I’ve registered olrr.net to provide a shorter URL to point people to when they want to check out my blog.
Hope you find it useful!
Spread the word!
(Thanks for the great idea, Kevin!)
New Shorter URL For My Radar: OLRR.NET
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Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules Gay Marriage Legal!
SJC: Gay Marriage Legal in Mass.
By Kathleen Burge for The Boston Globe.
The Supreme Judicial Court today became the nation’s first state supreme court to rule that same-sex couples have the legal right to marry.
“We declare that barring an individual from the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts constitution,” Chief Justice Margaret Marshall wrote in the 4-3 decision.
The ruling won’t take effect for 180 days in order to allow the Legislature “to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion,” the court ruled in its 50-page decision. Since the SJC is the ultimate authority on the state constitution, however, the Legislature cannot overturn today’s decision — nor would the US Supreme Court agree to interpret a state’s constitution.
Opponents could fight for a constitutional amendment, but the soonest that could be placed on the ballot is 2006. The Legislature has already been considering several bills, including one that would allow gay marriage, that would grant benefits to same-sex couples.
The SJC ruling held that the Massachusetts constitution “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” The state Attorney General’s office, which argued to the court that state law doesn’t allow gay couples to marry, “has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marraige to same-sex couples,” Marshall wrote.
The court rejected the claim of a lower court judge that the primary purpose of marriage was procreation.
Nice ‘Stop Bush’ Rally In London
Simon Perry was nice enough to provide us with some
Photos.
Blood On Bush’s Hands
Incredible animation which presents some frightening, perhaps enlightening statistics about this senseless war:
Their Blood Is On Bush’s Hands
Interview With Craig Newmark
I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.
Here’s an excerpt (complete transcription below):
A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I’ve done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I’ve adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90’s, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing — the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country’s in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70’s when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.
And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It’s changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It’s changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we’re now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing… another way to look at it is, in the early 90’s we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That’s not bad.
Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?
A: That wasn’t my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what’s going on. To hear about what’s going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don’t save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We’re not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we’re growing.
See You At The Special Registration Protest Today At Noon
British Shrub War Widow Will Be Giving Him A Piece Of Her Mind
My Husband Died in Vain
By Severin Carrell and Andrew Buncombe for the Independent UK.
President George Bush will be accused this week of lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in a face-to-face meeting with the families of British soldiers killed in the war, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
Mr Bush announced last week he was prepared to meet a small group of families of the British war dead. The names have not been officially revealed but two of the invited families have come forward to talk exclusively to the IoS, saying they will challenge the US President to explain why he went to war without a United Nations mandate and why no chemical and biological weapons have been found.
Lianne Seymour, whose husband, Commando Ian Seymour, was killed in a helicopter crash at the outbreak of the war, welcomed the chance to meet Mr Bush. But she dismissed his claim that the 53 Britons killed so far in Iraq had died in a good cause. She said: “Bush has been suggesting that he’s going to put our minds at rest. He suggests our husbands’ lives weren’t lost in vain. However, I’m going to challenge him on it.
“They misled the guys going out there. You can’t just do something wrong and hope you find a good reason for it later. That’s why we have all the UN guidelines in the first place.”…
Quite how his meeting the families of British servicemen killed in Iraq will be perceived at home is unclear: the President has not attended the funerals of any of the American troops killed. Nor has he visited any of the thousands of injured troops who have returned to the US.
Fox Nearly Sued Itself Over ‘Simpsons’ Parody
Fox Nearly Sued Itself Over ‘Simpsons’ Parody
By Agence France Presse.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of “The Simpsons” over a parody of the channel’s right-wing political stance, the creator of the hit US television show has claimed.
In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Matt Groening recalled how the news channel had considered legal action, despite the fact that “The Simpsons” is broadcast on sister network, Fox Entertainment.
According to Groening, Fox took exception took a Simpsons’ version of the Fox News rolling news ticker which parodied the channel’s anti-Democrat stance, with headlines like “Do Democrats Cause Cancer?”
“Fox fought against it and said they would sue the show,” Groening said.
“We called their bluff because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So, we got away with it.”
Other satirical Fox news bulletins featured in the show included: “Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay… JFK posthumously joins Republican Party… Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple…”
While the lawsuit never materialized, Groening said some action was taken.
“Now Fox has a new rule that we can’t do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it’s real news,” he said.
“The Simpsons,” featuring the dysfunctional family of patriarch Homer Simpson and his rowdy brood, is now in its 14th year and is expected to become the longest-running situation comedy in US history in 2005.
What The Shrub Can Learn From The Gropinator — Oops, I Mean Governator
This one’s a little late getting up, but better late than never.
Recall Lessons for the President
By Howard Fineman for Newsweek.
It would be nice to think that the ending of Election Day here will bring peace to the politics of California, and to the country. It would be nice, but wrong. Don’t expect an end to partisan rancor, voter anger and alienation, here or elsewhere. This state’s political warfare will resume long before Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger actually takes office. And the same forces that are shaking Sacramento could materialize on the doorstep of the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave…
But in an odd but important way, the Arnold victory could be an ominous message for President Bush. There is a straight line of voter protest running from Ross Perot through John McCain and on to the Internet-based campaigns of Wesley Clark and even Howard Dean. To some extent, all were or are powered by a sense of voter alienation from the centers of authority in government politics-whether those center are in Sacramento or Washington, D.C. The bigger and more remote the government, the more ignored and misunderstood the voters feel.
Re: CIA Leak Investigation — Shrubsters Will “Organize” Notes Before Handing Them Over To Justice Dept.
Bush Aides Will Review Leak Notes
By David Jackson for the The Dallas Morning News.
White House lawyers will review phone logs and other records supplied by presidential aides before turning the documents over to the Justice Department officials conducting the investigation into who leaked a CIA undercover operative’s identity, officials said Monday.
The disclosure inspired new Democratic calls for an independent inquiry.
“To allow the White House counsel to review records before the prosecutors would see them is just about unheard of in the way cases are always prosecuted,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., speaking on NBC’s Today show. “And the possibility of mischief, or worse than mischief, is very, very large.”