Michael not Mike

Go an iPhone Friday after work. Giving the WordPress app a try.

Poor little Patrick, one of the three members of Team Rainbow (teh gays) was kicked off Top Chef last week.  Yes, he came in almost last in the quick fire challenge and served up a pretty uninspired chinese food dish, but he is a cute little guy.  At 21 he has plenty of time to finish culinary school and go on to make something of himself.  If he’s looking for a place to practice his cooking skills, my place is open!

Patrick from Top Chef Season 5

Gotta love those Converse tennis shoes he’s wearing.

Schools have long been told that they should focus on the 3 R’s – Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmatic.  Kids, meanwhile have routinely balked that much of what they learn will have no practical effect once they leave school.k  Of course, kids fail to recognize that learning a wide variety of subjects exposes you to different areas which can influence career choice, prepare you for college and, perhaps most importantly, teach you how to think in different situations.  But, schools can easily make the 3 R’s relevant and applicable to daily life.  Schools need to teach basic budgeting.

Back when I was in school, we had a home economics class.  That class was considered a “girls” class and focused mostly on baking cupcakes and sewing on a button.  Little if any attention was paid to how to handle money.  Now, ignorance on basic money handling is a major factor in our current economic problems.

People don’t seem to understand the concepts of not spending more than they have, of making a plan for the future and of living without credit cards.  I know people who are currently out of a job.  None of those individuals have taken the basic steps necessary to handle this crisis.  More than one is living as a roommate with a friend in a house or apartment.  In each case, the jobless person has failed to cut expenses and look for alternative sources of income.  They have maintained their gym memberships, data plans on their cell phones, subscriptions to online games, continued going out for dining and drinks and some have even continued making unnecessary clothes purchases.

And these are not all young people.  These are  folks in their 20s and 30s.  These are people who should have learned the basics of understanding cash flow.  When asked, all one of these guys could tell me was, “I hope to have a job by the end of the month.”  That’s not a plan.  In the meantime, they are falling farther and farther behind on rent and credit card payments.

This is symptomatic of our wide scale econimic problems.  People failed to understand how much house they could afford.  The simple idea that if you can’t accumulate enough for a down payment, you won’t be able to pay the mortgage has escaped too many home buyers.  It has become much too acceptable to borrow money from a bank to buy a shirt, which is what credit card purchases are.  The idea of saving for retirement or paying for one’s own health care have been replaced in our society by the idea that government will take care of those things.  How much differently would everyone live if we could not expect to receive a social security check or medicare health insurance when we are old?

Our public schools can change this.  Not many people will use trigonometry after high school or college.  Everyone will have to look at a paycheck and decide what to do with it.

Last Friday night my Friend and I went to TPAC to see Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles.  Since I’m vastly older than he is, I had a bit more of a connection to the music.  We had a great time hanging out.  Afterwards, we stopped by Tribe for a drink, then went next door to Play to see what was going on.  A mutual friend, “T”, joined us.  After a bit of mingling and the requisite collection of a drink from the bar, we headed to the smoking porch out back.  The three of us were chatting when a guy in a red waffle henley and a ball cap came up and started talking to my Friend.  T and I took to our own conversation.  Red shirt was standing just off my right shoulder.   At some point in talking with T, I mentioned Proposition 8.  Immediately, red shirt turned and started talking to me.  I quickly learned that he had moved to Tennessee from California just four months ago.  Since he was still registered in L.A., he went back there to vote against Prop 8.  I mentioned to him the protests scheduled across the country for the next day and the one set to be held in Nashville at the courthouse.  At that point, and without prompting, he said, “I am a Stonewall Democrat.”  I smiled and said, “I am a Log Cabin Republican.”  His response?  “I don’t talk to Republicans.”  Then he turned away.

Wow.

I’m pretty out as a conservative.  I used to write a column  titled “Conservative Tendencies” for the now-defunct Church Street Freedom Press, a local gay paper.  It’s pretty common for people to engage me in political discussions when I’m out, whether at the bar or an event.  Rather than avoiding me because of my views, the more common reaction is to engage me.  That, I can respect.  Simply refusing to hear or acknowledge other viewpoints is pretty mindless.  I had heard, through GayPatriotWest, of this sort of reaction out on the coast.  This guy is going to need to grow up if he wants to live here.

A video put out by a group of Californians in reaction to the passing of Proposition 8 has the following script:

Divorce destroys the sanctity of marriage and its powerful influence on the betterment of society.  This proposition would keep the very meaning of marriage from being transformed into nothing more than a contractual relationship between two adults.  Prohibiting divorce between heterosexual married couples will keep the interests of children and families intact.  We will continue to celebrate marriage as the union of husband and wife, not as a relationship between %u2018Party A%u2019 and %u2018Party B.%u2019  The marriage of a man and a woman has been at the heart of society since the beginning of time and it promotes the ideal opportunity for children to be raised by a mother and a father in a family held together by the legal, communal, and spiritual bonds of marriage.  As a society we should put the best interests of children first, and those interests lie in traditional marriage.  Permitting divorce destroys marriage as we know it and causes a profound harm to society.  We should be restoring marriage, not undermining it.

And for those of you who voted yes on Prop 8 but disagree with this petition…Why?  This petition is copied and pasted from literature from your website, ProtectMarriage.com, but applied to Divorce instead of Gay Marriage.  So how can you argue with your own words?

What could possible destroy marriage more than destroying a marriage?  When I was forced to come out to my brother and his wife, my sister-in-law’s reaction was to say, “Well you know where I stand on the issue.  I’m on the committee to pass the marriage amendment.”  Knowing that she had divorced her first husband several years ago, I responded, “And I am on the committee to ban divorce.”  I rose and walked straight to the door.  Behind me I heard them say, “We love you anyway.”  And, “You are always welcome in our home.”  I have not been back.  Do not condescend to tell me that you “love me anyway.”  Such graciousness in the face of my obvious flaws which make me so undeserving is unwanted.

The video can be found here.

Eloquently.  Friend, neighbor and commentor – Salmon – alerted me to this clip.

As a conservative/libertarian, I generally find that the Republican party’s positions are closer to my own than those of the Democrat party.  If Republican are defined as being small government, strong defense, low taxes and traditional values, I would agree with them on the first 3 out of those 4.  George Bush helped move the party pretty far from the principle of small government.  And, supporting so-called “traditional values” conflicts the goal of having small government.  It’s takes quite a bit of government resources to wage the drug war, police people’s sex lives and keep teh gays out of the local library books.

Since the Democrats seek and even more expansive government that takes over health care, requires public service from everyone, desires increased taxes to make things more “fair”, willfully obstructs business and economic growth through nanny-state rules and ill-advised environmental regulations, among other things, I just can’t support their agenda.  In addition, suggesting that the party that brought us DOMA and DADT, is better on gay issues is simply not plausible.

Thus, I would very much like to see Republicans return to their core values (except one) and return to greater power in this country.  To do so, the Republicans must do certain things:

1. Organize better.  The GOP used to be known as the party with the better organization on the ground.  But, they failed to adapt to modern realities, especially the internet.  Barack Obama mastered the use of vast email databases, online fund raising and interacting with blogs.  McCain’s campaign showed some skill with the quickly produced YouTube video, but it wasn’t enough.
2. Get a younger candidate and one who is more eloquent.  Palin was actually pretty good on the stump.  With  more practice and preparation, she could do better in interviews.  Bobby Jindal seems to have a pretty good media sense about him.  I’m sure there are others.
3. Get a damn message.  McCain shifted message throughout the campaign and offered nothing that would stick.  “Hope and change” was an empty and meaningless message, but timely and effective.  The Republican vision (the pre-Bush Republican vision) can be explained.  Reagan did it and largely stuck to it.  People know that government workers aren’t smarter and shouldn’t be allowed to run their lives.  People know that if they have to send more money to the government,  they have less to spend.  People understand that a weak military can’t defend the country or help our allies.  People understand that myriad and byzantine rules are expensive and difficult for businesses to comply with.  People still yearn to be free, including free from their own government telling them how to live their lives.

Barack Obama will be running again in four years.  In the mean time, Republicans need to stick to their principles, be the loyal – not lunatic – opposition and be able to say four years from now that they have cleaned up their act while the Democrats are still taking and misspending their money and weakening this country.  I’m only moderately hopeful.

Rea Carey, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, sent out an email on the day after the Obama victory that started with these words:

Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States… but marriage bans have passed in Arizona and Florida, an adoption ban has passed in Arkansas, and the outcome of Proposition 8 in remains uncertain.

Needless to say, this is a bittersweet day for our community.

Er, no.  First, 27% of “our community” voted for McCain.  Second, Obama opposes same sex marriage on religious grounds.  (Sound familar?)  While so far he has said he does not support a constitutional ban on same sex marriage, he did nothing to defeat Proposition 8 in California, or other anti-gay measures in Arizona, Arkansas or Florida.  He will do nothing to make sure that our relationships are given equal protection under the law.

Why didn’t he come out against those anti-gay issues?  Because Democrats in those states are just as “anti-gay” as Republicans.  He wouldn’t risk offending his base to stand up for us.  He knew that the people who would vote for him, would vote against us.  He wouldn’t stand up for us in the election and he won’t stand up for us in office.  He still has to run again and the base simply won’t move enough on those issues to make it safe for him to help us.  Gays and lesbians should quit pinning their hopes on winning national elections and focus on making our case directly in our neighborhoods and our local communities.

At least we can’t say we were thrown under the bus.  We never had a seat on the bus, in the front or the back.

C’mon folks.  Before anyone believes the bullshit about Gov. Palin thinking that Africa is a country and not a continent and not knowing what countries are in NAFTA, just stop and think for a second.  Those allegations simply aren’t plausible.  No functioning adult who so much as watched the Olympics could not know that Africa is a continent.  And, as governor of the state with the nation’s longest border with Canada and with large amounts of goods and people moving across that border, it just isn’t possible that she didn’t know what countries are in NAFTA (that’s Canada and Mexico along with the U.S. if you don’t know).

These allegations are coming out because some inside the McCain camp don’t like that Sarah Palin realized that she was being mishandled at the beginning and insisted on doing some things her own way.  Couple that with the fact that McCain lost, and that these staffers don’t want to blame themselves or their boss and you end up with a need for a scapegoat.  Countless people around Gov. Palin have attested to her intelligence and insightfulness.  This is just silly, sour grapes.

As for the shopping spree, it doesn’t make sense either.  Large amounts of expense clothes aren’t Palin’s style.  She and her husband make enough money between their two careers to buy decent clothes, yet chose to dress modestly.  Nordstrom has a store in Anchorage. (I’ve shopped in  it.)  If she had this sort of taste, she could have exercised it before now.  (Yes, I know that Anchorage is not the capitol of Alaska.)

you are the next President of the United States.  Don’t fuck it up.