Liar Liar Pants on Fire!!!

Recently released Justice Department documents show Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicates he lied about his involvement in recent dismissals of 8 U.S. Attorneys. Two weeks ago Gonzales said, "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussion about what was going on."

However the documents reveal that on November 27th, Gonzales met with 5 other officals from the Justice Department and signed off on a plan to fire the prosecutors.

same sex attraction disorder

From the 2/6/07 episode of BOSTON LEGAL:

Has anyone ever heard of restless leg syndrome? It's where you move
your leg around in your sleep. It's awful. You may have it. May not
keep you awake; may not harm you in any way; may not bother you in
the slightest. But it's awful. The pharmaceutical companies have
declared it so, so they've invented a drug and you simply must take
it.

If you haven't heard of restless leg syndrome, then you probably
have attention deficit disorder. Awful … there's a lot of drugs for
that one. You must take them.

You're depressed …
You're not sleeping enough …
You think you're shy, but you've actually got a social anxiety
disorder.
Weak stream …
Irritable bowel syndrome …
You people have all kinds of ailments that you don't know about.
Luckily we've got drugs for every one of them. You must take them.

(At this point the judge interrupts and asks what the lawyer is
talking about. The following is his reply.)

Same sex attraction disorder. And what troubles me is why the folks
in big pharmaceutical companies haven't invented a pill for this
disease. Clearly they're in the business of selling sickness. If
there was a profit to be made, they would make it. And with an
estimated gay population of over 10 million people just in the US
alone, there certainly is a big enough market. Could it be that they can't cure it?



Well, not to worry. If big pharmaceutical can't do it, maybe big
religion can. And they are. They are the ones who have coined the
term 'same sex attraction disorder.' It's a very good name. And a
good name is very important. It's the crucial first step in
disqualifying homosexuals as a segment of the population and
categorizing them as a disease. It makes homosexuals seem less like
people and more like … the flu. And with terrible, awful symptoms.
But curable. And therefore, less concerning when it comes to things
like an individual's rights, freedom, privacy, marriage.

Big religion is very concerned with marriage. Big religion is the
one filling the pockets of Congress and actually got them to propose
a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Think about that. A
governmentally imposed, systematic prejudice against a class based
on their sexual orientation. Nevermind that one of the most trusted
evangelical advisors to the president was himself having a
homosexual affair on the side. Nevermind that one of our Congressman
was writing naughty emails to his teenage male pages. Isn't it just
a disease? And I just thought that it was curable. That's what they
told me down at the church.

Well, you can legislate against it, you can give it a clever name
and treat people for it, you can shut your eyes and have sex with
your wife and pretend it all feels right. You can join the church
and swear to be celibate for the rest of your life; you can drive
around on a Saturday night with a baseball bat and try to beat it
out of some poor soul you happen to meet. You can even come to this
courtroom and testify about your "new leaf" and how well it's all
working. What a miracle. My only response is … give it time, we'll
see.

Meanwhile, this company took $40,000 from my client promising to
cure him of his gayness. Only in America, only in a country that overtly and notoriously celebrates its prejudice against a class of people by proposing constitutional amendments. God bless us all. Home of the brave.

Condisleeza Rice: " A hasty cease-fire would not be a good thing"

W: "Not a FAKE PEACE"

600 people have died in Southern Lebonon because three Isreali soldiers were killed and two were captured. It's against all morality and it's real W. Anything that stops the senseless killing is good. We can work out the long term details after we stop the killing. Do it the Bill W. way... "I will not kill, just for today."

I don't see why a hasty cease-fire wouldn't be a good thing if it would keep people from dying, Condi ? Maybe your new Prada shoes are too tight and you can't think clearly.

I OWE MY MOTHER

1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE .
"If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning."

2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
"You better pray that will come out of the carpet."

3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
"If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!"

4. My mother taught me LOGIC
" Because I said so, that's why."

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
"If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me."

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
"Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you're in an accident."

7. My mother taught me IRONY.
"Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about."


8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
"Shut your mouth and eat your supper."

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM.
"Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!"

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
"You'll sit there until all that spinach is gone."

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
"This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it."

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
"If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!"

13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
"Stop acting like your father!"

15. My mother taught me about ENVY.
"There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do."

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
"Just wait until we get home."

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
"You are going to get it when you get home!"

18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
"If you don't stop crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck that way."

19. My mother taught me ESP.
"Put your sweater on; don't you think I know when you are cold?"

20. My mother taught me HUMOR.
"When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me."

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
"If you don't eat your vegetables, you'll never grow up."

22. My mother taught me GENETICS.
"You're just like your father."

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
"Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?"

24. My mother taught me WISDOM.
"When you get to be my age, you'll understand."

25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE.
"One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you"

September 11, 2001 -- The truth IS out there....


click here for video


In Plane Sight

This week Army Chief Warrent Officer Lewis Welshofer, Jr. was convicted negligent homocide in the death of Iraqi detainee General Abid Maoush. Officer Welshofer put the detainee head first into a sleeping bag, wrapped the detainee and the sleeping bag very tightly with an electrical cord all around his body, and sat on his chest. This detainee died of asphyxiation as a direct results of these actions.

Welshofer was fined by the military court $6000 and required to spend 60 days of house arrest (restricted to home office and church).

Only 60 days for murder.

Army Reserve Specialist Lynndie England received three years for "maltreating detainees" for her part in the actions at Abu Gharib Prision. Hardly seems appropriate for his crime.

Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Home Run

By FRANK RICH (The New York Times)

WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the
compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.

"Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any movie this year.

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding
yes.

All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."

In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a
National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over
the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful,
four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone,
starting with the riveting Heath Ledger.

The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.

By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive
for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode.
Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.

Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in recent years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of them updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of 1930's studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other minorities in prime-time television.

Entertainment Weekly has tallied nine movies, including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters this year. But "Brokeback Mountain," besides being more sexually candid than the norm, is not set in urban America, is not comic or camp, and, unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia" and "Angels in America," is pre-AIDS.

Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village People cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from which the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Mr. Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."

They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness in 1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans, and not just in Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to start spinning forward.

Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions and long separations, both Ennis and Jack get married and have children; it barely occurs to them to do otherwise. In their place and time, there is no vocabulary to articulate their internal conflicts, no path to steer their story to a happily-ever-after Hollywood ending. Before they know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words, "no longer young men with all of it before them."

Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions - yearning, loneliness, disappointment, loss, love and, yes, lust - are affecting because they are universal. But while the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, adheres closely to the Proulx original, it even more vividly roots the movie in the rural all-American milieu, with its forlorn honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics, familiar from elegiac McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show."

More crucially, the script adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and without any on-screen oralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.

Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace."

The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born.

Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."

But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe.

It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.

The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997.

That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.

ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war kirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines.

Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre.

Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.