My comments: I'd bet most people have never looked at gay marriage as...a way to stir a sluggish economy..! But why not?! A wedding is certainly a better thing to spend money on than tanks and bombs!

Apparently W wants to spend $1.5 million to try to make sure poor herosexuals stay married—whether it's best for the women involved or not. But then conservatives will spend all kinds of time and money to prevent other people from getting married! These right-wingers who say they're about "families" are so full of shit! They're for keeping a narrow definition of family and for keeping many other people from solidifying their family relationships. That's not pro-family—it's narrow-minded and petty. All they're really for is patriarchy, it's just not terribly acceptable to say so outright these days, so they use euphemisms like "traditional family" and falsely claim to be championing "family values".

How about seeing the beauty in opening up a long-awaited possibility to tens of thousands of couples to celebrate and recognize their relationships and their families? And heck, how about generating business for airlines and hotels and caterers and tuxedo shops to serve all of these would-be brides and grooms? How about giving thousands of families the opportunity to laugh and cry and have "Kodak moments"? How about something positive and uplifiting, rather than trying to amend our Constitution in order to deny basic civil rights to a whole segment of the American population?! Sheesh!!

Fortunately a new generation of Americans is growing up with a strong "live and let live" mentality, and when today's young people become tomorrows middle-aged people, they simply are not going to go for the kind of intolerance the religious right is fighting so hard to keep alive.

Here's a very interesting site from a (somewhat at least) conservative who is strongly against a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages: Just Say No to the Federal Marriage Amendment.

And here's a great piece from the NY Times showcasing a couple and their desire to marry: Love and Marriage: A Proposal in New Jersey.

What's there to say... It's silly and funny. :)

My comments: I never got a chance to comment on the "PS" added to the end of each day's worth of post regarding W. But of course it's part of the "miserable failure" Google project, plus I have several other links intending to link Bush's name to satire sites.

The title does seem a bit incendiary, however, Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries, and he has some insightful commentary. In his article, "Al-Qaida will do whatever it takes to assure Bush is re-elected", published today in the Salt Lake City Tribune, he points out the fact that virtually every non-US analyst knows perfectly well the basic goal of terrorists like Al Queda: to induce idiots like GW Bush to attack and occupy Muslim countries, in order to ignite the fury of the (oft'-too-complacent) Muslim masses against the West. It's really not complicated. Dyer writes, " It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States."

On the one hand it cerainly is astonishing. On the other hand, it's really not, because the majority of the US is unwilling to conceive of the fact that it's the standard policy of the US to exploit every other country in the world it possibly can, using whatever means it possibly can, to get whatever benefit it possibly can. The average US citizen is utterly unwilling to see her or his own country's international military, economic, and political policies and actions for what they are. Even countries with massive propoganda machines like, for instance, Iraq under Saddam, are probably not as successful in thoroughly convincing as much of their populations of their countries' ultimate rightness in all things as the US population is amazingly able to virtually convince itself! It's really an amazingly resilient hubris...

At least half of US residents seem to be convinced that W is actually protecting us from terrorism. How much evidence to the contrary will it take to convince them otherwise??

I didn't get a chance to post about the US Army War College-published report earlier, but of course it is incredibly powerful evidence that Bush's war has been an utterly disasterous course of action...

I'm not totally clear on what the "US Army War College" is, but it has a .mil URL, so it's obviously a military institution of some kind. How could anyone not take this report very seriously?!

I discovered an excellent progressive site yesterday, "Common Dreams", and read this article, "Clark's Criticism of Iraq War Distances Him from the Pack", which turned me on to yet another recent report, this time by the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace". Entitled, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications", it's an 111-page inquiry into the state of Saddam's alleged weapons. A quote from the report from the Common Dreams article: "There was no positive evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD or agents to terrorist groups and much evidence to counter [it]".

Another excellent article on the report ('Cause who's got time to actually read the 111 pages?! Best to let the journalist do that for me—assuming I can trust the journalist...):

This article goes on to provide some fascinating quotes from editorials on the report from around the world (Saudi Arabia, Germany, South Africa, Norway, Brazil, Ireland, Colombia). Are we really going to stand by and let W continue to make us the laughing stock of the world—in addition to being increasingly HATED by many parts of it?! What will it take already?!

[The Herald Sun]
Sunday bad for Sabbath
21 January 04

SUNDAY should be abandoned as the Sabbath because nobody wants to go to church at the weekend, a report by the Church of England said yesterday.

Most of the population would rather spend Sunday with their families or involved in sport, it said.

My comments: For more information on this report, see this article and this one.

Can we just put W on the Moon or Mars??