempt to regain a seat in Congress. That's the kind of unscrupulous, unprincipled man the right-wing champions as a defender of traditional morality.

So heading to the Supreme Court are two critical gay-rights cases: Proposition 8 in California and DOMA. They'll arrive sometime after the November election. Their disposition will in large part depend on what happens in Washington state, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota. The former three have gay marriage on the ballot; the latter has a state constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage up for a vote. If we win all four--and that seems probable now that opinion is rapidly turning our way after Mr. Obama's announcement supporting gay marriage--then there are good reasons to anticipate victory in the Supreme Court mostly, I think, because nobody on the Court (except Scalia) wants to be this generation's Roger Tawney.

You'll remember from your US history that in 1857 Chief Justice Roger Tawney wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case and won for himself undying infamy. By all accounts Tawney was a decent man, a Maryland Catholic who had freed his own slaves and personally opposed slavery. But as a judge he believed himself bound to uphold the letter of the Constitution, which of course permitted slavery and defined black people as three-fifths of a citizen (for that read "white people"). Tawney's legalism overrode his morality and his memory has been reviled ever since.

The Court can plainly see that the tide of history is flowing in the direction of full, equal civil rights for gay people. No justice wants to be a member of Tawney's gallery of rogues. So I'm guessing that after the election the Court will use the victories in these four elections as the foundation for a leap forward in gay rights: it will uphold the unconstitutionality of DOMA, thus requiring the federal government to recognize gay marriages; and it will uphold equal marriage for gay people as a basic civil right.

And when the Court so rules, the game's over--we'll have won!

The bottom drops out

More new developments on the gay marriage front:

(1) Former secretary of state Colin Powell has announced his support for gay marriage.

(2) ABC News/Washington Post polling reports that for the first time those strongly supporting gay marriage outnumber those strongly opposing.

(3) Langer Research Associates reports that since Barack Obama's announcement of support for gay marriage, African Americans now support gay marriage by 59%, up from 40% as recently as a year ago.

(4) ABC/Post poll reports that now an absolute majority of 51-53% support gay marriage.

(5) Public Policy Polling reports that now 57% of Maryland voters will vote to uphold the state's new gay marriage law. There has been an enormous shift in black support from 57% opposed to 56% in favor.

I'd say that the bottom of the anti-gay marriage hate ship has just fallen out and that the ship is now sinking. The haters had previously counted on an apparently immovable opposition to gay marriage among black voters. Then Barack Obama changed everything. Now prominent black leaders like Powell and the NAACP have announced support for gay marriage equality. The black vote no longer belongs to the haters. If trends continue (and there's no reason to think they won't) support for the anti-gay haters will hardly amount to a quarter of the population. Talk about reversal of fortune. That's about where gay marriage support started back in the late 1990s, the difference being that support for justice, fairness, and equality has grown whereas support for bigotry has declined. It's fair to say that the anti-gay marriage campaign is dying on the vine in front of our eyes.

November is now not only a watershed moment in the gay marriage struggle. It may be a knockout victory. If the votes in Washington state, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota turn out to be landslides in favor of equality for gays, it's over. The Supreme Court will have a political basis to invalidate all anti-gay marriage obstructions when the Proposition 8 case arrives on its docket sometime after the election. There is already constitutional basis in Roemer vs Evans, but the uncourageous court never outpaces public opinion on anything.

Put a bit differently, if a political candidate was polling the way gay marriage is now polling, all observers and pundits would say that he was own his way to victory. Mitt Romney is going to pay a big price for his stupid support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He'd better drop that crap right now if he knows what's good for him although I hope he doesn't because there will be nothing sweeter in November than the sight of the Mormon church and its favorite son/champion being crushed by a pro-gay avalanche.

NAACP supports gay marriage

The good gay news just keeps rolling along.

The oldest civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP, has just endorsed gay marriage. Civil marriage, says the group, is a civil right and civil rights are for every American.

Hooray! This endorsement is a consequence of Barack Obama's recently announced support for gay marriage. But the NAACP sees him and raises the ante. None of this "leave it up to the states" crap for them. Nobody left black civil rights "up to the states" because "states rights" meant no rights for black people. We are citizens of the United States of America, not merely citizens of Idaho or Maine. All citizens enjoy the same rights: that's what the 14th amendment to the Constitution says. It was ratified in 1868 precisely to correct the Founding Fathers' error of minimizing the federal government's responsibility to articulate, define, guarantee, and protect exactly what rights citizens of the country possess. The correction the amenders proposed is simple: every citizen has every right and all citizens are equally protected by the law. Civil rights don't stop at state borders. You don't become a second-class citizen just because you cross a state line.

That rumbling you hear is the gay rights avalanche sweeping across this country. There's no stopping it. The feeble obstructions bigots have placed in their state constitutions will all be swept away by federal statute and Supreme Court rulings. We're not going to keep fighting a skirmish here and a skirmish there indefinitely. We're not going to fight the way the bigots want us to fight. We're fighting to win. We're going to win this war with overwhelming force and destroy our enemies. Period.

More good news yet again!

Today the Maryland supreme court legalized gay marriage. In a unanimous ruling the court declared that gay marriages performed in other states must be recognized as legal marriages in Maryland. The case dealt with a lesbian couple married in California but seeking a divorce in Maryland. The court requires the state to permit the divorce as it would with any other marriage whether in-state or out-of-state.

This ruling makes no reference to the current political debate going on in Maryland. Early in the year Maryland's legislature and the governor signed gay marriage into law. Because Maryland has one of those despicable voter veto laws, the anti-gay losers immediately launched a petition drive to put the issue on the November ballot. That process is still underway. But no matter what the outcome, the supreme court says that out-of-state gay marriages are legal in Maryland.

Which to all intents and purposes legalizes gay marriage in Maryland. Gay marriage is legal in the District of Columbia, so gay Marylanders can simply drive to DC, get hitched, and drive back home with a fully legal marriage license that the state must now recognize completely. Earlier in the week Rhode Island's governor issued an executive order requiring the state to recognize out-of-state gay marriages thus effectively legalizing gay marriage there. So we have two big wins in a single week! Hooray for justice and equality.

Maybe this ruling along with Barack Obama's public support of gay marriage will help preserve in-state gay marriage in Maryland. Blacks are a big voter block. Polls taken after Obama's announcement are starting to show movement toward accepting gay marriage among blacks who have previously opposed gay marriage by the widest margin among voter groups. The times are changing fast.

November is the watershed moment for gay marriage. Probably we'll have three states deciding gay marriage (Washington state, Maine, and Maryland) and one state deciding a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage (Minnesota). Supporters of equality and justice for gay people can win all four. If so, that's the effective end of the anti-gay marriage opposition: they're losing in state legislatures, in courts, and soon at the ballot box. Then it's on to the US supreme court for California's Prop 8 and possibly a landmark ruling that sweeps away all the state prohibitions and obstructions and burdens bigots have placed in the way of gay people who simply seek the same opportunities in life that everybody else enjoys. It's becoming clear as a bell now: anti-gay bigotry is losing politics. Republicans had better figure out really quick how to accommodate gay marriage or that party will be by-passed by history and relegated to the dump.

I'm going to enjoy watching the haters get squashed. Couldn't happen to more deserving people.

More good news again!

More good news on the gay marriage/gay equality front. Today the governor of Rhode Island signed an executive order directing the state's agencies to recognize the marriages of gay people living in the state. Rhode Island itself does not allow gay marriage, so the order requires that the state recognize marriages performed elsewhere. About a year ago the governor and his allies in the legislature tried to enact gay marriage but could not win sufficient support and had to settle for civil unions instead. So today, the governor gets revenge for his loss by enacting gay marriage by edict. Gay Rhode Islanders can drive to Massachusetts, get married, drive home, present their license to the state, and voila they're married as far as Rhode Island is concerned. Clever!

Of course we'll hear grumbling and moaning by opponents and certainly shrieks of "tyranny!" (as if the rabid anti-gay haters aren't supporting raw tyranny against gay people). Too bad, folks. There's more than one way to skin a bigot. Kudos to Governor Lincoln Chaffee for having the guts and tenacity to stand up to the bigots and to the Catholic clergy who tried to thwart civil rights for gay people.

The cause of gay marriage is on a roll. That vile vote in North Carolina was sadly inevitable. North Carolina is after all the state that sent the mad dog racist and gay-hater Jesse Helms to the US senate for term after term. It is part of the old Confederacy. Who has been out of step with the march of history more or longer than white southerners? But with Barack Obama's long overdue discovery that he has a spine and therefore can stand for gay rights instead of just yacking about it and today's victory in Rhode Island, nobody should doubt that the cause of equality for gay people is now rolling forward. The bigots are in retreat. This November there will be game-changing votes in Washington state, Maine, Minnesota, and Maryland. This year's election is the watershed. Everything will be different after the first Tuesday in November, 2012. The retreat will become a rout and our enemies, who are enemies of human freedom in general, will be crushed and thrown onto the garbage dump of history.

Good news!

Today the New Hampshire House voted decisively against an attempt to repeal gay marriage. The vote: 211-116. This is astonishing given the fact that the 400-member house has 294 Republican members and a mere 103 Democrats (with 3 vacancies). The gay-hate caucus failed to win even a majority of Republicans! Now that's total failure. Gay marriage was legalized by the previous Democrat-controlled legislature. Then along came the 2010 election disaster for Democracts (many thanks to Barack Obama for this!) and the Tea Party/Republicans won a veto-proof majority in both the House and the Senate. Repealing gay marriage was an early goal of the Lord's warriors in the Tea Party but one thing led to another and the vote was postponed until this election year (wonder why--maybe some anti-gay demagoguery to plump up those poll numbers?). What appeared to be a dead-certain repeal has exploded in the faces of Tea Party wackos, NOM, mad-dog evangelicals, and assorted enemies of gay people. Polls had repeatedly shown absolutely no interest in the repeal among New Hampshire voters. Zilch. New Hampshire citizens have made their peace with gay marriage. They've moved on. That message finally got through to the rational (and rationally self-interested) members of the legislature: voting against gay marriage is definitely a bad career move. Thus today's vote.

This victory is critical. In November there will be at least three critical ballot issues in Washington state, Maine, and Minnesota regarding gay marriage. This vote is especially important for Maine. Two years ago the voters in Maine ratified bigotry by cancelling a law enacted by the legislature which included gays in marriage. The vote was close. Now polls clearly indicate a majority in favor of gay marriage and the issue is once again on the ballot. If New Hampshire Republican voters (at least enough of them) can allow gay marriage in their state, then the signs are good that next door in Maine voters will correct the injustice done two years ago and restore gay marriage.

The leaders of anti-gay hate have until now banked on the bigotry of the mob. Court rulings and pro-gay legislation have often been stymied by referendum. Disgraceful and odious and unjust as putting human rights up to a vote is, the haters (who have no scruple whatsoever) are happy to let the mob rule as long as the mob can be stirred up against gay people. They've been largely successful until now. However, that strategy (if it deserves the name) has not worn well over the years; it isn't working anymore. Public opinion has changed very rapidly in the last few years. Polls clearly indicate that a majority of voters in critical states have accepted gay marriage and now support it (or at least don't oppose it). Seems that more and more people accept fairness for gay people. The haters on are the run. The Republican party has gone out of its way to be the anti-gay party in order to demagogue the issue and squeeze as many votes out of the haters as possible. Whoops! Repubs didn't count on a sea-shift in public opinion. They thought hatred of gays was an eternal truth; instead it's a cultural artifact of the past, like race hatred. Repubs are going to be punished severely for this error. They've let their party become infested with haters. What will they do now that inflaming anti-gay hate is a loser at the polls? The conservative party in Great Britain did the same thing under the anti-gay hater Margaret Thatcher, and the party was out of power for more than a decade, losing three successive general elections and effectively became a rump, regional party without a national constituency. Only now under Prime Minister Cameron has the party embraced gay rights and become viable against Labor but only by sharing power with Liberal Democrats. The British conservatives are now proceeding with full gay marriage on the agenda; the new leaders of the party want a modern party, not a useless antique from the distant past. Canadian conservatives made their peace with gay marriage when they were returned to office and have prospered ever since. What's wrong with Republican conservatives? Why can't they learn from experience? The answer: Republican conservatives are not true conservatives; they are radical ideologues wholly captured by reactionary doctrine and ideology.

So November 2012 is the watershed in the struggle for gay marriage and full civil rights for gays. I expect victory in Washington state, Minnesota, and now Maine. The last device of the gay-haters--demagoguery at the voting booth--will fail. When mob rule is no longer an option, the haters will have no weapons left. Public opinion will turn rapidly and decisively against them. Victory is at hand. Finally.

The political party that time forgot

Physicists and science fiction writers should take note of the Republican primary campaign. Each of the four remaining contestants is trying to time travel into the past. Newt Gingrich wants to time travel to the fictitious "morning in American" Reagan era of the early 1980s. Mitt Romney wants to time travel to the last quarter of the 19th century and rule the country along with the rest of the robber barons like Vanderbilt and the first Rockefeller. Ron Paul wants to time travel back to the 18th century and live in the early days of the American republic when the Constitution was new and most of the country was wilderness. Rick Santorum wants to travel back to the 12th century and reprise the Dark Age and the Crusades and get the Inquisition back into business.

Before these knuckleheads started campaigning, the Republicans were looking forward to a big win in 2012. Then these clowns opened their mouths and started talking. Bad career move. Now even hardcore do-or-die party stalwarts are aghast and have had their fill of this non-stop nonsense. Primary voter participation is down 30%. Old dog poop looks better than these guys. Old Republican dog poop today is going to be older Republican dog poop in November. Who'll want to vote for a pile of it then? The Republican party may have engineered a landslide victory for a Democrat president that even Democrats think is below average.

Even for a party obsessed with looking backwards, that's ass-backward politicking.

Sign of the times

Here's an interesting wrinkle that finally somebody has written about: doctors in private practice are under financial stress and many of them are going broke.

So much for the blather about recovery in 2012. As Paul Craig Roberts has been saying for years: there can be no recovery because there is nothing to recover. America has lost a vast part of its industrial infrastructure (some 54,000 entire industrial plants closed in the first decade of the 21st century--that's equivalent to the whole industrial sector of many first world nations). It has also sent abroad by the millions the middle-class service jobs that once sustained the consumer economy. The borrow-and-splurge financial fiesta that masqueraded as prosperity during the Bush years is long over--it crashed in the fall of 2008 and revealed to the world the total fraud of the Bush-Cheney administration's economic polices of wealth through warfare.

Barack Obama has no clue and no policy. His fellow fraudster, Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, has been printing money by the trillions for "stimulus"--as if you can stimulate a corpse. Every finagle of the Keynesian counter-cyclical program has been tried and has failed. There's nothing left to do. The tricksters of Washington, D.C., are fresh out of tricks.

Ordinary folk have been sinking to rise no more even before the "official" crash and subsequent pseudo "recovery." The relentless economic rot has now reached the top echelons of the professional class, the medical profession. About half of America's doctors are in private practice, which is to say that they are small businessmen who have to pay rent and make payrolls. Broke customers (a.k.a patients) can't pay their bills and reimbursements from government programs are shrinking and the doctors are getting screwed by big pharma just like the rest of us. The upshot is many doctors are going broke and bankrupt. When life is no longer good even for the upper crust, it's just plain crap for everybody.

The silly season of presidential primaries is now in progress and not a single person--not even the fabled straight-talker Ron Paul--is addressing what is really happening in America and what (if anything) can be done to save the country. The old-time religion of the free market and yet another mid-east war (this time with Iran) won't save us. Nobody's got a new idea or the guts to try it if they did.

Back home the river's still rising, the levees are buckling, and the sandbags won't hold. Which way to the high ground? Can you swim?

Read about it here