The Dickopath

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Your word for the day from the Manley-Webster dictionary:

dickopath, n. (from OE dick, a penis + Gr. pathos, suffering, feeling, emotion, sickness, calamity): a massively self-centered hypocrite with an offensive, grandiose ego who lacks any semblance of a conscience and who displays a pervasive disrespect for the rights and dignity of others; usually a chronic, self-serving liar, seeking to mislead, manipulate, or overpower friends and enemies alike for his own sadistic amusement or enrichment.

Cf. sociopath, narcissist, egomaniac, shithead.

(I just made this word up.  You're welcome.)

This Week in Trumpocracy, 2/25/17

We are a month into the Trumpocracy, and make no mistake about it, my friends:  the celebrity-dictator Trump is just what he promised he would be, and it is the duty of every true liberty-loving patriot to resist the one-man rule that he wants to inflict upon our country, and resist that evil utterly, whether by great measures or small.  I am old and weary, tired of strife and effectively disabled, but I am doing what I can here by posting reports and news that may encourage some others to do more than I can.

We stand at one of the great turning points in American history, and who knows how we shall find our way out.  Perhaps the first and best thing we can all do is to see what is right before our eyes, speak the truth to our neighbors, and keep on speaking it.  Light a little candle in the darkness, if you can do no more, and keep it burning - we Americans will not go silent and unresisting into the night, will we?


1. Kudos to my trucklady friend June over at The Wounded Bird, who struck a blow for democracy way down in the bayous this week, and justly earned her 15 minutes of fame by breaking into a Senator's self-serving speech:

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2.  CNN's Jake Tapper on the "un-American" White House, which barred the nation's leading news media from a press conference yesterday:




3. Why some former Obama voters voted for Trump; notice that these folks-next-door have no fangs and horns, but are sadly misguided:




4. At CPAC this week, Trump's ghastly eminence gris Steve Bannon admitted that the goal of this administration is to "destroy the administrative state" - which your Head Trucker would translate as "destroy democracy" - in other words, replacing our system of government with the Will of Trump alone - is this not a blueprint for dictatorship?  Yes it is.  Also high treason. Daily Kos reports:

Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.

“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said. He posited that Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history.”

The crippling or wholesale elimination of Federal agencies that ensure we receive such things as clean air, clean water, fair labor laws, fair housing standards, anti-discrimination laws, financial protections, food and drug safety, national education standards and the like, has been a goal of far-right “thinkers" for decades. Their rationale, propagated by corporate and industry-funded think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, has always been that that the existence of these “unelected" agencies represents a mortal threat to American “sovereignty and self-government." This is exactly the line Bannon was peddling at CPAC today. It is delusional, right-wing garbage.

5. A Republican state judge in Ohio wrote a blistering editorial for the Cincinnati paper, excerpt:

The leader of the band of Mad Hatters occupying the White House has already insulted allied world leaders, issued illegal and badly written orders, impugned a “so-called” judge appointed by his own party, and appointed the least-qualified cabinet ever. The first secretary of state was Thomas Jefferson. Trump appointed a big-oil executive with close ties to Russia. The first treasury secretary was Alexander Hamilton. Trump appointed a former Goldman Sachs exec who got rich foreclosing on homeowners. The national security advisor lasted 24 days.

And all that’s just at the time I write this. Who knows what happens next. Each new day is a new nightmare. We are still trying to digest one breathtaking assault on America when another is signed, issued, or Tweeted. All this amid constant lies. Constant. Lies.

I am a lifelong Republican. I voted for every Republican presidential candidate from 1968 to 2004. But I have watched what once was a sane, center-right party go off the rails, first to the extreme right, then to wherever Trump is, which is in another universe.

It’s tough, but we must end this dangerous presidency. Trump must be impeached and removed with all haste. But only Congress can initiate the process. . . .

Basic American values – free speech, the rule of law, separation of powers, even common decency – are unknown in this White House. We now have a president who has no concept of separation of powers, or why we have three branches of government. If he knew anything about the Constitution, he would know the framers envisioned just the situation we have now – a would-be dictator. They provided checks and balances – such as an independent judiciary to protect us from presidential tyranny. . . .

All the above bothers me and should appall all Americans. We must admit we have elected a president who has immediately proved himself to be a grifter, a pathological liar, a mean-spirited bully and dangerous to American values. This not-ready-for-prime-time show is too dangerous to continue. America is at stake.

6. Dan Rather, one of the elder statesmen of journalism, sounded the emergency alarm on his Facebook page:

The time for normalizing, dissembling, and explaining away Donald Trump has long since passed. The barring of respected journalistic outlets from the White House briefing is so far beyond the norms and traditions that have governed this republic for generations, that they must be seen as a real and present threat to our democracy. These are the dangers presidents are supposed to protect against, not create.

For all who excused Mr. Trump's rhetoric in the campaign as just talk, the reckoning has come. I hope it isn't true, but I fear Mr. Trump is nearing or perhaps already beyond any hope of redemption. And now the question is will enough pressure be turned to all those who enable his antics with their tacit encouragement. There has been a wall of unbending support from virtually every Republican in Congress, and even some Democrats. Among many people, this will be seen as anything approaching acceptable. And mind you, talk is cheap. No one needs to hear how you don't agree with the President. What are you going to do about it? Do you maintain that an Administration that seeks to subvert the protections of our Constitution is fit to rule unchecked? Or fit to rule at all?

This is an emergency that can no longer be placed solely at the feet of President Trump, or even the Trump Administration. This is a moment of judgement for everyone who willingly remains silent. It is gut check time, for those in a position of power, and for the nation.

7. Look into the crystal ball - is a military coup in our future? Patrick Granfield's Politico essay, "The Generals Guarding American Democracy," implies a hitherto unthinkable thought.

Bonus:  The New Yorker slyly captures the essence of the moment on its annual Eustace Tilley cover:

The Enemy of the People

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My usual Friday post will be delayed a bit while I inform my truckbuddies of this appaling item: this afternoon, Trump declared the mainstream news media "the enemy of the people."  Breathtaking effrontery!

Oh yeah? Well, I have a much better, much clearer idea of who the real enemy of the people is. Nobody who shoots his mouth off like this has any right to be sitting in the Oval Office.

It would seem that Republican Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe feels the same way as your Head Trucker:

My God have mercy, I have lived to see this day - a sitting president denouncing the free press, which the Founding Fathers held was essential to our Constitution and our liberties - a view which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld ever since. This cannot continue. This attitude has no place in our republic, and no one who thinks this way and spews such fascist garbage has any place in our government.  Such a one is a traitor to all that America stands for.

He must go, and all his fascist minions with him - the sooner, the better. Will anyone second this motion?


Bonus: Scholars might debate the meaning of the word fascist, but here is a living, breathing example direct from the White House last Sunday - Trump advisor Stephen Miller announcing to "all of planet Earth" that the powers of the President "will not be questioned." The panel at Morning Joe take him to task for that dictatorial attitude:




Less than a month in office, Trump has shown his true colors, and they are just what we feared they would be. What more proof is needed?

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Where Are the Friendly Voices?

Ross Murray, Director of Religion, Faith, and Values at GLAAD, writes in Huffpo:

As someone who identifies as gay and Christian, I see parts of myself reflected in the world around me. When I turn on the television, I get caught up in the drama of gay and lesbian students on Glee. I can laugh with a gay couple raising a child and trying to relate to the rest of their relatives on Modern Family. I can cheer on a Chaz Bono, the first transgender man to "dance with the stars."

When I sat in Easter worship this last Sunday, I was surrounded by many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, as well as supportive and affirming straight people. I heard an Easter sermon that acknowledged my existence and affirmed my faith in the Easter message.

However, I still long for the day that those two realities, my representation in the media and the affirmation from my faith, would become one reality. My desire to hear an affirming message of faith being broadcast over television or printed in a newspaper grows stronger as I see both increasing representation in the media and growing affirmation in religious communities. And I am not alone. Thousands of us want to see the LGBT-affirming voices of faith lifted up in the mainstream media. But so far, the media has done little to reflect the new religious reality in America. . . .

According to a recent survey by the Knight Program in Media and Religion at USC and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, journalists, producers and bookers are far from experts when it comes to religion, which makes them return to the same voices that they have used for so long. They tune to "Christian" television to find what the "Christian" viewpoint is on LGBT people. Anti-LGBT groups use their PR operations and sell spokespeople as representative of the religious voice - when in reality they speak for a very narrow viewpoint that is becoming progressively narrower within religious circles. Add in the fact that the media suffers from a conflict addiction and tends to put stories about gay and transgender people in terms of controversy, and we have a recipe for only extreme religious voices being given platforms in the media to reach millions of Americans. . . .

The media needs to stop promoting the false notion that being religious is synonymous with being anti-LGBT. By contrasting anti-LGBT religious voices against pro-LGBT voices with no identified religion, the media has reinforced a misleading and dangerous 'religion versus gay' frame. This frame is misleading because it gives media consumers the false impression that to be religious, particularly Christian, is to be inherently anti-LGBT. Experiences like the one I had in Easter worship are not reflected in the media. The frame ignores religious people who increasingly support equality and discounts the thousands upon thousands of LGBT people like me whose faith plays a central role in our lives.

Pre-emptive Paranoia

An excerpt of what Adam Gopnik writes today at the New Yorker News Desk:

Obviously, this was a big storm with a lot of water and wind in it; if things broke the wrong way, it could do a great deal of harm to a lot of people—and, just as obviously, the politicians had made an intelligent decision not to get caught with their raincoats down this time. (See Katrina.) But the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about—was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. “It hasn’t even started, and the city is already Atlantis,” one of the back seat riders announced.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.

And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. Sirius radio makes this clear in a backward way because it “blacks out” the commercials on the TV stuff they broadcast, not having been paid for them. Right in the middle of being terrified, everything stops and you’re bored stiff for a few minutes—and it occurs to you, as if for the first time, that those few minutes, when a commercial is being shown on CNN or MSNBC, are actually the whole point of the exercise. . . .

The Nightly Bullshit Report

I'm sure a lot of people work very hard to produce television news programs.  But sometimes it does seem a whole lot like this, don't it.  Which is one reason why your Head Trucker doesn't have cable. 

Language NSFW.




Honk to my truckbuddy RPTRCUB who found this first.

The Way It Was

From The Advocate via Joe.My.God:  the 1967 CBS Reports:  The Homosexuals.

Homo = pervert = sick = dirty = disgusting = miserable = doomed:  this was the world I grew up in and remember so vividly.  The attitudes and prejudice and total condemnation that drove a lot of guys to suicide, and deeply wounded those of us who survived - wounds that still hurt and still deeply affect our lives all these years later. 

I didn't see this show when it was first broadcast, and that's probably a good thing, but I do have a memory from just a couple of years later that I want to share with you.

When my father died unexpectedly in my junior year of high school, an older lady I'd never met before, some friend of the family, started a conversation with me at the viewing.  She pulled a photograph out of her purse and said, "This is my grandson, we just buried him a few months ago.  He killed himself with a shotgun in his car one night.  Look at his picture:  he was such a handsome young man, smart, athletic, popular.  I just can't understand why he would do a thing like that.  Can you?"  I suppose because I was nearly the same age as her grandson, she perhaps hoped I would have some younger-generation insight into this unfathomable mystery that obviously grieved her deeply.

I looked at the photo, his senior portrait:  yes, a smiling, goodlooking guy with wavy blondish hair, neatly dressed in sport jacket and tie, the kind of guy who might have been elected class president or won a scholarship to an Ivy League school.  The kind of guy who would have been popular in school, who could have had lots of friends, and plenty of girls lined up to date him.  I had to tell her no, I couldn't understand it, either.

But years later, I remembered:  and it flashed on me.  What if he was gay?  And then it all made sense:  the fatal sense of guilt, the inward shame, the disgust with one's self, the need to hide and pretend, the unanswered prayers, the hopelessness.  The knowing that you would never be what everyone thought, what everyone expected you to be.  The despair.  The unremitting pain.  The one way out.

There was no hope for small-town guys back then.  Do watch this and learn just what the world was like for us gays not so long ago, just in my lifetime; and notice that some straight people's minds have not moved one inch forward in the forty-three years since then.



Some quotes from Mike Wallace:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, isn’t interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His life, his love life, consists of series of chance encounters in the clubs and bars he inhabits, and on the streets.”
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.”
“The church has a great deal of sympathy for those who are handicapped in this way.”
“[Being a homosexual] automatically rules out that [the man in question] will remain happy.”

The men (no mention of lesbians is ever made) who aren’t on camera as representatives of fledgling gay rights groups at the time, like the Mattachine Society, are interviewed in shadow or behind plants, and say things like, “I know I’m sick inside . . . immature.” And then comes the segment on a 1955 homosexual witch hunt in Boise, Idaho, one that apparently turned the whole town upside down with fear and paranoia, with a close-up of an op-ed piece in the Boise newspaper titled “Crush the Monster.”

On a related note:  here's a trailer for the 2006 documentary The Fall of '55, about the Boise witch hunt:



It's available from TLAvideo here.

The Green Revolution, Continued

The Green Revolution is getting into high gear, it seems.  Unrest has been simmering in Iran since the huge protests over the corrupt election last June.  Now things are getting very violent, with police and state milita forces beating and killing protesters - and in one reported case, running over them with an SUV going at high speed through a crowd - and the big, bad militia guys are targeting women in particular, the fucking cowardly bastards.  Unarmed protesters are fighting back, burning police cars and motorbikes, even ripping up pieces of the sidewalk for stones to throw at the security forces.  Sullivan comments on the anti-government outbreaks across the country:

This has to be seen now as a crippling blow to the coup regime. This vivid demonstration that they simply cannot command the assent of the Iranian people except by brutal, raw, thuggish violence, and that resistance to the regime is clearly stronger, more impassioned and angrier than ever before is their death knell. They have lost any shred of legitimacy - and the Green Revolution is outlasting them in conviction and energy and might.

The significance of this day, Ashura, the day Khomeini regarded as the turning point against the Shah, cannot be under-estimated. Its symbolic power in Shia Islam, its themes of resistance to tyranny to the last drop of blood, its fusion of religious mourning and political revolt: this makes it lethal to the fascist thugs who dropped any pretense of ruling by even tacit consent last June.

We cannot know yet, but this might be it: the pivot on which our collective future hangs.

The situation over there is complex, and I'm not in a state of mind to keep up with all that here in the Blue Truck, though my sympathies are entirely on the side of the people fighting against a corrupt, brutal, theocratic dictatorship.  As much as I've blogged in the last week or two about my personal religious convictions, that's a matter for inward contemplation.   As history has amply shown, it just doesn't work well in the long run to try to impose a religious ideology on the workings of government.  Government should be entirely secular:  of, by, and for the people, with equal justice under law.  Putting religion into the mix results in inequality and oppression, sooner or later.

I refer my Truckbuddies to the New York Times news blog, The Lede, for continuing updates on events, as well as Andrew Sullivan, who as he did last summer is live-blogging the historic developments around the clock, with the help of his small staff.  Both provide links to many other blogs and sites that are receiving updates out of Iran minute by minute.

Also of note:  today the White House, in contrast to the cautious statements made by the President in June, has issued a blunt condemnation:

"We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights," National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement.  "Hope and history are on the side of those who peacefully seek their universal rights, and so is the United States.  Governing through fear and violence is never just, and as President Obama said in Oslo -- it is telling when governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation."

However, your Head Trucker is a little mystified over Mr. Hammer's wording:  "universal rights"?  Is that the Next Big Thing?  All my life, people have been talking about civil rights and human rights - what's with this new lingo - or was he just in a hurry, and thinking of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  The adjective applies, however, to the declaration, not the rights.  Am I the only one who pays attention to sloppy thinking like this?

Anyway - the very interesting thing here is the seismic change this country boy is seeing in the way news is gathered, transmitted, and recorded.  When I was a kid, there were only three TV channels:  ABC, CBS, and NBC.  I was in high school before anyone ever heard of PBS.  There was the news on local radio stations, which was usually tied in with a major radio network; and the local newspaper.  That was it.  There was no USA Today, and the only place you could read the New York Times was in the public library - and of course, nobody bothered to go do that.

Now all of a sudden the bloggers - with the help of thousands of people with cell phones and digital cameras - are taking the lead in news reporting, with or without formal credentials in journalism.  And even Facebook and Twitter - which I only heard about last year, and thought was too silly to last - are turning out to be extremely valuable sources and conduits for information.  The revolution in Iran simply highlights the enormous worldwide revolution in communication that's taken place in the past decade.  

Even more shocking - and your Head Trucker doesn't get satellite TV, so I wouldn't know from watching, myself - it seems the big networks today are NOT covering events in Iran.  I'm flabbergasted; how can this be - and why the hell not?  What's wrong with this picture?  It seems just not very long ago I and the rest of the country were watching enthralled as the major news networks showed live coverage of the Berlin Wall's overthrow, the protests in Tiananmen Square, and so forth.  So what gives here?

As Sullivan says:   "If you want actual news, don't switch cable on. Go to the blogs."  The times, they are certainly a-changing.

 P.S. - Do keep American soldier Bowe Bergdahl in your thoughts and prayers; he's being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan and was made to participate in a propaganda film, in which he says he's being well treated.  Sullivan: 

If and when he is released or rescued, we will know the full story. But it stings deeply to realize that the Taliban can now preen as morally superior in their treatment of prisoners than the US under Bush and Cheney - and have a smidgen of a point.

Until his rescue, please pray for him and his family - and for all the servicemembers out there today, risking their lives for us, and for all those military families who spent this Christmas with someone missing, and in harm's way.

NYT, Maddow Slap Obama Administration

The New York Times put out an editorial today on the Administration's outrageous smear of gay people, with the understated headline "Bad Call on Gay Rights"; here's an excerpt:

The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights. . . .

The brief also maintains that the Defense of Marriage Act represents a “cautious policy of federal neutrality” — an odd assertion since the law clearly discriminates against gay couples. Under the act, same-sex married couples who pay their taxes are ineligible for the sort of federal benefits — such as Social Security survivors’ payments and joint tax returns — that heterosexual married couples receive. . . .

There was no need to resort to specious arguments and inflammatory language to impugn same-sex marriage as an institution. The best approach of all would have been to make clear, even as it defends the law in court, that it is fighting for gay rights. . . In times like these, issues like repealing the marriage act can seem like a distraction — or a political liability. But busy calendars and political expediency are no excuse for making one group of Americans wait any longer for equal rights.

And here's Rachel Maddow talking it over with Howard Dean - "You can't talk about gay Americans that way . . . this went a lot too far":

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And this pic from the CBS News blog Political Hotsheet sums up my feelings pretty well right now:

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

I'm just a singer of simple songs
I'm not a real political man
I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran

--Alan Jackson, "Where Where You (When the World Stopped Turning)

Although you truckbuddies know that the Administration's huge, hurtful betray of trust has absorbed my attention the last few days, that doesn't mean I haven't kept an eye on the earthshaking events in Iran, and I hope you have too. Sure seems like CHANGE is about to happen in a big way over there.

When it comes to foreign affairs, I wouldn't say I'm quite as naive as Alan Jackson claims to be in his song; but on the whole, things on the other side of the globe don't interest me nearly as much as things here at home because I do realize I don't know enough about overseas matters to speak confidently about them; and in any case, I feel nothing I say or do can make much of a difference over there.

But Andrew Sullivan has been blogging practically nonstop for the last 3 days about it, as have other sites; and it seems this is Twitter's shining moment. The fascist pigs of the Ahmadinejad regime - he's the guy who came to New York and said in a speech "There are no gays in Iran" - after stealing an election in broad daylight, and sending the religious police out to bludgeon or shoot down demonstrators - including women and children - have tried to shut down internet sites and foreign TV and news services in the country, but demonstraters have organized and gotten words and pictures out to the world via Twitter, YouTube, and other social networking tools. Very cool.

And this might spell a revolution in the way we get our news; because that CNN news Alan sang about is woefully, miserably behind the curve on this. I don't have satellite or cable, but I pulled up the CNN news website last night, and watched a few of their little videos on the situation in Iran - and golly gee, it gave the impression that Oh well, there was some election and a few students got out in the street and yelled about it, big deal.

Something's very fishy about CNN - which twenty years ago was the place to go for world news - remember Tianmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War? But I noticed last summer when they were reporting on the Democratic convention, as soon as a major speaker got done, instead of doing a little summary and commentary as most networks would, they immediately switched to some Republican machete-mouth, cutting down everything that was just said. I thought then something was very wrong at CNN - now I'm sure of it. Which means, fellas, you can't just sit back in your La-Z-Boy anymore and flip on CNN and think you are getting all the news, or getting it right. That's sad - and scary.

And think about the MSM coverage of gay issues too, in this regard.

A reader of Sullivan's has this to say, which is a wake-up call for all of us:

Reading your blog over the past 30 something hours makes me realize why the MSM is really finished. I mean, this point has finally hit home.You are blogging real time events, with descriptions, evaluation, analysis, and eye witness accounts. You are gathering information from a myriad of sources and putting it out there for a cohesive message. CNN, NY Times, et al are merely running an article about "thousands" of protesters. Its a canned message from just a few stale sources.The revolution is definitely on in Iran. And its on in American journalism too.

Andrew says: "And I'm doing it on the end of a pier in Cape Cod surrounded by two beagles and a water-pistol (to control Dusty's howling)."

I recommend you go stay up to date with Andrew's coverage, which is not as light-hearted as all that. It's democracy versus fascism, and it's not pretty, guys.

Forty Years of Love Erased

Your Head Trucker is not a big fan of drag shows; a little bit is fun, if it's well done, but it's not high on my interest list. So I never heard of British drag star Danny La Rue until I read a mention of his death last week.

The contrast between newspaper obits there and here is very striking, though; and says an awful lot about how far we still have to go in this country to win equal respect for our relationships:

But while the British papers all note that the performer was pre-deceased by Jack Hanson, his companion of 40 years — the Telegraph includes a heart-rending description of the devoutly Catholic, avowedly monogamous La Rue being “hysterical with grief” after Hanson’s death — the New York Times and the Associated Press don’t mention Hanson at all. The result lets readers imagine that La Rue led a lonely life. Given the ongoing politics of same-sex marriage, the omission of the news that an archetypal gay performer lived a life of domestic stability is especially disappointing. What a drag.

(From Obit Magazine via Andrew Sullivan)

WTF: The Invisible Gays - again

On this historic day, when the whole queer community in this nation is protesting from shore to shore, all at the same time, in an unprecedented way, here is how two of the nation's biggest mainstream media web sites reported it. Screenshots taken by me about 2 p.m. CST today:

One small spot on the CNN page, which story contained a link to this other story in great big letters on the Time magazine site:

So. What is the subtext, the suggestion given by these two pieces? Two things, I think:

A) Teh gayz are a tiny, inconsequential bunch worth only a very brief mention, and

B) THEY'RE SCARY AS HELL, YOU COULD BE NEXT!

Hmmm. Seems to me we need to hold these MSM outlets accountable for fair and balanced coverage. I suspect that the Time-CNN combo is run by a bunch of Republican bigots; but that's just a guess, I don't know for sure.

Still, this is America, right? I know there are lots of other important news topics that need to be reported today, all around the country and the world. But dammit, our protests, our struggle, our civil rights, our families are bloody well important also.

I remember vividly watching the coverage of the civil rights struggle back in the 60's - the MSM always had a lot to say about those protests.

We need to demand better coverage, better reporting of our cause. As Olbermann put it so briefly and brilliantly in his equal marriage essay this week: "Just because this is the only world we have and the other guy counts too.” (Emphasis mine.)

The same goes for all mistreated groups, not just us; but this is our moment, our time, our demand for justice and equal rights. No one's going to hand it to us for free, guys.

Write some letters, post comments, make your voice heard by the MSM. Demand that national LGBT groups also turn up the heat. Remember this: it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

WTF: Gay is the new Invisible?

Your Head Trucker thinks it's worth noting for the historical record that last night, all during the time of the New York City protest march, 15,000 strong, and afterwards until my bedtime - a click on the main Google News page showed not a single story referencing the NYC march and protest at the Mormon Temple there.

Furthermore, typing in keywords like "Prop 8 protest New York" and such pulled up a whole page of news items relating to the recent California marches, but only two - from Newsday and Gay Socialites - mentioning the New York City event.

Even today, an hour or two ago, I found nothing whatever on Google News' main page about last night's event; and going to both the CBS News website and the CNN website, found nothing but one video referencing it by name, no video, in the lead, then quickly shifting to another California protest about the El Coyote restaurant.

What gives here? Of course the gay blogs are all full of pictures and commentary, but no major news organization has any online coverage of last night's historic protest in the middle of Manhattan??

Something's very, very wrong with this picture. Ominously so.

Not a Reality Show!

Stop the madness! An Op-ed in the NYT by Bob Herbert spells it out for those who can't read the handwriting on the wall (emphasis mine):

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?

For those who haven’t noticed, we’re electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on “American Idol.”

Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.

With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues. . . .

Ms. Palin’s problem is not that she was mayor of a small town or has only been in the Alaska governor’s office a short while. Her problem (and now ours) is that she is not well versed on the critical matters confronting the country at one of the most crucial turning points in its history.

The economy is in a tailspin. The financial sector is lurching about on rubbery legs. We’re mired in self-defeating energy policies. We’re at war. And we are still vulnerable to the very real threat of international terrorism.

With all of that and more being the case, how can it be a good idea to set in motion the possibility that Americans might wake up one morning to find that Sarah Palin is president? . . .

John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America’s ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically.