Neat!

I love this, even if it’s too conservative when it comes to preserving existing state boundaries.  Why is Nevada so recognizable?  It would be better to see this map reflect concentrated populations only; coastal Washington and Oregon together, for example.   To see one enormous state covering most of eastern Montana, both Dakota and Wyoming [...]

I have to give Christwire credit.  Normally, when people who hate gay people open their mouths, the most trenchant remark they make approximates, “Butt sex!  Eww!”  It’s usually Godshit, because paranoia about the national character and the debilitating effects effeminacy will have on the general population fell away after WWII.
Not so much this time.  This [...]

It’s so fucking irritating the way conservatives, once ejected from running things, speak their minds and–surprise–reveal themselves to have had sensible opinions on controversial issues all along.  Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist thinks Obamacare is vital?  Naturally–he’s a cardiologist (and co-owns a hospital chain).  Nancy Reagan supports stem cell research?  Duh–her husband died of [...]

It’s either pay attention to the news or stay sane today, so since it’s the fourth day in a row of 100 Years of Solitude-type rain in San Francisco and I feel like writing, I’m going to be self-indulgent, apolitical and irrelevant.
In my long-running grip that the 60s were totally overrated except insofar as the [...]

The last time Massachusetts elected a Republican to the Senate was in 1966, the Thermidorian Reaction against LBJ’s Great Society.  Forty-four years ago, that man was Edward Brooke, the first popularly elected African American Senator.  He was a liberal Republican, the first in the party to urge Nixon to resign, and he had sex with [...]

I don’t think Ted Olson, Sept. 11 widower and chief counsel for the winning side in Bush v. Gore, is out to torpedo gay rights by intentionally throwing the set, if you will.  He’s not hoping for a premature Supreme Court decision that hinges on dubiously decent country club Republican Anthony Kennedy voting with the [...]

In its entirety.  Ready?  Go!
You’re probably not gay, dude.  You’re probably a pedophile.  As in:
But then my eyes lowered and I became transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist. And I almost wanted to burst into song.
(I know, sexuality is fluid, people should do what they [...]

A major difference between the San Francisco Bay Area and urban areas east of the plains is the enduring strength of what used to be called white ethnics.  This is probably an east-west cleavage generally, but I haven’t lived anywhere else on the West Coast.  Austin is like that, but it’s a boomtown only one [...]