Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

So, there was this thing downtown yesterday...

The best laid plans of mice and Nea ran aground the moment they were put into place. The idea of meeting up at the Landsburgh Theater instead of the mall? Excellent. settiai, ladymalchav, ponygirl72 & hubby were right there, easy to see.

Me, thefannishwaldo, & suricattus? Not so much. I took us to the College Park metro on the basis that nobody seemed to have "discovered" it on Inauguration day, arriving at the station at 9:00 for a 10/10:15 meetup.

Well, it's been discovered now! The lines were across the station and up the stairs, with people coming in by the busload. Meerkat (that's suricattus, y'all) told me it would be a mitzvah as a local to squirm my way to the head of the line and help people out with our fare machines... and it would have the bonus advantage of making said lines move faster, getting us through. So I duly squirmed and pointed at buttons saying "punch that now" and shouted "IF YOU'RE GETTING A DAY PASS, IT'S $9! IF YOU'RE JUST GOING TO THE RALLY AND BACK, IT'S $4.80 TO UNION OR L'ENFANT STATIONS!" This was surprisingly popular; the guys behind us in line were all "Don't leave yet! Not until you show us!"

It took us an hour to get onto the platform; we were able to squeeze onto the first train that arrived, stuffed as it was, and it would take about another 40 minutes to get downtown. This trip turned out to be one of the success stories of the day. I've heard of someone who got to Greenbelt at 11:40 and finally got onto a train about 1.

Having finally made the meetup, we joined the flood of people onto the mall. It was shoulder-to-shoulder packed on the mall itself and up the stairs of the National Gallery of Art, West. However, there was space on the lawn of the Gallery between the retaining wall and the stairs where you could mostly hear the loudspeakers and sort of catch an edge-on glimpse of the jumbotron, so we set up a base camp there.

Signage was fabulous. Also surreal. ponygirl72's two-sided sign (We have nothing to fear but fear itself the zombie apocalypse / I am a Marxist (Groucho Marx glasses & mustache) was incredibly popular. There was a Waldo with a sign saying "I'm here." There was a little girl in a princess dress with a sign saying "I want my tea party back." There were riffs on the theme like "Give Please a Chance" and "Only Hitler is Hitler." On the more political side, there was "Taxes are good; they pay for stuff" and "Nothing to fear but Fox News." And then there were people in costume - superheroes, lots of Waldos, a couple of Doctor Whos, and a whole lot of "I'm not sure what that is, really..."

Sound was iffy - we got to hear Jon Stewart "singing" with all too much clarity, while it took jumbotron cues to know what Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters were asking the crowd to do. (There were often chants of "Louder! Louder!" to no avail. Apparently the actual rally permit was only for 60,000 and so the space and the volume were set for that. While Stewart said there were "10 million" and Colbert said "6 billion," I'm going with the Guardian estimate of 215,000-250,000 on the basis that they don't have a bias. Certainly they were blowing well over the estimated 60,000, which is why the audience just about died of laughter on Colbert's line "I'm afraid nobody came to our rally.")

At one point I went in search of vendors - we could see people carrying little towels that both Meerkat and I wanted. (We would find out after via Facebook that said towels were being handed out while we were on our way to the mall.) The crush went from thick to nigh impassible as I got closer to the front, so I squirmed my way up 3rd to walk around the gallery. By the time I tried to come back down 7th, the crowd was so thick and so still that I thought I would *never* make it back to base camp! I tried sending a text to Meerkat, but the bandwidth on the Mall was so blown that no calls were going through and texts were iffy. (She did get mine... about 45 minutes later.)

Mad props to settiai and ladymalchav, who had the good sense to bring food. There was much munching of peanut butter and even more munching of cinnamon teddy grahams. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

There was just no way in hell that it would be possible to get off the mall to make a 3:30 meet; I tried texting and later calling raqs, who I really wanted to meet up with after. As it was, we stayed in base camp and let the worst of the crowds shuffle zombie-like past us, then tried going to the front (I was still hunting vendors. Going to a rally and going home with money? So wrong.) settiai and ladymalchav peeled off to meet up with other friends, while the rest of us had a rather tiring on-foot tour of Chinatown looking for a restaurant with a less than a 2-hour wait. As it was, we eventually limped off to Union to say goodbye to ponygirl72 & her husband (who completely defines the strong and silent type) and take metro home.

By now it was 3 hours after the rally had ended, and we still had to let an overcrowded train pass us by on the way out of the city. And I hear there were fistfights at the next station because some people had been on that platform for over two hours and still couldn't crush onto a train. We ended up getting diner takeout and heading home to crash on the couch and watch The Librarian while reminiscing and drinking hot spiced apple wine.

Meerkat's on her bus back home, Mo's ushering, and Waldo's at the zoo all day, so I've crawled back into my pyjamas. I should write a review of Live 34 and do laundry, but I'm thinking that what I'm really going to do is catch up on a week's backlog of Sherlock fic while watching scary movies until it's time to fetch Waldo at the station. It's a plan.

Pictures to come later. And probably links to video of the rally.

ETA: My favorite sign of the whole day? "If you see my friend Amy, tell her Courney's looking for her."

ETA II: Meerkat's writeup & pictures Waldo, ditto

Seen in just about every newspaper article covering health care: Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the lawsuits have a chance. "Never before in this country has the government mandated that a private citizen do business with a private company," he said.

Except for
- car insurance
- pre-sale car inspection
- home insurance
- pre-sale home inspection
- drug prescription sales

and more...

Who knew that legal proceedings could be so entertaining to read? If you poke around my talibangelical/women's rights tags you'll find the smackdown given to Noel "I don't have to do anything in my job that might make me even hear the words birth control" Noeson, and if you poke around the ID tag, you'll find the Dover "Dude, Intelligent Design is too Creationism" Decision.

And now, Judge Land of the Middle District Court of Georgia has handed Orly Taitz her ass on a legal platter. (pdf warning)

Long story short, Orly Taitz has been treating the legal system like a slot machine, dropping in lots of little lawsuits in the hopes of someday winning the jackpot of a judge who agrees that Obama is not a natural-born citizen and thus not legally President. A particular favorite is filing on behalf of soldiers who claim they can't be sent to Iraq because President Barack Obama is not constitutionally eligible to act as Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. [p1]

The spanking Captain Connie Rhodes and Ms Taitz get is GLORIOUS, starting with the Court finds that Plaintiff’s claims are frivolous... Furthermore, Plaintiff’s counsel is hereby notified that the filing of any future actions in this Court, which are similarly frivolous, shall subject counsel to sanctions. [p1]

How frivolous was it? First of all, Judge Land notes that she has already lost this case once, only to have Taitz go ahead and refile it in a different jurisdiction [p2] and that the argument that Rhodes would happily obey any order *except* deploying to Iraq, or she would deploy to a war zone if only GW Bush was still President are completely unconvincing arguments of "irreparable harm."

In the meantime, Taitz and Rhodes claimed, in court, that the evidence against Obama included Obama:
- not being in the country legally, much less being a citizen [p7]
- "might" have used multiple addresses, names, and social security numbers [p8]
- that the infamous Hawaiian short form birth certificate should be presumed fraudulent. [p8]
- being considered a fraud in the general opinion in the rest of the world [p8]

and my personal favorite:
according to an “AOL poll 85% of Americans believe that Obama was not vetted, needs to be vetted and his vital records need to be produced.” [p8]

My favorite of the whole thing is on page 9, though: Plaintiff’s complaint is not plausible on its face. To the extent that it alleges any “facts,” the Complaint does not connect those facts to any actual violation of Plaintiff’s individual constitutional rights. Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so.

Glorious stuff! Do go read it all.

Rhodes has asked the judge to reconsider. Taitz's response was to say that the judge should be tried for treason (and compare her trials and tribulations to Nelson Mandela's).

I've talked about the Presidential election, but I haven't talked about the other big issues being voted on. And with the hoopla done over one of them and the outrage building on another, I want to bring all three into perspective.

Yes, three. Three hot, contentious social issues were up for public ballot.

First
Whichever way the Presidential vote went, either a black man or a white woman was going to end up in the highest posts of Government. And because there are still plenty of people who have issues with race or gender, that did have an impact on the race. To a small fraction, but a fraction that isn't hard to find, race and gender were MORE important than qualifications and campaign platforms.

That's sad and that's wrong, but it is.

Second
Women's rights battles went beyond whether Sarah Palin should or could be part of the Cabinet. South Dakota, already home of the strongest anti-choice rules in the nation, tried again. Because, as McCain pointed out with his air quotes in the debate, the "health" of a women is just rhetorical flair that can mean anything (and he was speaking for a wide range of non-medical people who believe exactly that) South Dakota defined health in Measure 11: immediate major organ failure. Not not even minor organ failure (hell, who needs kidneys when there are dialysis machines?) Immediate major organ failure only. Two years ago it was up for ballot and the people rejected it. This year it was up for ballot and the people rejected it. The whackjob who keeps pushing Measure 11 says she's going to put it on the ballot again in 2010, because the voice of the people isn't enough when the voice of the people keeps damn disagreeing with her.

That's sad, and it's wrong, but it is.

Third
California's Proposition 8 was the most famous of the gay marriage ballots, but it wasn't the only one. Gay rights has been an even bigger flashpoint than abortion these days, mostly because it's been a while since Roe v Wade, but it's still a novelty when a state decides, like California, that the current laws are unConstitutional and must be expanded. Personally, I would have thought that the very notion of a "one man, one woman" movement funded by a church originally founded on polygamy, much less the idea of Utah telling California what rights apply in their state would have been laughed out of the ballot, but I underestimated the overwhelming fear of "Teh Gay." There are plenty of people who don't mind being told who can visit them in hospital and who can inherit and who can peck a kiss in public as long as they don't have to deal with something uncomfortable to them.

That's sad, and it's wrong, but it is.

Keith Olberman was brilliant about this. And unusually for his Special Comments, he wasn't angry, he was so upset that he kept choking up.


Do I want to see Proposition 8 pass? Hell, I want equal rights for all citizens, gay and straight, at the Federal level. But when I look at the Obamas gearing up for their move and the South Dakota measure going down in flames, I can't help but think "Two out of three ain't bad."

If nothing else, it frees up energy and resources to work on that third.

Stephen Colbert with a brilliant twofer: just how stupid does abstinence-only sound when it's translated word-for-word into "abstain from voting" instead of "abstain from sex"?

If you're American, care about women's rights, and have not yet emailed or written, the 30-day comment period on the Department of Health and Human Services Proposed Regulation Ensuring that DHHS Funds Do Not Support Coercive or Discriminatory Policies is still open. (HTML version here.)

I have talked about this before.

There have been many responses to this. None of them include a precise example of what health care would be like under this rule - so today I'm going further back in my posts to show you the future Leavitt envisions: the saga of Neil T. Noeson.

In April of 2005, the State of Wisconsin Pharmacy Examining Board reprimanded him and limited Noeson's license. This was in response to the fact that Noeson had not informed his employer of his objections to providing birth control, which ultimately led to his being the only pharmacist on duty one day, refusing birth control to a patient, refusing to refer her elsewhere, and refusing to pass on the prescription to the next pharmacist she found. She sued. He hid behind the very conscience clause that Leavitt proposes. The Pharmacy Board concluded (emphasis added):

The Wisconsin Pharmacy Examining Board has never held that a pharmacist is not entitled to exercise his or her conscience in the practice of his or her profession, nor is Respondent’s exercise of conscience the basis for prosecution of this case. Rather, this case is about following professional standards in the exercise of one’s conscience. This, Respondent failed to do. The discipline recommended in this Order is a consequence of Respondent’s failure to act as a professional. The Respondent is not being sanctioned for exercising his conscience. Rather, he is being held accountable, as would any other registered pharmacist, for engaging in a practice that departed from the standards of care that govern his profession.

Page 9 of Leavitt's proposed regulation whines the standards of professional organizations have been used to define the exercise of conscience to be unprofessional. Read that again, in conjunction with what the Board actually said. (And note that at no point in Leavitt's regulation mentions standards of care or patients' rights.)

This is not the end of the Noeson story. He went to a different pharmacy, one which had other pharmacists on staff to help women wanting birth control, even having a separate basket for such drugs so he didn't have to touch him... but he refused to talk to women who asked at the desk, refused to tell anyone else they were there, and even refused to answer the telephone lest he be asked about birth control. Unable to deal with that amount of refusal to do his damn job, they fired him.

He sued them over the very conscience clauses Leavitt cites as current legal precedent.

He lost the first case. He appealed. In April 2007, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago handed him his ass on a platter. The very regulation that Leavitt suggests is reasonable and right a Chicago court finds "would impose an undue hardship... an accommodation that requires other employees to assume a disproportionate workload (or divert them from their regular work) is an undue hardship as a matter of law." (page 4 of the pdf)

Leavitt keeps talking about the hot topic of abortion (limiting of which he apparently considers "an important and legitimate social statement".) Noeson refused BIRTH CONTROL, something the vast majority of American women use. He refused to tell his own supervisors what duties he would or would not perform. He prejudged and refused to serve women. He refused to answer the fucking phone in case he had to hear something he didn't want to hear!

THIS is what DHHS thinks "nondescrimination" looks like. This is the test case of what the DHHS wants to make legal, acceptable, and praiseworthy behavior. If you think this is not the sort of "caring service" that you, your mother, your sisters, your wife, and your daughters should be subjected to, if you don't want to see the floodgates opened to yet more normal and needed services reclassified as "objectionable," then WRITE NOW!

Your voice DOES make a difference. Under the stewardship of Leavitt, the DHHS has also come up with such nonsense as assuming and treating all women as if they are "pre-pregnant" and redefining all forms of birth control equaling abortion. Both of these bits of utter nonsense were shot down as regulations after sustained public outcry (as you can imagine, due to some 98% of American women using birth control at one point or another). This is yet another attempt to get the same notion across, and even if we can't get the notion that women have rights through Leavitt's pointy head, we can make sure that his personal bigotry does not become Government regulation.

In some ways it doesn't matter who Obama's running mate is because I wouldn't vote for McCain if you put a gun to my head. ( However, now that the choice is made, it should be examined. )

Most importantly to me, Biden has a rating of between 75 to 100% from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, which makes sense for someone who wrote the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This makes him the perfect person to contact regarding Bush's latest loogie smearing down the Constitution, the upcoming Health and Human Services Regulation to Protect Health Care Providers From Discrimination

Know how the far right likes to frame basic human rights - child custody, employment, hospital visitation, marriage - as "special" rights when homosexuals want them? Well, this little bit of legislative sleight of hand puts conservative Christians in a protected class by making it illegal for them to have to aid the termination of a pregnancy - "termination" redefined as birth control of any sort and "pregnancy" redefined as the moment of conception - regardless of the wishes and beliefs of the patient.

Think I'm making this up? The full text is online as a pdf. Pages 1 and 2 provide means of responding to the Department of Health and Human Services during the 30-day comment period.

I've run a search, and the words "woman," "fetus," "mother," "baby," aren't even in the document. What is there is a whole bunch of whining about how "standards of professional organizations have been used to define the exercise of conscience to be unprofessional" and the health care profession is "intolerant of ... certain religious beliefs" (p 9)

My heart bleeds purple peanut butter in sympathy. How dare organizations set standards of provided care and expect all their members to actually provide it! Page 10 goes on to snivel about "the mistaken beliefs that rights of conscience and self-determination extend to all persons except health care providers."

Everyone else in the world has the choice to not take a job if it conflicts with their personal convictions or to put up and STFU. I can think off the top of my head of about 25 different medical careers that don't ever bring abortion or birth control into the issue - there aren't a lot of cardiologists or radiologists or orthopedists having "conscience" problems on the job. So that whole "we're discriminated against" dog won't hunt. What they're asking for is the right to not do their job AND keep their job AND not be penalized, a "right" extended to no one else anywhere.

Remember that guy I linked to a week or so ago? This is his pet project, only now it's inching from "piss-poor idea" to "law of the land." There is a 30-day comment period. Let the HHS *and* your congresscritter *and* your Presidential candidates of choice hear from you.

My f-list exploded last night with the news that the Department of Health and Human Services is not only attempting to make it legal for care providers to refuse to provide care on the basis of their religious beliefs, but to also redefine most forms of contraception as abortion. I hope that the stink as this splatters across the web and print media will lead to a quick burial and mutters of "we were only thinking about it," just as with their previous attempt to rule all women to be treated as "pre-pregnant." (And if you want to read a rant on the subject, naamah_darling's is the best (and utterly NSFW) with a less profane follow up citing places where strongly worded outrage will do a little good.

There is going to have to be a Supreme Court case about personal rights (as in "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose and your religion doesn't trump my right to direct my wishes on health care.") And we need it soon.

But in a quieter way, sometimes the good guys win. Two library stories. In one, local members of a church group got their panties in a wad because the library computers can (and are used to) access Teen Planned Parenthood. (Among other complaints, sex ed is "pornography.") The library board voted unanimously to keep the site linked.

In the other, a librarian responds to the request to remove a children's book about gay marriage. Beautifully written anti-censorship piece, with a side order of "the Founding Fathers didn't found this country for the same reason your minister told you."

I was not, by the standards of my previous post, a lucky fish. Nor am I feeling particularly better. Feh. Have spent much of the day re-re-re-engineering the Roma afghan pattern. At this rate, I will spend as much time designing it as I will knitting it.


In the WTF is happening to our leaders? section, McCain calls DC "The City of Satan" (tidily implying that anyone who isn't going in there with an UnConstitutional Christian mandate is equally satanic) and Bush vetoes a bill because it banned torture. The torture techniques associated with the Spanish Inquisition and which the U.S. condemned as a war crime after WWII are now "practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe." Really? PROVEN? Funny, I'm pretty damn sure I can point to centuries of proof that torture does the exact opposite, muddying intel by getting people to confess to any damn thing. Rather than rant, I'm just going to point you at nemo_wistar's excellent post on the subject.

If it's one thing that infuriates me more than anything else about this government for the last few years, it's this constant feed of bullshit in an attempt to somehow make us believe that the things we do to "defend our freedom" are somehow different and more morally permissible than the tactics our enemies use to try to defeat us.


calufrax recced this one, and I'm pretty sure it's already in my fic recs tag (how could anyone forget a title like "N is For Not On Your Life, You Horny Little Prick"?), but I'll repeat it: Around the Universe in 26 Letters.

Also, via jooj, proof positive that a list of titles can not only be a fic, but a hilarious one: The Torchwood Paper Trail, a list of standard forms at the T3 office.

Alien Brought to The Hub
* A. For Diplomatic Purposes
* B. For Interrogation
* C. For Observation
* D. For Medical Purposes
* E. For Sexual Purposes (Unofficial, added to the rosters after J. Harkness began working at TW-3.


Dude! A yarn party not that far from my place!

It's not even the end of the primaries, and already the vote-rigging has begun:

New Jersey voters arrive at the polling place, find out their party affiliation has been switched, and cannot vote until a judge straightens it out.

One Democrat was not only told she was a Republican (and had to interrupt a jury trial to get the judge's permission to vote in the proper primary), the system said she had voted Republican in the 2000 primary, which she had not done!

Naturally, not everyone was willing to take off a day from work and chase around to get it fixed, and thus defaulted on their chance to vote.

[P]oll workers told incredulous voters... that the stylus used for touch-screen voting was actually an inkless pen to fill out paper ballots. Even the ballot scanning machine knew better, he said, rejecting all 20 ballots as blank. "Each time, the judges overrode the scanner and recorded the vote," [WHOSE vote, I want to know!] he said. By 3 p.m., only five of the 20 voters had been contacted to return to recast their votes.

And again, people are deliberately disenfranchised.

The first one smells suspiciously like Diebold getting caught with its pants down for previous vote-rigging, but the second one is utterly staggering in its coordinated and deliberate attack on voter's rights and shameless ballot-stuffing.