Found a site that is site interesting and who was down at SXSW this week. www.FarewellMrPresident.com.

From their site:

Farewell Mr. President is a mashup—the ultimate multi-platform media project created to allow anyone and everyone to say farewell to President Bush before he leaves office in 2009. Whether you love him, dislike him or have strongly undecided feelings, Farwell Mr. President is your chance to bid adieu to Dubya.

Check it out and watch some of the videos - hey, even submit your own video.

Labels: bush

This is too good not to post. John Stewart discusses the stupidity that is... Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush's Surgeon General nominee.

Labels: anti gay, bush, federal, video

Today in the Washington Post there is an editorial entitled "Dr. Dodgy" and it rips Dr. Holsinger a new one.

DR. JAMES W. Holsinger Jr. wants to be the next surgeon general of the United States. On paper, he's nearly perfect. His distinguished career spans nearly 40 years in Kentucky and Washington, D.C. If confirmed, Dr. Holsinger said, his three priorities would be combating smoking and childhood obesity and improving how the public health system responds to emergencies -- excellent goals. But his prurient 1991 paper for the Methodist Church on what he imagined to be the sex lives of gay men has gummed up his effort to become the nation's top doc.

The hope was that his confirmation hearing last week would bring some clarity to Dr. Holsinger's views on homosexuality. No such luck. Instead, he expressed his "deep appreciation for the humanity of everyone, regardless of their personal circumstances or their sexual orientation." That's excellent, but it doesn't answer the question.

"Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality" is a six-page romp through sexual practices that would be extreme for anyone regardless of sexual orientation. Yet Dr. Holsinger ascribed these practices to all gay men and decreed that the practices marked all homosexuals as promiscuous and diseased. The idea that two people of the same sex could establish a relationship based on love was never broached. Instead, he concluded his NC-17 report by saying the hardware store popularity of male and female pipe fittings proves the primacy of heterosexuality.

[...]

Dr. Holsinger struck a that-was-then-this-is-now pose. "The paper does not represent where I am today," he said. Fine. But the question remains: Does Dr. Holsinger still believe that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy? If the answer is yes, he should not be confirmed.

Read the editorial in it's entirety here.

And here is some more enjoyable reading from some great gay blogs:

Queerty: Ex-Gays Love Ex-Gay Loving Holsinger

Surgeon General Nominee Holsinger Has Broad Anti-Gay Bias

Labels: anti gay, bush, federal, holsinger

Well at least that is what the Under Secretary of Defense is claiming, or not claiming--then claiming.

From Slate.com

For years, the Pentagon has defended its ban on gays and lesbians by repeating the mantra that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service." But as evidence has mounted that gays serve openly in dozens of countries including the United States without harming unit cohesion, the military has grown increasingly incoherent in defending the "don't ask, don't tell" gay exclusion.

For some years, the military has been trying to pass the buck back to Congress, suggesting the gay ban isn't the fault of the Pentagon, which merely "implements a federal law" from 1993, as obligated. But in recent weeks, the military has unveiled several new defenses of the gay ban. Each of them is bizarre, and as a group they make no sense at all.

Yesterday, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Chicago Tribune (registration required) that open gays should not serve in the military because homosexuality is "immoral." Pace said, "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts." He said he did not think the military was "well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way" and compared homosexual conduct to adultery. Today, Pace retreated from his comments, saying, "I should have focused more on my support of the policy and less on my personal moral views."

That would have been a good idea.

Even so, Pace's frank acknowledgement that his opposition to gay service is moral signals a departure from the carefully constructed "effectiveness" argument that the military used for more than a decade. In 1993, when military leaders developed a strategy to prevent President Clinton from lifting the gay ban, some members met with leaders of the religious right, who urged them to oppose gay service on moral grounds. But Colin Powell and other senior officials decided it would be more effective to resist the change on the grounds of military effectiveness. The "unit cohesion" argument was born of this conversation, which argues that straight soldiers dislike gays so much that unit cohesion would suffer if known gays were allowed to serve.

Pace was also contradicting the Pentagon's own brand new justification for leaving the ban in place. According to the military, even talking about gays in the military will undermine the war on terror. In a February letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, Undersecretary of Defense David Chu said that a "national debate" on lifting the gay ban, "with the accompanying divisiveness and turbulence across our country, will compound the burden of the war." As a result of this conclusion, he "question[s] the wisdom of advocating a change."

This is an astonishing claim for Chu to make—that not only must gays conceal their homosexuality to protect unit cohesion, but the entire country must avoid discussing homosexuality or else it will undermine the war effort. By this reasoning, we should ban discussion of whether to increase troops in Iraq and prohibit an inquiry into conditions at Walter Reed.

Read the rest over at Slate.com.

Labels: anti gay, bush, DADT, discrimination, military

Now that the U.S. Congress is in a much better state, a state in which it actually serves its citizens, anti-gay hate crimes in addition to emplyment non-discrimination are likely to pass in 2007. A major step forward for fairness for the nation. This would be the first major pro-equality bill in a long while to pass through Congress.

While it isn't certain whether President Bush would sign this legislation there are signs that he may. Stay tuned...

Labels: bush, discrimination, gay rights, hate crimes

Labels: bush, focus on the family, lesbian, mary cheney

Today President Bush signed the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act, a critical life-line for over half a million low-income Americans living with HIV/AIDS. For years, the Ryan White CARE Act has been instrumental in the fight of HIV/AIDS, giving hope to those living with HIV and AIDS by providing care, services and access to lifesaving medication.

HRC President Joe Solomnese stated:

"We are pleased that a bipartisan Congress and the President were able to come together and agree on the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act and officially sign it into law today," said Joe Solmonese, President of the Human Rights Campaign. "This critical life-saving piece of legislation will help over a half million low-income Americans living with HIV/AIDS continue to receive the medical care they so desperately need. However, as we head into a new year and a new Congress we will aggressively push to ensure that the years of insufficient funding of this program be corrected. If our government is serious about combating this epidemic we must not allow rhetoric to mask itself as real action."

Speaker-elect Pelosi said in a statement:

"But our work is not yet done. We must remain vigilant in our fight against HIV and AIDS, recognizing that the reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act is only one of the many steps we must take if we are to make HIV and AIDS a distant memory. Funding has not kept pace with the number of people with AIDS or with inflation, dropping 35 percent per case since 2001. It is long past time we provide additional funding, and next year, under a Democratic Congress, we will reverse that decline."

Labels: AIDS, bush