On 9/11. a gay man saved the White House

I wonder how many Americans remember, or ever knew, that one of the heros of Flight 93, the airplane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field rather than into the White House or the Capital Building as the hijackers planned, was a rugby-playing lawyer/PR executive named Mark Bingham, who also happened to be proudly and openly gay.
There are two reasons I am remembering this now. First, rehashing the election is now going on in the progressive blogs, one point being that Kerry lost the spin cycle after the third debate because so many Americans were shocked when Kerry noted that Mary Cheney is gay -- many Americans, it appeared, considered this a "smear" because they hadn't known about her before. I think democrats looking for a short and pithy way to frame their issues for Americans should remind people about Bingham's heroism
And second, here in Canada, the Toronto Archbishop and Calgary Bishop are both trying to pressure Paul Martin to use the notwithstanding clause to deny marriage rights to gay couples.
These were rights that Bingham supported - he wanted to marry his own partner. Its a tragedy and a waste that he gave his life to save the White House, while the people in the White House whose lives he saved still continue to reject his basic humanity and his courage.
Here is the story of that flight, and what Bingham did. Here is the tribute site in his memory -
Mark Bingham, a tribute to a Wonderful Man, a Great Friend, a Loving Brother, and an American Hero

34 and counting

A few weeks ago, I complained that there were just too many Bush administration outrages for anybody to keep track of, one succeeding another until there were so many piling up in blogosphere archives that I couldn't keep track of what was happening with them all. So now Salon has published The scandal sheet - a handy reference guide.
Of course, it only lists the scandals which are actually against the law, charges which have been heard by a court or are under investigation by a grand jury or a prosecutor or a congressional committee -- so it leaves out things I also consider scandalous, like altering reports on climate change science and trashing international treaties and smearing people like Richard Clarke and Paul ONeill, not to mention Guantanamo Bay and torture and preemptive war and the divine right of kings doctrine -- but its a start.

Good for you, Paul

PM runs into same-sex debate in India "This is a question of civil marriage, not religious marriage," Mr. Martin told reporters . . . "No church, no temple, no synagogue will be forced to provide a marriage in any other way than with those [values] which are accepted by its own beliefs." . . . Mr. Martin told reporters he is proud of the way Canada supports the rights of minorities. "I believe that one of the reasons that Canada has been so successful at bringing together people from all around the world is in fact we do understand religious freedom, we do understand the necessity for minorities to be protected so in fact they can pursue their own faith and they can pursue their own way."
Exactly.
The same-sex marriage debate is heating up in Canada, too, with more overblown rhetoric and implausible scenarios -- like this one "Dr. Buckingham pointed out that courts in the past have declared that public schools must provide a welcoming environment for all children. That may well become more and more difficult to do, she said, with acceptance of homosexuality in the name of tolerance leading to intolerance of those who morally oppose it." Ahhh, you mean those poor students, whose teachers already prevent them from calling their fellow students squaws or bucks or kikes or wogs or chinks, won't be allowed to call anybody a faggot either? Well, it just isn't FAIR, is it?

Live by the sword -

and die by the sword.
Bush Upsets Some Supporters
And Bush said the same thing again last night on an NBC interview I watched.
Well, he got all those church-going ladies out to vote for him, so together they could smite same-sex marriage, and now he tells them that he isn't going to bother with the amendment because Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act is good enough.
What? Something done by Clinton-the-devil-incarnate-antichrist-wannabe is sufficient?
Gee, if this keeps up, people who voted republican might start to think that maybe they made a mistake.

Milgaard Inquiry underway

The Globe and Mail: Judge at Milgaard inquiry counsels patience
Here is the Official Website for the inquiry, which will be meeting from now until the end of April. I may not blog too much about it, because its difficult to develop conclusions from the day-to-day testimony. But I'll be following it.
And here's the list of other recent Saskatoon justice inquiries and cases:
the Stonechild Inquiry
the Lawrence Wegner inquest
the Darrell Night case
the Commission on First Nations and Metis Peoples and Justice Reform
the Klassen/Kvello case
and the Martensville case
Its a lengthy and sorry record, isn't it.

Laugh!

My Blahg gets "Ahead of the Curve".

The war has been cancelled?

Well, that's a relief -- DoD News: Statement from Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence DiRita on Latest Seymour Hersh Article
So Seymour Hersh's article is all wrong. The US won't be invading Iran after all ...
No, wait . . . no one actually said THAT.
Thanks to All Spin's Kate for the link.
UPDATE: Ah-ha! Just as I suspected!

Zephyrgate -- revenge of the dissed?

So I looked for the very beginning of it all, and found it here, on John Palfrey's blog, dated Monday: "Z on who was paying whom for what. A propos of credibility on the web: everyone knew that the Dean campaign had bloggers on their payroll. But these bloggers? And does it matter how much they were paid, relative to staffers? I am intrigued by the issue of how much can be cured through transparency and disclosure, as Kos and others have argued. " This was the very first reference anywhere on the web to Zephyr Teachout's column. Then Ed Cone found the link, which was noted on Instapundit, which attracted the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which wrote the story, which lead to everything else.
I thought Palfrey's tone in the original piece was a little negative, a little dismissive, a little contemptuous of Kos and of MyDD's Jerome. So I googled some more.
Now, John Palfery is the head of Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, which is sponsoring next week's Conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility , in which interest Teachout wrote the piece. This conference has already provoked some negative comments in the progressive blogosphere for its virtually total lack of progressive bloggers invited. Note that Teachout, who has been blogging for a week, is invited. As is Ed Cone (which is why, I suppose, he found the link). So is Powerline. NOT invited are Kos, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Steve Gillman, Liberal Oasis, Pandagon, Hullabaloo, Kevin Drum, Daily Howler, Oliver Willis, MyDD . . .
So, googling John Palfrey, I found some previous controversy here, too -- the October 2003 BloggerCon, also sponsored by Berkman, was roundly trashed by progressive bloggers including Pandagon, Atrios and Kos as both expensive and irrelevant to blogging. Palfrey had to back down a bit on the price. (By the way, if you click the trashing link, you will note that The Register promised more articles on BloggerCon. Apparently they never published them, though they have continued to say some pretty negative things about organizer Dave Winer.)
So does the earlier dissing of BloggerCon account for the "gotcha" tone in Palfrey's blog about the bloggers on the Dean payroll?

Words of wisdom

MSNBC - Social Security, solvency and political spin:
Guess who said this: "'For too long, too many people dependent on Social Security have been cruelly frightened by individuals seeking political gain through demagoguery and outright falsehood, and this must stop. The future of Social Security is much too important to be used as a political football."
Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link.

Neocons descending?

Boy, is this ever good news -- Neoconservatives at Sea - by Jim Lobe Shorter version: just when the neocons thought they had won, they find out they're losing all around.
And Antiwar.com, where I got the Lobe story, has a new section up entitled "military madness" with stories like this one, about the "gay bomb" idea. It really is pathetic, isn't it.

Zephyr, we hardly knew ye

Gilliard gets it, too -- he addresses the deeper agenda of the Zephyr storySteve Gilliard's News Blog : See what you did in an Open Letter to Zephyr: "Do you think that because you shit on two honest people that people will now listen to your little hobby horse about ethics? Are you fucking kidding me? Your ethics suck. You would buy coverage for a candidate. So exactly why should I listen to you? Here's the deal: just shut the fuck up. Your carelessness has caused an amazing amount of harm for a non-issue."
UPDATE: So, the plot sickens -- appears that Zephyr Teachout was lying when she said the Dean campaign was trying to bribe Kos and Jerome for favourable coverage -- either lying deliberately to cause Dean trouble in the DNC chair race, or lying inadvertently because she assumed that she knew the "real story" behind their hiring when she actually didn't. Zephyr, buh-bye.

Trying to bribe bloggers -- THAT'S the story

Digby gets it.
Forget ethics paradigms and Zephyr and Kos and MyDD. The media, for all the trashing we give them, have actually focused on the meaningful news story here: that Dean's presidential campaign tried to bribe left-wing bloggers to support him.
Zephyr, who started all the brouhaha, now writes "We were paying him [Jerome Armstrong of MyDD] in part because WE hoped that he, and Kos, would blog positive things about Dean, but that was never explicit or implicit in the contract. This has to do with OUR motives, not some contract, and no compromise on their part." And she's now preaching about how bloggers need to have ethics! Well, duh!
It doesn't matter now how clumsy and unsuccessful the bribery attempt was -- Armstrong actually shut his blog down while he worked for Dean, while Kos noted it prominently on his site and on every Dean-related post he wrote. So it didn't work.
I suspect, actually, that the bribery idea never occured to Dean himself -- sounds to me like it was Trippi, now turned pseudo-journalist on MSNBC, and the fair Zephyr who thought this one up all by themselves. What did Trippi say the other day, something about that he couldn't support Dean for DNC chair because Rosenberg would do a better job of pulling the party together? Yeah, Dean just made too many poor decisions, didn't he, like hiring Trippi and Zephyr to work for him in the first place.
Poor Rosenberg, I'll bet he thought it was a real feather in his cap when Trippi endorsed him four days ago. Little did he know. It will be interesting to see whether this story, in the end, turns against Dean or against Trippi, but I know who I think should get the blame for it.
And personally, I hope Dean wins the DNC chair, and cleans house with a mighty broom. He knows who his friends are now, and his enemies, too.

Maybe it really does all come down to manners

Giving Good Behavior a Sporting Chance Every now and then, Miss Manners get a little..., well,... political, in a polite sort of way.

It's just an impression, but Miss Manners has the idea that there is more rude behavior associated with professional basketball than with, say, national spelling bees.
Could it be the difference in maturity of the participants? The society's adulation of physical triumphs and suspicion that there is something weird about mental success? The cumulative influence of an educational system that deemphasizes disparity in intellectual achievement on the grounds that it is discouraging to others, while maintaining rigorous standards for being allowed to play school games?
Or is it that Miss Manners has not seen enough of either activity to be aware of how softhearted athletic stars really are and how viciously competitive the spellers?
Fortunately for her, it is not necessary to dig into a morass of social issues to discover why people so often behave badly in competitions. They do so because it is only natural, and they have not been required to be unnaturally polite. On the contrary, the belief lingers, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, that it is good to get rid of ugly feelings by expressing them.
Perhaps; but there is still a difference between sneezing into one's handkerchief and sneezing into other people's faces.
The sad part is that it was once the world of sports that did a good job of teaching civilized competition. The very name of good sportsmanship was used in other contexts to define propriety under adversarial circumstances. A situation in which the sides have no real quarrel but are merely testing their more-or-less evenly matched skills in repeated contests is ideal for teaching the kind of restraint that is required to settle serious differences. The restraint involved is key in conducting conflicts -- military, legal and political, among others -- that do reflect deep differences.
It is then that most people have to be reminded that no matter how bitter the contest, the boundaries of civilized behavior must be respected. This is crucial not only to preserving our humanity but also to preserving the possibility of resolving the conflicts and returning to peaceful coexistence. Nothing can be settled otherwise, unless one side is able to prevail by utterly destroying the other.
That is seldom possible, much less desirable, even in outright warfare. Yet that is the spirit in which even games are now conducted. Etiquette rules are tossed aside on the grounds that they interfere with expressing the pure enmity that is felt -- which is exactly what these etiquette rules are designed to do. Far from paving over the source of the conflict, etiquette enables the opposing sides to deal with those sources instead of their scorn for one another.
Miss Manners has never shared the naivete of believing that it is the task of athletes to live their lives as roles models of character and propriety. All she would hope is that they conduct their own business of playing sports in such a way as to again provide their fans, as well as people in other adversarial situations, with the example of good sportsmanship.

Humble pie

Yahoo! News - Bush Admits Misgivings About Famed Phrases
Well, finally -- its not the end, or the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.
"I don't know if you'd call it a regret, but it certainly is a lesson that a president must be mindful of, that the words that you sometimes say. ... I speak plainly sometimes, but you've got to be mindful of the consequences of the words. So put that down. I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something."
This story exposes Bush as a teenager -- one of the characteristics of "teenager thinking" is their idea that they nothing they say or do has any real effect. Thus, they can grump and scowl and scream insults at their mothers, then be sincerely amazed about "why was Mom so mad at me?" Thus they can get drunk and drive, and then be sincerely incredulous that the police think the car accident was their fault.
And so now we have Bush, a grown man and the president of the United States, announcing solemnly that presidents have to be careful about what they say. Well, I guess it only took five years for him to learn that -- he'll grow up someday, don't worry!
It may be just an act, though, because Bush is usually very careful about what he says, so that he can mislead people without technically lying.
UPDATE: This Iraqi resistance video is dated Dec. 10 and refers to the "bring it on" remark in particular. I wonder whether this had any connection to Bush's semi-apology?

Cattle cull?

Added to my update on the BSE story - CTV.ca | Mad cow owner points to suspect cattle feed- comes the discussion further down the story about Ralph Klein's call for a cattle cull -- ie, slaughtering of all cattle over six or seven years of age.
Such a cull would be difficult and expensive and painful. But Ralph is likely right that a cull may be the only solution -- the thousands of animals we now have over six are, I would think, virtually worthless now anyway and their continued existence jeopardizes the perception of safety so important to the industry. How to undertake the cull is also a terrible problem - from the radio discussion I heard today, our processing plants just don't have the capacity to process such a large number of animals quickly, so burning the carcasses may be the only option.
So to satisfy that greater beast, The Market, we slaughter thousands of healthy animals whose only crime was to be born too early, or too late, and we waste their meat while millions starve around the world.
That cracking sound you hear is the hearts of hundreds of cattle ranchers, breaking, as they contemplate the prospect.