WTF? a third-rate skank 4 Jesus from the lamer portions of San Diego County utters a barely intelligible defense of what she learned in youth group between fingerbangings in an effing beauty contest and now she’s the hero of the Right? it is as if Joe the Plumber and Miss South Carolina have merged.

does she even realize that nobody of any worth to society except homosexual men (and now hipsters) has ever WATCHED the Miss America Pageant?

WTF do we even care abt this story????? unlike in the days when anita bryant ejaculated messages about the family, today GLBT Americans are relatively safe and have massive public support across the civilized portions of the nation. if HRC gave up this h8 crymez joke and actually campaigned for civil rights (what we pay them for) the issue would be solved and Carrie Prejean and all her friends (the idiots, not the conservatives, though there is a fair amount of overlap) would be deported to a reservation in Nevada.

Concerned that we are too concerned about a stupid whore who’s this week’s head of the crazy Southern (and Fundie/MRMN/TradCath) party.

UPDATE: HRC is wasting no time getting back to doing absolutely nothing this session. glad to see the meaningless Shepard Bill may finally become a law. Meanwhile, my br0 can get evicted cuz he’s ghey.

Ecuador’s Rafael Correa seems to be a pretty chill bro, his contempt for the media notwithstanding. Adbusters has an article which, underneath the layers of pan-leftist Ph.D-speak, makes a point:

Ecuador’s act could be the beginning of a revolution in which leaders of developing countries realize that their obligation is to defend the well-being of citizens and not to submit to Western-imposed neoliberalist policy. Ecuador may not be wealthy, powerful or even politically relevant to most of the developed world, but it is now a beacon of strength for the dozens of countries spending more on loan interest than on health care and education. By choosing people before money and life before debt, Ecuador is beginning to make cracks in the capitalist system.

I believe the problems lie not with capitalism itself, but with the Friedman-Hayek ideological form of capitalism that has infected much of the Western intelligentsia. Liberalism and capitalism are actually the road to social democracy, as Bernstein pointed out. Nonetheless, a pretty good article on a country the papers don’t cover anymore because they have no idea how to run a business.

Speaking of the idiots who run the papers, the New York Times is trying to be hip by printing a quasi-interesting blog meme from several weeks ago. Hopefully some website arises which attempts to do good reporting, or the papers learn how to use the internet, like the rest of us did in 1995, and somehow manages to save itself.

Still, congrats to Adbusters for almost seeing geopolitics as something not controlled by a secretive cabal of the BBC, Israelis, and Americans (especially the Jewish ones).

Sully weighs in on climate change:

My own preference is to avoid the bureaucracy of cap-and-trade in favour of a serious carbon and petrol tax that would shift the economic balance towards noncarbon energy. If you gave back the tax revenue through a tax refund, you could avoid depressing growth and help cushion the working poor from higher petrol costs. You need no new bureaucracy to do this – and you’d help drive green decision-making away from top-down government towards more bottom-up human-level calculations.

It’s not as satisfying as a massive government regulatory programme. It tries to counter the worst-case scenarios without assuming them. It hopes that a carbon-hostile tax would prompt a technological breakthrough to solve the problem. And it’s easily reversible if needs be. It’s the kind of green policy that is neither in denial nor in hysteria, and it’s a rough balance between the planet’s needs and humanity’s. Think of it as innovation over regulation – a way to manage the contradictions of conservatism and environmentalism after all.

I too favor the straightforward method, which might actually do something and can actually be modified over time. Nonetheless it has no chance of passing. While often pointing the GOP’s tight connections with major industries, environmentalists are less apt to criticize Democratic connections to labor. And on the most important issue of our time, both seem finally united against prudence, justice, and good government.

Tim DeChristopher, the man who stood up to the cronyism that epitomized the Bush years, has been indicted by Utah’s U.S. Attorney:

Tim DeChristopher — the monkey-wrenching University of Utah student who caused an environmental sensation by disrupting a high-profile oil and gas lease auction — pinned his hopes on President Barack Obama to get him out of trouble.

But shortly after a federal grand jury handed up a two-count felony indictment Wednesday against the 27-year-old economics major, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar crushed any notion of help from Washington.

The Bureau of Land Management, Salazar warned, “will not tolerate future conduct which undermines the integrity of the bid process.”

Well, at least we aren’t the only ones.

Meanwhile, some nutjob who gets off by creeping out the families of scientists will now get a $500 check from the government. Making a principled stand for transparency and sustainability in public policy is a bad thing, but trying to get beat up by the cops because you don’t understand biology is the basis of American government.

UPDATE: Thanks to Obama, we’ll now also have JesusGoblins bugging the hardworking researchers of Upper Campus as well. The Jesus Goblin is basically identical to the VeganZombie, but is working on a fluff degree that doesn’t involve “identity.”

Utah’s economy is still doing relatively well, owing to our status as the only place in the country where people build homes that also has water and soil and less than 45 minute drives between subdivisions and minimalls. It helps that the predominant religion maintains that being stupid is not only stupid, but also sinful. However, we do share one thing with Iceland: a counterfactual inbreeding meme:

5. “Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth — geneticists often use them for research.”

Now this is insulting. Icelanders’ DNA shows their roots to be a healthy mix between Nordic Y chromosomes and X chromosomes from the British Isles. The reason genetic-research company deCODE uses Icelandic genes for its research is not because the codes are so homogeneous, but because the population has kept excellent genealogical records dating back thousands of years.

Heh… my bio major friends have to destroy the Utah version of this rumor on a daily basis. The best part is that Pioneer stock Mormons are actually one of the more genetically diverse populations of white Americans, owing to frequent intermarriage between first generation immigrants, due to a shared religious identity which effectively negated ethnic tensions. Only in the twentieth century was the same commonplace outside of Mormondom.

[Daily Intel]

I am often asked why how can support gay rights and be a good Mormon at the same time. The answer is simple. If the Church lets the state GOP ignore everything they’ve ever said about social justice, immigration, abortion, or education, I feel they won’t care if my views on homosexuality conflict with what McConkie says is doctrine. Due to typical ignoring of constituents by the GOP, and a total lack of moral courage on the part of the LDS Church, Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative has failed. In other words, rights basic to the liberal system of free markets and free government have been determined by committee not to apply to some on the basis of what they like to do in their bedrooms. Likely, none of us will have the balls to throw the pigs out in two years, especially with the meaningless ethics bills poised to cover the legislators from any form of criticism. I will not comment on the Buttars fiasco.

But it was fun to think that somehow the Church’s meaningless post-Prop 8 message actually meant something, that it would return to being a meaningful conservative institution instead of the reactionary vanguard it has become.

A wake will be held for the measure tonight from six to eight at Nobrow.

Kleiman explores marijuana decriminalization:

I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

My stoner friend suggested precisely the same thing several months ago.

As the New Great Depression deepens, some good indicators from the twitternets:

Obama is going to promote his anti-reality plan today in one the larger burghs of the Mormon Empire:

Obama will announce his Housing Save shortly, from the “where?” suburb of Phoenix called “Mesa, Arizona.” Mesa is one of those places that had 722 residents in the year 1900. Now, it’s got nearly a half-million people, most of them added since 1980. Like the rest of Phoenix and Las Vegas and San Diego and the “Inland Empire” and the entirety of Florida, Mesa has been foreclosed upon, by Fate.

Basically, all the silly towns made up by developers in the ’70s on the ruins of failed 1850s Mormon settlements are probably going to return to desert, like they should; people will go back to living in places where you can survive without air conditioning, vaguely-worded contracts, and Mexican slave-labor. The Church won’t sell the half of Florida it still owns, and Las Vegas will revert to being a Cove Fort-style place for your grandparents to torment you on the way to/from L.A., except controlled by the Mafia. Even if Obama succeeds in saving people who will do anything a realtor tells them to do, concern for the environment and/or actual environmental devastation will halt desert growth, meaning that bands will once again regularly stop in inhabitable Western cities like Salt Lake, Denver, and Missoula instead of imaginary places like Taos, Tempe, or Henderson. Coachella and Burning Man will be relocated to Ketchum and Provo (with “man” replaced by “third-rate cow college”).

[Wonkette]

Rather than strengthening “traditional marriage,” civil unions and other separate-but-equal regimes have the opposite effect:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage.

One of the few dozen people on earth to have actually read Burke, Sully, chimes in:

In this, the gay movement, in its support for civil marriage equality, is a force right now for social conservatism; and the Christianist movement is the one fomenting the real attack on the institution of marriage

Meanwhile, the Utah GOP continues its radical revanchist crusade against LGBTQ Utahns and their families, striking down all but one of the Common Ground bills supported by 83% of Utahns (the last is slated for execution tomorrow). Some post by an idiot on Craigslist captures the view of America’s whitest sausagefest:

The closer you get to the blade of the fan the more likely you are to get your finger chopped. This follows the same logic as the people in Europe who had to get their guns registered. As soon as all of the guns were registered, it was easy to collect them and the people were defenseless against tyranny. If you have civil unions, it follows that it is one small step away from gay marriage, and then we will be ripe for destruction like Sodom and Gomorrah. God help this perverted country before it is too late.

The event to which he alludes never actually happened, but does appear to be some sort of NRA-bastardization of Fascist/socialist gun control programs. The gun debate, along with abortion and gay rights, is dominated on both sides by ideologues who don’t pretend to care about reality. I’m pretty sure God would like families to succeed, but your bizarre anti-gay fetishism is making us look like idiots.

Remember the Danes, how they saved the vast majority of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, whose number one export was once moral courage? Well, not anymore:

A number of school administrators have come forth in recent days to confirm that they recommend Jewish children should not enrol at their schools….

On Monday, headmaster Olav Nielsen of Humlehave School in Odense publicly admitted he would refuse Jewish parents’ wish to place their child at his school….

Other headmasters have now come forth to support Nielsen’s position, adding that they are putting the child’s safety first.

Well there goes centuries of rigorous liberal thought!! But remember, kids, this is anti-Zionism, so it’s okay, as it only assumes 45% of Jewry is responsible for everything bad that has ever happened.

Juan Cole explains why Khatami’s second time around will also accomplish nothing:

Khatami has many flaws. He is at base a Khomeinist and so supports a regime that has a poor record on human rights. He may have high principles himself, but so far he has been relatively ineffectual in getting them implemented. His unwillingness to risk a crisis by pushing hard liners too far may contribute to social peace, but it also gives the hard liners a veto on reform.

All this election will do is give some legitimacy to the regime, which has suffered from very low voter turnout recently. By voting for a proven incompetent quasi-liberals, all Iranian liberals will do is put themselves backward. If you are reading this and can vote in Iran, don’t. Then read this guy.

Tula Connell of the AFL-CIO explains:

What do Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have in common? They both oppose provisions in the economic recovery package that would ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent on products that are made in America-to the maximum extent possible.

This bizarre brand of left-revanchism continues to undermine my hopes that Obama and the Hill Dems can actually make progress on the most important issue of our time, Climate Change. If this kind of meaningless crap can get the great unwashed of the Midwest to start fighting against the Green movement, the Democrats won’t have the spine to stand up to them.

While I was volunteering with an enviromnental organization last year, the union-industry reps came in and gave us all oxymoronic hats and t-shirts. Interestingly, these “Clean Coal” products were all made in China.

[UPDATE: It appears America's Power is actually just industry science-deniers, no labor involved. But I still am worried that labor will be more AFL, less CIO.]

Carles captures the spirit of the times:

Are yall scared about ‘getting older’ and ‘losing ur swagger’?
What r u doing 2 deal with ‘growin up’ or r u ‘just gonna die young or live 4ever’?

I’m pretty sure I’ll die before I’m forty. Sure, I eat well and don’t do drugs or alco-pops, but for some reason I woke up with heartburn this morning. I’m hoping I die at 29 so I can be like Percy Bysshe Shelley, only without the free luvs (gross).

“Let others complain that the times are wicked. I complain that they are paltry; for they are without passion.”
-Kierkegaard

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’”
-George Orwell

“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”
-Spock

“The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”
-Susan Sontag

“I don’t might straight people so long as they act gay in public.”
-Nate Davis

“An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.”
-Douglas Haddow (ostensibly not a hipster)

Remember how moderate (i.e. non-Southern Republican and AFL-CIO-bankrolled rustbelt Democratic) senators are taking everything that might actually stimulate the economy and fight climate change out of the stimulus package and stuffing its fallen corpse with pork and tax cuts for Rockefellers, then putting Gingrich on the teevee to explain that the inverse is somehow true? Well, as M.J. Rosenberg explains, Congress is also responsible for the fact that Jews and Arabs are still killing each other, instead of creating amazing fusion dishes.

But a President cannot do the job alone. He needs the American people behind him, and he needs Congress. Unfortunately, Congress tends to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not so much as a problem but rather as a cash cow for fundraising. Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives tend to come together as one when it comes to telling the pro-Israel community what it thinks we want to hear (and will reward).

He basically analyzes the Israeli election very thoroughly from an American perspective, highly recommended reading.

America’s own Osama bin Laden, Tim DeChristopher of Salt Lake, whose “monkey-wrenching” prevented our great nation from harnessing its vast energy resources, is happy with Obama’s latest edict, which, in effect, nullifies ten thousand years of American history.

“That’s excellent. That’s wonderful,” DeChristopher said Wednesday of Salazar’s move. “That’s the kind of strong stance we need our leaders to be taking.”

Well, your “strong stance” is actually an act of terrorism, and the ecofascists who now occupy our great nation are actively promoting this kind of behavior, so I don’t see any courage in it. But DeChristopher may yet be brought to justice:

It remained unknown Wednesday how the lease cancellations might affect DeChristopher’s potential prosecution on federal charges that could result from his auction actions, which he called an act of civil disobedience. Salazar would not comment on DeChristopher, deferring to U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman in Salt Lake City.

[Salt Lake Tribune]

The wheels of industry have come to a standstill following a recent, borderline socialistic action from our new president, B-Boy Obama, and his Ed Abbey knock-off in chief, Ken Salazar:

In a high-profile reversal of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday the government is scrapping the lease of 77 parcels of federal land for oil and gas drilling in Utah’s redrock country.

It’s just this kind of eco-terrorism that is threatening our way of life. When the Ecofascists tell us that eating five meals of nothing but steak a day and incinerating down the entire nation of Zambia are bad for the environment (it’s not, Rush said so), they are ignoring the fact that it is our right, as Americans, to rape and pillage God’s creation for shits, giggles, and moneys. Pretty soon they’ll tell me I can’t have bonfires in my backyard or poach bald eagles.

[AP]

The internets are buzzing with the purely numerological news-item that Face-book is now five years auld. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg’s days are numbered and “the toughest challenge is yet to come.” Observe:

However, the next five years look a lot tougher for Facebook. The honeymoon period is well and truly over, and there is anecdotal evidence, at least, that “Facebook fatigue” is setting in with some users. The greatest difficulty the website faces is “user stickiness” – remaining sufficiently dynamic, interesting and relevant to retain its members.

It’s easy– get rid of those boorish prudes from high school who never log on, and when they do, it’s only to post pictures of the prudish escapades they are getting themselves into in Provo or Logan or wherever the hell they are. Then get rid of “poking” and hire Farhad Manjoo to fix everything, because he is the uber-geek.

[Telegraph]

That’s what we’re beginning to realize, according to a recent post at Grist:

Suppose you want your kids to eat healthier. Which is the more effective approach? (a) Tell them they can only have one scoop of ice cream with dinner, or; (b) Tell them their meal cannot exceed 10 percent ice cream?

Option A clearly limits their ice cream consumption. Option B most likely leads to fat kids, who quickly figure out that if they can scarf down a few more bites of spaghetti, they’ll get a pro rata increase in their ice cream allowance. The Clean Air Act takes the fat kid approach.

Some pretty amazing wonkish blibbering is found throughout the piece. Reading it is a great investment of your time.

Sully distills contemporary conservatism:

Even evangelicals like Joe Carter would support this, right? And Christianists insist they are not anti-gay and do not want to hurt anyone. So why not? And, on cue, a Christianist Republican who once supported the exact same legislation when he was opposing marriage equality now opposes it. Why? It’s a threat to marriage!

The Church’s silence is just getting more and more grating to the soul.

The University is finally starting work on a bill designed to prevent deranged bums from wandering into portions OSH or the law school and making doodies all over everything. The administration says its bill would allow the campus cops to keep “disruptive persons” off of campus for “extended periods of time. Getting rid of the TRAX-hobo menace is quite a problem for Police Chief Scott Folsom:

There have been a number of people on campus that cause disturbances. It has become problematic. We have been struggling to find a solution to properly handle them.

A good starter would be either getting rid of buses and trains or euthanizing the homeless, but neither of those are legal or ethical. As a result, we are stuck using vague language to argue for a vaguely worded bill that will likely do nothing to stop that weird old person from hitting on you after chemistry. Balls.

[Daily Utah Chronicle]

Remember in college, at the U, going into that horrible circular business building to listen to some old fart lecture about federal regulations applying to accountancy? Well, that horrible building is still there (though the prof has died), and needs to be DESTROYED and replaced with a building suitable for a major research university, with things like toilets and windows. Unfortunately, the stingy ol’ bastards on Capitol Hill don’t wanna pay for it, on account of Fannie May and Nasdaq.

“This building would be part of a larger solution,” said Chris Treasure, a marketing analyst for the business school. “We can use the bonding as part of a broader economic stimulus bill that would create jobs and provide opportunities for many different people.”

Haha job creation is for Democrats, if you like it so much move to Communist China! Besides, everyone knows the Lord’s elect (i.e. those who will actually make money) all go to B.Y.U., because of their righteousness in the pre-existence.

[Daily Utah Chronicle]

In yet another show of the lack of LDS Church influence in Utah (remember all the talk of “charity” and “humanity”?), the silly bill requiring colleges not to allow undocumented immigrants from Utah to pay in-state tuition may be revived, as may an attempt to prevent said undocumented students from working.

Instead of repealing the 2002 in-state tuition law, as has repeatedly been tried unsuccessfully in recent years, Rep. Richard Greenwood, R-Roy, wants to require affected students to sign an affidavit each semester promising they haven’t worked in the United States during the calendar year.

What a great way to strengthen Utah’s economy, preventing the only people capable of actually doing work, the young and the poor, from working. Good luck tending to your 20-head families and building your swimming pools without Lamanitish help-meets, Draperites!

[Salt Lake Tribune] [Daily Utah Chronicle]

The confederacy of wingnuts formally known as the Utah House have approved evil, naughty, backwards laws that will prevent people too stupid to use condoms from having abortions quite a long time after their pregnancies begin.

HB90S1 would increase the penalty for an illegal abortion from a third-degree felony to a second-degree felony. HB222 would require doctors to inform mothers about to have an abortion of anesthesia options for a fetus older than 20 weeks.

Omigawsh! These purely procedural laws which will apply to maybe four women each year are a great threat to democracy itself. First they take away our right not to be informed by our physicians of the treatment we will receive, then they force us all to listen to Rush Limbaugh. It is a sad time to be a lady in Deseret.

[Salt Lake Tribune]