In the middle of the night on August 27, 1955, Emmett Till--a 15 year-old black boy--was kidnapped from his uncle's house in Mississippi by two white brothers. They dragged him into the woods, beat him until he was unrecognizable, shot him, tied a fan around his neck to weigh him down, and tossed him into the Tallahatchie River.

On September 22, 2000, a man charged into a gay bar in Roanoke, VA and opened fire because he wanted to "waste some faggots." Danny Overstreet was killed, and six others were injured.

In a new video, Focus on the Family equates being brutally murdered for being gay with getting your order screwed up in the drive through. They equate Emmett Till's savage death with being cut off while driving on the freeway.

These are the people who purport to speak for Christians in America. These are the family values that they espouse. This is the group that is pulling George W. Bush's puppet strings.

The Bush Administration recently demanded that air carriers collect broad personal information, including a traveler's sexual orientation, by threatening to turn planes away from Europe, and the European Union caved in.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff praised the pact as an "essential screening tool for detecting potentially dangerous transatlantic travelers." If available at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Chertoff said, such information would have, "within a matter of moments, helped to identify many of the 19 hijackers by linking their methods of payment, phone numbers and seat assignments."

That's right. Micheal Chertoff just said that the 9/11 hijackers were gay. Or at least that if we had known conclusively if they were gay or not, we would have been able to prevent 9/11. Or something.

The government will retain information on your sexual orientation for at least 15 years (but they leave the door open to keeping it forever):

Although Homeland Security has said it will move passenger information to "dormant" status after seven years and "expects" to erase it after 15 years, it notified the E.U. that expiration of data will be subject to "further discussions."

The data is only supposed to be used for counter-terrorism and law enforcement. Which means that if the army of lawyers at Focus on the Family are successful in overturning Lawrence v. Texas, the government will have a huge forever database of gay people it can arrest en masse. One and only one protection exists to prevent the government from arresting and jailing gay people, and it is in the hands of the likes of John Roberts and Sam Alito.

Even if Lawrence is never challenged, Bush and Chertoff could right now black list gay people from traveling, because there is no federal law that protects gay people from profiling or discrimination.

If you think I'm being alarmist, ask yourself why the government would be collecting information about someone's sexual orientation if they had no intention of ever using it.

A brilliant response from John Edwards' web team:


And it's so easy to put videos together like these--you don't even need a video camera. The Intertubes are awash with images and sounds that you can put together in iMovie or your video editing application du jour.

From the Chronicle:

The speaker said she had "no hesitation" criticizing the president about his handling of the war, but said there were more important priorities for lawmakers -- such as health care and creating jobs -- than the divisive pursuit of impeachment.

"Look, it's hard enough for us to end the war. I don't know how we would be successful in impeaching the president," Pelosi said.

She did note that calls for the president's removal are not coming just from San Francisco.

"I'm not unsympathetic to the concern people have -- I hear it all over the country. People here have said to me, 'Well, people on the left want the president to be impeached.' I hear it across the board across the country. It's not just the left," Pelosi said.

That ought to make the ITMFA crowd happy.

Look, impeachment is only useful if there's a snowball's chance in hell that it will actually result in removal. The impeachniks need to start camping out at the offices of Senate Republicans, and leave Nancy Pelosi alone.

I've heard over and over and over again that the Democrats should impeach the President and Vice President.  Many of my friends - both on the left and in the "center" - say that the Congress is a failure if they don't impeach the President.  My response has always been that unless there's a way to somehow convince 67 United States Senators to vote for a conviction (and remember that only 49 of them are Democrats), then the Congress is better off spending its time on other issues like getting the troops out of Iraq, improving education, making it easier to join a union, and so on.  Still, fervent calls to "Impeach!!" continue, and there's a lot of frustration that the Congress isn't listening.

Well, you know what, the Congress is working on impeachment, and they're working on it hard.  For months now, both the House and Senate have been digging deeper and deeper on the Attorneygate scandal, trying to see just how involved the President and Vice President were in the decision to fire US attorneys in an act of unabashed political cronyism.  Testimony at the ongoing hearings, coupled with unprecedented use of "Executive Privilege" to compel former White House counsel not to speak with Congress, all suggest a huge and probably criminal cover-up.  (Speaking of cover-up, this week, Democrats in Congress will open hearings into the Libby commutation, which looks like yet another unprecedented abuse of presidential power.)

In order to successfully impeach, there needs to be solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing - the kind of smoking gun that Nixon faced during Watergate.  The CIA leak, the Libby commutation, and the Attorneygate scandals might provide that smoking gun after the investigation runs its course.  The Democrats, particularly Judiciary Committee Chairs John Conyers in the House and Patrick Leahy in the Senate, continue to run their investigations despite finding little public acclaim or reward for churning in minutiae.  If you're looking for impeachment, it might be best to show support for these stalwart Democratic investigators.

Even though Bush and Cheney clearly did lie to the American people to get us into the Iraq War, I really don't see 67 Senators voting to convict Bush and Cheney on charges of lying and fabricating intelligence.  But the ongoing investigations on Capitol Hill have the White House scared and stonewalling in desperation.  If the Democrats find impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors - and have evidence to prove it - then impeachment over Attorneygate and the criminal cover-ups surrounding it might become very possible.  Those of you crying out "Impeach!!" it looks like the Democrats are listening.

Would you like to become part of the Courage Campaign blogging team?

We've got news for you: you already are! We've had community blogging for a long time, but starting now, posts to your personal Courage Campaign blog will now show up on the front page, and in the RSS feed. We've invested lots of time and money to make the Courage Campaign a reflection of California. Now it's your turn, as we turn the keys to the front page over to you.

Want to get started? Just go to your dashboard and look in the My Blog section.

Introducing a new feature for the Courage Campaign Community Blog: Tags.

You've seen tags on many other sites, such as Daily Kos, Flickr, and others.

What's a tag? It's like a category, but instead of picking from a list, you get to define it yourself. You can then view all of the entries containing a particular tag by clicking on the tag in an entry, in the sidebar, or in the grand tags list. For instance, here are all of the entries tagged "Media." You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the entries with a particular tag by clicking on the little orange XML icon at the bottom of the page.

Please try to re-use existing tags, and read the hints for more information on tagging. I'll get us started by putting some useful tags in this post (but from now on all the tags you use should actually be related to the entry). Take a look at Daily Kos's tag list for ideas if you need inspiration.

Tag away!

The LA Times reminds us why we need to open a mercenary training camp in San Diego (yes that is snark):

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

   Read More »

Why is it that when Democrats didn't vote for cloture on bills in the US Senate that it was called a "filibuster" by the media, but now that the Republicans are in the minority and won't vote for cloture the bills are "blocked" because they "didn't receive the votes" to clear a "procedural hurdle?"

Of course I already know the answer to my own question. The media reports what politicians say and not what they do. Mitch McConnell says the Democrats are filibustering and the media reports that Democrats are filibustering. Harry Reid says they failed to get the votes for cloture, and the media reports that a procedural hurdle wasn't cleared.

Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Reid. But he's lousy at spinning the media, and these days that's all the coverage we get. In a perfect world I'd prefer Harry Reid's accuracy over the buzz-words and sound bites of the Republicans, but this is not a perfect world. The Republicans, from their place in the minority, are still great at spin-- and as a result the coverage still paints them in a better light than they deserve.