Tom Jones – Burning Hell

The Palm Center, which has done heroic work to get Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell repealed, by studying and sharing how other countries’ militaries have succeeded with open service and by documenting the implications of DADT repeal, has a new website you might want to check out.

The Human Rights Campaign, reliable lapdogs for the Obama White House and their lack of progress on LGBT issues, bothered to chastise GOP Senate candidate in Colorado Ken Buck — on Sunday! — for his remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press that being gay was a “choice.”

Move over, Nucky. The prohibition shakedown game has refined considerably since the 1920′s, but lucky for them the “beautiful, ignorant bastards” falling for they same cheap hustle haven’t.

Members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy in San Francisco this weekend for the group’s West Coast Conference are calling young voters for Proposition 19. We’re livestreaming the students calling voters live from Yes on 19′s campaign headquarters in Oakland, CA.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan is out today with a more measured, slightly more progressive-friendly, but still ultimately unsatisfying take on the foreclosure fraud mess. He does say that the faulty documentation of foreclosure documents from the same banks and servicers that caused the housing crisis is “shameful” – the strongest word I’ve seen from an Administration official so far. And he asserts that nobody should lose their home from a bank mistake, which is nice. But while he lists all the ways in which the Administration is reviewing the practices of the servicers, and forcing them to undergo reviews of their own, he eventually toes the White House line against a national foreclosure moratorium. Here’s his argument:

Father and son, Charles Fried (former solicitor general of the United States under Ronald Reagan, legal scholar at Harvard University and author of Modern Liberty) and Gregory Fried (chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University and author of Heidegger’s Polemos) have undertaken the daunting task of examining the limitations and excesses of modern day Presidential power to gather intelligence by torture and surveillance. In order to reach their ultimate conclusions as to the interplay of law, morality, civil community and political leadership, the Frieds review sources and thought from Aristotle to Machiavelli to the Bible, including principles from epieikeia to “dirty hands” to religious and secular precepts relating to human dignity. They have deliberately kept the conversation, “as wide as possible” in recognition that “ours is a nation founded in philosophy.”

Zenophobia is ugly and it produces irrational behavior toward fellow beings, too often with tragic consequences. Out leaders would serve their countries better by inspiring us toward better behavior instead of falling in with the goose steppers that thrive on bad feelings and the rabble they produce.

In his op-ed today, the normally razor sharp Frank Rich makes the same mistake I keep seeing over and over amongst the chattering classes.

Tax the rich or face worsening standards of living. It’s that simple.