Prop 8 in California

We yield the floor to Andrew Sullivan:

Heart-breaking news this morning: a terribly close vote has stripped gay couples in California of their right to marry. The geographic balance shows that the inland parts of California voted for the Proposition and the coast and urban areas voted against it.

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It’s a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California’s constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama’s luke-warm opposition didn’t help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

But I realize I am not shattered. My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others. One day soon, it will be accepted by a majority. And this initiative in California can and will be reversed, as California’s initiatives are much more fluid than those in other states; and the younger generation is overwhelmingly - 2 to 1 - in our favor. The tide of history is behind us; but we will have to work harder to educate people about our lives and loves and humanity.

I live in Missouri, whose good citizens saw fit to enshrine this kind of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the state constitution four years ago. What happened yesterday in California is as vindictive as what happened in my own state - and as futile. The recognition of simple equality that eventually undermined anti-miscegenation laws - for which my wife and I are understandably grateful - will bring the basic human right of marriage to gay couples, and one day we will look back in bafflement on a time when this was considered an issue.

But it’s going to take more time, and more words, and more work - and less caution from leaders who claim hope and inclusion as part of their mandates. President-elect Obama: take note.

“Invalid node structure”

The hard drive in my beloved white MacBook gave up the ghost last week. The night of the gizmo’s demise saw me shutting down the laptop as usual and looking ahead to a good night’s sleep, only to be met with the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. I had seen the multi-colored wait cursor many times before - a sign of “processor-intensive activity,” a euphemism for “yo’ shit be all locked up, homie” - but never for such an extended period of time. In a fit of irritation, I forced the Mac to shutdown and trudged off to bed.

The next morning, I pressed the power switch, waited several minutes as the laptop churned away, then found myself staring at a black screen with dire messages. The take-home phrase: “invalid node structure.”

“That can’t be good,” I said.

Try as I might, I was unable to resuscitate the failed drive. Apple’s Disk Utility? Useless. (Does Disk Utility ever actually fix a problem?) The much-vaunted DiskWarrior took hours of grinding to tell me the same thing: no sale, no luck. (I was lucky in one sense; the program could have taken weeks to report that it crapped out, as has happened to some.)

It finally became clear that the files on the hard drive - documents, images, movies, music - were irretrievable. Interestingly, this left me less concerned than I had expected. Much of what I produce in daily computer activities - not all, but much - is stored up in the cloud: sitting on this or that server, whether at Google or Photobucket or Steadfast Networks. And the notion of simply starting fresh with a cleaned-out, reformatted drive seemed appealing in many ways. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that that cleaned-out, reformatted drive would have to be another drive altogether, as all attempts to reformat the drive also ended in failure. This was a simple case of failed hardware. Time to go shopping.

A friend at work directed me to Other World Computing (”serving the Mac Universe since 1988″). I browsed OWC’s selection of 2.5″ serial ATA drives and settled on a 200 GB Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 drive with a 16 MB cache. It meant a nice increase in storage from the original Fujitsu 80 MB drive, and cost under $90 even with two-day shipping.

The drive arrived yesterday, Election Day. Normally, I would have immediately set to work on installing it, but prior obligations - an appointment with a sales rep from a home remodeling company, and an election night party - delayed the procedure until Barack Obama made his triumphal address at Grant Park. With the uplifting words of our president-elect ringing in my ears, I swapped out the old drive for the new. Then I installed the Leopard Mac OS X, and a half-hour later I had a working laptop once more. I activated Software Update to being various programs up to current editions and went to bed. (I have got to stop doing these chores late at night.)

This morning, my MacBook was once more ready to serve. It’s awfully zippy, too; don’t know if that’s because of the hard drive cache, or if it’s because the drive isn’t burdened with pesky files and programs. Whatever. Time to start anew - and to implement a backup routine for the machine, because you never know.

Stupid human tricks

I cook. A lot. I enjoy cooking. Mostly, I enjoy cooking for M, but increasingly I have come to enjoy cooking for its own sake. Incidentally, this post has nothing to do with cooking; I mention the activity only because there are days when even dedicated home cooks don’t wanna do it, and this day in question was such a day. M felt likewise, and we mulled over our choices of take-out food. We decided on pundit David Brooks’ lodestone of Real American Culture, Applebee’s. I planned to pay for the meal in cash; as both of us were tapped out, I decided to stop by our bank on the way and hit the ATM.

An uneventful drive ensued, and I pulled up alongside the ATM. I withdrew my wallet and removed the ATM card…and then performed a remarkable stunt. Suddenly and unaccountably clumsy with the card, I somehow flipped it into the air. The card followed a short arc, over and down, falling beside the parking brake in the car’s center console. By that, I mean the card landed on edge, directly on the gap between the brake lever and the surrounding frame, a space barely wider than the thickness of the card itself. The card threaded that space and vanished, disappearing into the depths of the console, beneath the console, like a quarter vanishing into the coin slot in a vending machine.

I gasped. I sat for a moment, literally slack-jawed. Then I swore like a particularly irate longshoreman faced with increased union dues. The gap through which the card disappeared was far too small for my fingers or any tool to which I had ready access, and the console seemed all of a piece - molded plastic - allowing no ingress.

And on top of that, my food was getting cold at Applebee’s.

I left the bank and drove to the restaurant, grumbling all the way. (This was after having surveyed the driveway beneath the car to make sure the card hadn’t simply fallen through and onto the ground, as might have happened had I been driving a Flintstone mobile.) I paid for the food - with a credit card. I drove home and entered the house where M awaited.

“Your husband did something stupid,” I told her.

M listened patiently to my rant, commiserating as appropriate. Then we ate. In the meantime, darkness fell, and with it the outside temperature. I decided to wait until the next morning to attack the car console.

I awoke that morning with visions of an expensive trip to the auto dealer. “Yeah, we can pull that console,” I imagined the mechanic telling me, “but we’re gonna need a special console puller from Canada. Gotta special order it. It’ll set you back about $2500.” I shuddered and got out of bed.

I was home from work that day with an annoying head cold, so I drove M to work. After returning home, I drank a cup of coffee, then went out to the car to survey the problem. The console looked as impregnable as it had the day before. No visible nuts or bolts to remove. At length, I decided that I might avoid costly service charges by cutting a hole through the bottom of the storage compartment and gaining access that way to the console’s innards.

I opened the compartment and removed the contents, the kind of detritus that accumulates in such a space - a couple of forgettable music cassettes, some loose change, some wadded tissues. Once these obstructions had been cleared away, I could see that the bottom of the compartment was made of a different material than the plastic of the overall console. It seemed to be lined with textured rubber or vinyl. Even more interestingly: the bottom of the compartment seemed removable! I pried with fingernails for a grip of the compartment floor and pulled it up and away, revealing a dark space with mysterious rods on the floor. These I paid little attention; instead, I reached inside the space and forward, groping until I felt a thin piece of plastic. The card! It took some twisting and turning to orient the card properly as I pulled it back toward me, but moments later I met with success. “Ha!” I exclaimed to no one at all.

And, uh, the end.

Note: It did not occur to me during this sad episode - though it did just now - that the car’s owner’s manual might have clued me in to the false floor in the storage compartment. Might have. I’ll have to check. My only defense for not doing the standard RTFM bit is that I was consumed with brain-paralyzing rage at the time.

Darcy Burner call to arms

Back in early July, I asked readers to lend some support to Seattle-area Congressional candidate Darcy Burner after she lost her home to a fire. She’s rebounded from that to actually take the lead in the race, but she’s facing fierce opposition from the local powers-that-be. I now yield the floor to the great and powerful Kos:

Freaked out at the possibility of Darcy Burner winning her seat, a whole host of unsavory characters have suddenly piled on:

Third party groups are dumping hundreds of thousands into the district.

Reichert’s media buyer has given the candidate an illegal $500,000 loan to saturate the airwaves with anti-Burner attack ads.

The Seattle Times gleefully ran a bullshit story about Darcy lying about her Harvard degree. The paper has now been forced to backpedal furiously. Now watch the paper ignore Reichert’s own lies about his college degree.

Washington Monthly alum Amy Sullivan wrote in Time how us dastardly bloggers were sinking Burner’s chances.

Republicans claim, and the local media parrots, charges that Burner is funded by out-of-state liberal wackos (that’s us), when Reichert gets even more of his money from out of state. And his doesn’t come from small-dollar donors, but corporate interests and lobbyists.

While the NRCC is pulling back from most of its targeted races, this is one of the very few in which they remain fully engaged.

Yet throughout it all, Darcy has taken a small lead in the race.

Look, here’s the deal: The local media and the local political establishment see themselves as kingmakers. They get to decide who sinks or swims in their areas of influence. Then along comes Darcy Burner, thinking she can crash the gates and get elected for office in the district, and the local elites are pissed. So they conspire with Reichert, a supposed local hero, to dish all sorts of crap about Darcy and bury Reichert’s dirt.

We’re winning this race, but they’re throwing EVERYTHING plus the kitchen sink at Darcy. If we want to win this thing, we’ve got to get her back and push back. We’ve got to leave everything on the road.

Right now Darcy is about $350,000 behind Reichert. I’m not going to pretend that we can raise that kind of money quickly, but can we cover $50,000 of that? Can we help Burner fight against the smears from the state and national GOP?

I’ve given Darcy $1,000 already. I’ll match the next $1,300 pledged to Darcy in the comment threads and max myself out. My wife will kill me, but like I said, we’ve got to leave everything on the road. Join me, and let’s fight the local media elites, the local Republicans, the national Republicans, the vicious third-party groups that have their sights set on taking Darcy down.

Give to Darcy so she can fight back. And if you live anywhere near her district (and I know that’s a lot of you), please volunteer.

We’re starting this fundraiser with Darcy at $200,000 on our O2B page. Let’s get her to $250,000.

Update: We’re at almost $10,000 in 30 minutes. Nice!

Little donations count, too! If you can throw some support her way, it could really help her maintain the lead between now and Election Day.

“Hit A Jew Day”

First they came for the tall people, and then they came for the Jews. Today’s give-you-pause headline, courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Parkway West Middle students to be punished for ‘Hit A Jew Day.’”

Four or five Parkway West Middle School students will be disciplined after administrators found out this week that they designated a “Hit A Jew Day” at the 850-student school.

Principal Linda Lelonek learned Monday evening that her sixth-graders had started an unofficial “spirit week” last week.

The students started with “Hug A Friend Day,” moved to “High Five Day,” “Hit A Tall Person Day,” and then, finally, this Monday, to “Hit A Jew Day,” representatives of the Parkway School District said.

The students generally were not being violent, Lelonek said, but instead “tapping” their peers.

“It was almost like a tag thing,” Lelonek said. “But then it changed.”

She now knows of three or four students who were slapped; none told school officials about being hit. “They said, ‘We were just playing,’” she said.

Sure, sure. It always starts out as “just playing.” First it’s taps, then it’s slaps. Next thing you know, it’s Kristallnacht.

Props to the principal at Parkway West Middle School for the timely intervention. Looking forward to hearing about that extra-special Holocaust lesson coming later this year.

Nixon’s the one

My big concern about the 2008 Republican gubernatorial stakes in Missouri was that Sarah Steelman would win the nomination. When the state treasurer lost the bitterly contested primary to US Rep. Kenny Hulshof, I sighed in relief. “Jay Nixon’s got it,” I said.

From the outset, Steelman was a candidate who should have appealed to the GOP base in Missouri. Anti-tax, anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, anti-immigration. Pro-mandatory Pledge of Allegiance recitation in schools. The official Republican apparatus favored Hulshof and tried to pressure Steelman out of the race. This helped underscore Steelman’s stance as a outsider unafraid to take on her own party. She blasted the congressman as one of those, you know, Washington types, while touting her own “Rolla values.” In the end, she lost to Hulshof by fewer than 18,000 votes.

Incidentally, it took Steelman a good five weeks to get around to endorsing Hulshof as the GOP nominee - and rather half-heartedly at that.

What are the odds that the Missouri GOP would like a do-over on that race? Hulshof has consistently trailed Attorney General Nixon in polls, and the chances of a major shift are all but nonexistent:

Democrat Jay Nixon, the state attorney general, enjoys a comfortable lead in a handful of major polls with anywhere from 52 to 56 percent of the vote. Hulshof trails badly, anywhere from 34 to 39 percent. Hulshof also trails in money. At the start of this month, Nixon had $3.2 million dollars to spend. Hulshof had $1.2 million. Nixon has out raised Hulshof almost two-to-one.

Ouch. A big problem for Hulshof is that he can be charitably described as nondescript. Basically, he’s this year’s Jim Talent: a reliable follower of the GOP party line - having voted with his colleagues 92.6% of the time in the previous Congress - but generally indistinguishable from the herd. If Hulshof was a color, it would be elephant gray. That serves him ill in a time when the national Republican brand has taken a severe beating. Couple that with wide concerns over the economic downturn, both nationally and here in Missouri - a topic on which Nixon has repeatedly labeled Hulshof as out of touch - and Hulshof finds himself at a decided disadvantage.

While it’s hard to say definitively that Steelman would have fared better as the Republican nominee, it’s tempting to imagine a pairing of Steelman and GOP veep nominee Sarah Palin in joint appearances in the heart of the Show Me State. “Sarah and Sarah” with families in tow, a current governor and a gubernatorial candidate, smiling and bolstering each other as feisty outsiders while throwing red meat to appreciative crowds. It’s too easy to visualize, isn’t it? Even apart from that, however, Steelman would likely have been viewed by conservatives as a fresh face, untainted by all that Washington stuff, with a greater claim on some levels to being an agent of change than Hulshof could ever manage.

It’s rather likely that Missouri Republicans missed a bet here. Too bad for them, eh? In the meantime, I am glad to see that my chosen candidate, Jay Nixon, seems headed for the governor’s manse in Columbia.

A message from Leon

Leon, former Garden Cat and stray, asked me to pass along this message:

TEH GUY TUK DOWN TEH PAGE DAT OFFERD ME AS PET CUZ HE AN TEH LADY DECIDD 2 KEEP ME. SO I HAZ HOME NOW. I LIEK TEH GUY AN TEH LADY AN WILL BE TEH BEST KAT EVR.

I TAEK NAP NOW, K?

Okay.

Obama in St. Louis

This past Saturday, St. Louis entertained a gentleman caller and a few of his closest friends.

An estimated 100,000 people attended. A hundred thousand. In. Saint. Louis.

The population of St. Louis proper is just under 354,000.

Note the domed building in the far background. This is the Old Courthouse, notable for being the venue of the Dred Scott trial. You may infer for yourself the historical ironies at work.

No, I did not attend the rally, as I am allergic to crowds and to cheerful, hopeful, optimistic political enthusiasm in general. I did receive this souvenir, however.

Hmm. This could be worth something on eBay someday. Now that’s change we need.

So long, Mr. Blackwell

NY Times: Annoying fashion scold consigned to Hell. Satan will regret this for all eternity.

Beefeaters Salmon Treats

Riding herd on six household felines is hard work, 24/7. You need a lot of tools to maintain kittycat harmony; high on the tool list are tasty treats (or as we sometimes call them, fish-flavored bribes). We have a vast array of snackables in the pantry. Variety is necessary because the cats are so damned finicky. “Oh, I don’t like this. I may have loved it yesterday, but now it smells like poo.” Nice.

Thanks to a tip from a feline-loving friend, however, we have a treat that the kitties find hard to resist: Beefeaters brand freeze-dried salmon.

The cats come a-runnin’ when we break out the Beefeaters! Five of our six charges are helpless before the treat. Leon, for some reason, turns up his nose at it every time. Oh, well; can’t please everybody.

Here’s a clear picture of the container.

As Kitty Bloggy points out, the salmon treats come in big chunks and tend to crumble into salmon-flavored dust (which is great sprinkled on cat food, or so I’m told). M takes pains to carefully slice the big pieces into smaller bite-sized portions, a must if you want one container to last more than a couple of days.

Beefeaters also sells a cod-flavored variety. Oddly, the salmon version is always low in supply or else sold-out when I visit PetSmart, but the containers of cod are always, er, plentiful. Hmm. The PetSmart buyers may want to take a look at that.

Alas, this stuff doesn’t come cheap. The standard two-ounce container (yes, it’s light) costs nearly seven bucks a throw. Due to the popularity of the salmon flavor, we make a point of purchasing three tubs at a time. It wouldn’t do to run out.

You know, they smell so good that I have been tempted to try them myself. I haven’t, though; for one thing, the cats would severely disapprove.

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