There aren’t a lot of openly gay Republicans, but there are some. This is not as surprising as it may seem. David Brock in his book Blinded By the Right talks about what it is to be gay inside movement conservatism: they accept it silently. At least they do until you stray from the fold and then they attack you with every vile insult they’d been stifling all those years. So I feel sorry for gay conservatives because their political allies hate them and I fear they secretly hate themselves.

The thing is that sex is one of the most basic things about us. I can’t imagine joining a group that denies one of the core aspects of my being. And what is this done for? Economic libertarianism that the movement only pretends to follow? A fanatical belief in a religion that claims you ought to be stoned to death?

The situation is even more intense when the politician comes out only after he has been in office. In that case, I think that he is likely to change his outlook over time. Clearly, coming out is a liberalizing act. Who knows what the future holds?

Pennsylvania state Representative Mike Fleck is such a man. He is in his fourth term, but he just came out as gay. And he has an interesting story: he is a graduate from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. I wonder what that experience did to him.

I suspect there may be some gamesmanship going on with Fleck’s announcement, however. Brian Sims was just elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature and he would have been been the first openly gay member. And a Democrat. Also note that Fleck came out after the election. That should tell you everything you need to know about the Republican Party generally when it comes to gay rights.

But I’m with Sims, “The truth of the matter is, I’m excited any time anybody feels that they can come out of the closet… [and] that they can be honest with themselves and people around them.” Good policy is secondary. At least for now.

Prachi Gupta reports today in Salon, Scottish farmer trumps Trump. It tells the story of Michael Forbes, a salmon fisherman in Scotland who stood up to Donald Trump and his project to build the “world’s greatest golf course” and amenities costing more than a billion dollars on over a thousand acres of environmentally fragile land in Aberdeen, Scotland. Of course Forbes isn’t the only local residence who Trump has gotten into conflicts with. But he was named “Scotsman of the Year” by a contest held by Glenfiddich and the newspaper The Scotsman.

Clyde Haberman of the New York Times notes that this award normally goes to stars like J.K. Rowling and Susan Boyle. And this year, it seemed most likely to go to the number 3 ranked tennis professional Andy Murray. But no:

Yes, Mr. Forbes; we’ve known for a long time.

Afterword

Here is the trailer for You’ve Been Trumped. I’ll let you know if I find it online.

Here’s a question for you. What’s worse: killing innocent civilians or reporting on it? If you ask the fascists at Apple, the answer is reporting on it, of course. Apple has turned down the app Drones+ because it is “objectionable and crude.”

Let’s be clear here: there is nothing objectionable or crude in this app, except that it highlights an objectionable and crude United States government policy. All the application does is search the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism database for reports of drone attacks. It then creates an incident on a map. Pretty simple, right? But this is a big deal to some people. You might really care if you want to hide the reality of our drone war from the public.

You might also really care if you have received “$9 million in Pentagon contracts in recent years” as has Apple.

Charles Cooper at CNet explains that Apple’s app guideline policy is not public (like so much else about the company). But it was once leaked to the public. And it basically says that they will reject apps that are “over the line.” But they can’t say what that line is. They just know it when they see it.

Apple’s fascistic tendencies have long bothered me, but now this is political. This is important. Come on people: Android is better anyway. Get off the fucking Apple IV drip. It’s worse than heroin!

And sign the petition now: Roots Action

Robert Reich has made another of his ticking clock videos where he explains something complicated in a short period of time. This time it is the fiscal cliff in two minutes 30 seconds:

If you want to understand theater, you should watch the Italian film Habemus Papam or (more or less), “We Have a Pope.” I picked it because the box said that it was hilarious. And generally, I find that other countries do a better job with comedy. In America, they tend to be over-produced and over-complicated. A good example is Le Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game). The American remake Dinner for Schmucks was reasonably funny, but it gets awfully sidetracked on unnecessary subplots and smooths away too many of the character’s rough edges. (Admittedly, I loved Barry’s mouse taxidermy.)

Habemus Papam is very amusing at times, but I would hardly call it a comedy. If Shakespeare had written it, we would call it a “problem film.” It tells the story of the election of a new pope. At the beginning of the film, all the cardinals are casting ballots and the camera shows a number of them in close-up with the voice-over, “No me, Lord, not me.” As I understand it, this is very accurate. Most Cardinals have no interest in being pope. As a cardinal, they have prestige, a good job, and they get invited to all the best parties. They’re Catholics, not protestants! Being Pope means a lot of work.

They finally pick Cardinal Melville to be the next Pope. He is definitely not up to the task. In fact, he looks shell shocked throughout the rest of the film. But not much happens for the rest of the film. The new pope runs away and wanders around Rome anonymously. The cardinals, all stuck at the Vatican until the pope goes out on the balcony to greet the people, sit around playing cards and volleyball. Throughout, Melville seems to be reflecting on his life. He had wanted to be an actor, but failed and so succeeded rather brilliantly in the church.

My take on the film is that religion is above all theater. Cardinal Melville has not lost his faith—it is probably stronger than ever. Just as he continues to love the theater while being no actor, he loves God while unable to play the part of a spiritual leader. The denouement of the film is at the very end, and it shows very clearly how much everyone in the church depends upon everyone else playing their role. The film asks an important question, “If you truly loved God, would you ever take part in a formal religion?”

Despite these important issues, the film is filled with joy. I think it does an especially good job of showing that church leaders are regular people with all their quirks. A good example is when the Oceania volleyball team—which only has three players—scores a point. It is the climax of the volleyball sequence. If the three-man Oceania team can manage to score a point, then maybe God really can do anything.

Afterword

The film is also beautiful. Kudos to Alessandro Pesci (cinematography) and Paola Bizzarri (production design).

Peter Baker wrote a good article for the New York Times yesterday, Criticized as Weak in Past Talks, Obama Takes Harder Line. It is very evenhanded, of course, but just in reporting the facts, it makes the Republicans look very bad.

The Republicans claim, for example, that they have changed: they are now willing to raise taxes by cutting deductions. This is a bluff, of course; they know that the few deductions that really do end up getting cut will very quickly be reinstated. But it goes further than this. Boehner claims that by cutting deductions he can raise $80 billion. First, this is half what the president is requesting. Second, as usual, Boehner won’t say what those deductions are. And for good reason: the White House says that to close that many loopholes, Boehner would have to end popular policies like charitable deductions.

This is the Republicans all over. They want serious, long-term cuts to social programs and in exchange for vague promises of maybe increasing revenue in the future but who knows how. Meanwhile, the Democrats present a detailed proposal and it is a “non-starter,” apparently because it does not give Boehner 99% of what he wanted. (Note: when Boehner did get 99% of what he wanted, he still turned down the deal.)

Baker reports that the Republicans are also floating this idea that Obama is acting like Bush in 2005:

Obviously, this is the kind of thing that Republicans say to make themselves feel better. The situations are totally different. Bush went out to convince the country that his idea to privatize Social Security was a great idea. The country hated the idea before and after his tour. Obama, on the other hand, is going out to boost for an idea that is already popular—even among Republicans. So this isn’t an issue of a president who wins by a small majority pitching an unpopular plan; it is a reasonably popular president shoring up support that already exists.

I hate reading the coverage of this day after day, because it really doesn’t matter. Most likely, this will go into January. Then everyone will freak out and we will get a deal. And that deal will be heavily biased toward President Obama and the Democrats. Because they have the leverage. Because the Republicans gave them that leverage over the last two years. Because the Republicans were too big of dicks to compromise.

The dickishness has not changed, but it no long has that much power.

It doesn’t much matter which side of the political spectrum an education bureaucrat comes from, they want to destroy the essence of education. The reason is very simple: they want to create workers rather than human beings. Children are not taught to read so they can spend time with the greatest minds of our culture. They are taught so they can read technical documents and understand signs that say, “No sleeping in the workroom!”

Ezra Klein tells us that 46 states plus the District of Columbia has passed the “Common Core State Standards” in English. These standards call for pushing kids to learn how to read “informational” text rather than fiction. This makes no sense on a number of levels.

Primarily: reading is reading. I have always found reading fiction more difficult than reading technical material, except that most technical material is poorly written. Everyone understand the difficulty in starting a novel. You have no context, it just starts. I remember helping my mother decipher the first couple of pages of Naked Lunch, when she inexplicably decided to read it at 60.

Regardless of how technical the material, a good writer is always telling a story. So in a fundamental sense there is no difference between nonfiction and fiction. The biggest difference I find between the two is that nonfiction is typically padded. Reading a ridiculous amount of nonfiction in book form, I can tell you that most 400 page books could easily have been cut down to 100. (In fact: note how often and easily magazine features—10,000 words—get whipped up in to books of 120,000 words. I avoid such books at all cost.) Technical documents (e.g. government reports) are far worse. First, they are with few exceptions poorly written. Second, they are excessively padded—often belaboring one aspect of the subject because one of the team members cared about it. And was verbose. But the editor couldn’t pair that down, because such reports are rarely read and thus judged by weight.

By far the worst aspect of such guidelines is that they destroy our culture. Do we really what a society in which graduates can easily digest a government report but fail to recognize an allusion to Shakespeare or the Bible? Where no one has read Proust or Dickinson or Cervantes? Conservatives are always claiming that they want individual rights. But rights for what? To be a cog in a massive economic machine?

Give me poetry or give me death!

Dean Baker noted something in a post late last night. He was talking about the latest Robert Samuelson column over at the Washington Post, Who’s Not Bargaining in Good Faith? Baker does this at least once a week. It seems that Samuelson can hardly open his mouth without making him apoplectic. And with good reason.

Samuelson wrote an attack on the horrors of inflation, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath. In 2008. Bad timing? I don’t think so. I would call it poor thinking. He is very good at sounding knowledgeable and reasonable while spouting complete nonsense. In his book, for example, he claims that the high level of government spending caused the inflation of the 1970s. But then this inflation was fixed by Paul Volcker with monetary policy. Somehow, this is due to Ronald Reagan, even though Jimmy Carter appointed Volcker, and Volcker’s anti-inflation policies were one of the reasons that Carter lost re-election. Regardless, Samuelson’s “keep inflation low and don’t give a fuck about unemployment” philosophy has been shown to be the cruel battle cry of the elite. It deserves more than scorn; it deserves indifference.

In Samuelson’s column, he says, “The Administration on Aging reports that in 2010, 25.9 percent of households headed by someone 65 or older had incomes exceeding $75,000.” This one is a softball, which Baker hits out of the park:

This isn’t the first time that Baker has noticed this disconnect. And it doesn’t just come from Samuelson. The elite seem to have divided the world into two parts: their friends (people like them) and everyone else. Any discomfort for their friends is unacceptable. And no discomfort for everyone else is too great.

There are things that make me so angry that I tend to not even write about them. I suspect that some readers will find this amusing, because I seem to be angry much of the time. And that’s true, so what I just said should be given the proper amount of weight. One of those things is the pretend Benghazi scandal. I have to give the Republicans high marks for tenacity, but this is simply an outrage. There is no scandal in this matter and people like McCain are losing much of their unearned credibility.

An issue that makes me even more angry is almost everything about the Bradley Manning case. The worst that any reasonable person can say about this young man is that he should have done a better job of being a whistle blower. And I agree. But he’s a kid. And he is a classic whistle blower: a disillusioned true believer. Perhaps he should be punished, but surely he has already been punished enough.

The more we know about the military justice system’s treatment of this kid, the more disgusting it is. There is no doubt that the military are trying to send a strong message to any other potential whistle blower: we will torture you long before we prove that you’ve done anything wrong. For that is what has been going on: the military has been torturing Bardley Manning. Of course, it isn’t just to send a message; they have also been hoping that he would roll over on Julian Assange.

Glenn Greenwald published an article in The Guardian Friday, Bradley Manning: a Tale of Liberty Lost in America. In it, he gives a really good overview of the case in a very short article. But he makes a really stark contrast between how the current administration has chosen to dispense justice:

I’m actually quite used to the United States government meting out injustice. The biggest thing that bothers me here—the core of why I find this subject hard to even talk about—is the triviality of the information leaked. This is the information that we classify?! How exactly does a democratic government justify keeping stuff like this from the people?

Many have tortured and killed innocent people while working for the government. But these people must not only be forgiven, we must pretend they never did anything wrong. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission for America! That would be wrong. But a kid releases a bunch of documents that embarrass a few people and document what we already knew that the Afghanistan War was going poorly? Well, that’s treason!

This kind of bullshit that makes me ashamed of our government.