Month: February 2004

Lots of blogging people have sustained elbow injuries from patting themselves on the back over how inclusive and tolerant they are with respect to gay marriage since the City and County of Frisco has been issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. This exercise generally involves quite a bit of sneering at the religious right and is generally most intense on feminist and/or libertarian blogs such as Reason Magazine, and on the sorts of blogs that were in favor of tolerating the marriage of Saddam Hussein with the people of Iraq a few months ago. And yes, I can see that this development is good for many gay people and not at all destructive to normal marriages, but the latter is because we’ve already paid the price for normalizing gay relationships and demonizing straight ones.

This process started in the US and the UK in the mid-seventies when the movement to provide shelter and support to violence-prone women was hijacked by a group of people who made a conscious decision to tear down the image of the traditional family in order to achieve a set of goals that included gay marriage, a permanent women’s rights movement, and an anti-male emphasis in most aspects of social engineering.
Continue reading “Del Martin’s Mission”

I’ve been travelling for a couple of weeks, and not posting much, and now so many bodies have floated to the surface it’s hard to know where to start counting. We got your latest JFK sex scandal:

Here we go again?

The worlds of politics and the media were all atwitter yesterday over a report on the popular Internet site, the Drudge Report, that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry – the Democratic presidential front-runner – may be brought down by a sex scandal.

Six years ago, it was a similar item on the Drudge Report that brought the world’s attention to the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky – sparking the scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment.

It doesn’t surprise me that stories like this would turn up, but I don’t much believe it because Kerry looks like a failed experiment in taxidermy. So maybe it was planted by his campaign to make him look more human as he starts running against Bush and not just a Martian, a lunatic, and a robot. But Kerry’s campaign language has always been quite sexually suggestive, so maybe the boy has a secret life for real. It’s interesting that the British tabloids are all over the story, as you can see from the links Drudge Report’s assembled. The American media has too much invested in Kerry to tear him down quite yet.

Comcast is going after Disney, which has created big buzz in the newspapers (Los Angeles Times — San Francisco Chronicle — San Jose Mercury — Los Angeles Daily News — Wall Street Journal — Washington Post) but not that much on the blogs, except for Tim Oren’s savage attack:

Let’s keep this short and sweet. Anyone thinking they are going to merge a content business and a network transport business and add value hasn’t been paying attention for at least ten years.

Tim’s stating the conventional wisdom, of course, but at some point the technology and the marketing will be advanced to the point that a merger like this one is actually going to work. Comcast has a vehicle for delivering pay-per-view, customized programming that the satellite companies and the Internet can’t match, and Disney’s got content, so if this merger goes through and Comcast promotes new services, it may actually turn out to be something. Comcast has a former Disney guy on board, and I suspect he’s got some more specific ideas in mind than the loons at AOL had when they scooped up Time Warner. I’m not ready to poo-poo this deal myself.

Personally, I had a great time in Austin and did some good work in Hillsboro, so life is good.

Matt Welch’s article on child support and paternity is on-line now, at Reason: Injustice by Default. This system really is the major civil liberties problem in America today, in terms of numbers of people affected and the severity of the injustice, so please check it out.

My post on Dean’s Deaniac problem (The Stupid Campaign) has made the rounds, and I’ve encountered some predictable push-back from Deaniacs who don’t like my claim that they’re basically nuts. So let me clarify the claim and then back it up. I’m not saying that everyone who ever thought about voting for Howard Dean is a loon, and I’m sure there are many people who approve of his policies and background who’ve thought through all the implications and simply prefer him to the alternatives, on balance. But these don’t seem to be the people who’ve formed the core of his volunteer effort. The first to jump into the Dean campaign are apparently the purple-haired loners who lack social skills and emotional balance, and these first movers effectively built a wall keeping the others from taking volunteer positions in the campaign.

This is evident when you read the following account of Caucus Night in Iowa on the Daily Kos, a notorious far-left blog, by Dean supporter Tom Schaller:

At Precinct #63, which caucused at the same, East High School as Precinct 37, there were ample Dean signs. The precinct captains had the super-looking yellow T-shirts that with blue lettering that read “Dean Precinct Captain, January 19, 2004.” On the back it read “It starts here, it starts now.” The Dean campaign had not one, not two, but three observers in the room. Amazingly, Kucinich had two, but neither Kerry nor Edwards nor Gephardt had any. But so what? What counts are the people in the caucuses, not the ones watching from the sidelines.

More damning, the Dean precinct captain on the floor was ineffective and diffident. I watched with amazement as a more-motivated, more-mature Edwards captain named Susan Voss (sans T-shirt, sans sideline coaches) went over to the Gephardt folks in Precinct 63, who at that point had only seven members but needed nine for viability. Susan sat down at their table, looked them in the eye, appealed to them about how Edwards is an “articulate, bright, caring person.” You can tell not only that she meant it, but that she could personalize it. She didn’t have any training, and it showed – it showed as authentic, that is.

Then, with grace and aplomb, she got up and said she would make room so a guy named Arturo, from the Kucinich group (also non-viable, and hoping to move Gephardt’s people to them to achieve viability), could have his turn.

Meanwhile, the Deanies are sitting with their hands folded. They are not even talking to each other. No comity, no motivation. The precinct captain eventually comes over, unsure of what precisely to do with himself or how to speak to people. The Geppies are still sitting at the school library’s tables at the far end of the room.

The Dean captain meanders over, stands over the Geppies, providing physical distance that is conveyed in a non-verbally and dismissive way. Worse, his main message is little more than, “C’mon, don’t you want to join us?” or “Are there any questions or issues you have about the Governor?” The Geppies are literally staring at his navel, because it’s hard to make eye contact with somebody whose head is three feet over your own with craning your neck.

There were six delegates to be assigned by the 60+ people who turned out at Precinct 63. Dean had 16 of the caucus-goers at the start, and ended up with 14. Kerry didn’t budge much, but Edwards gained strength. Gephardt managed to cobble together the two defections from Kucinich he needed, and got one delegate, as did Dean and Kerry. But Edwards left with two, and he can thank the dynamism, assertiveness and tact of Susan Voss for that second delegate.

No training, but none needed.

Of course, you can’t teach basic social skills to your volunteers in a couple of hours, so perhaps the final lesson about the Dean Campaign was that it was always an illusion, built on a foundation of overblown promises, wild claims, and ferverish expectations, like the Dot Com Bubble.

Howard Dean looked to me like a much better candidate before he met the Internet than he ended up being after he was Trippi-ized, so it’s kinda sad that he’ll go off into the sunset as one of those “we hardly knew you” guys. But don’t blame the media for this, blame Howard and the Internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog.