I'm sorry for what happened on Saturday. I'm also sorry for the Sunday night texts, as well. They were sent out of frustration. They were inappropriate. They were adolescent. It was absolutely wrong for me to send them.
I could address every point of your email and recount all the times I've felt injured by you, but it would serve no purpose. It would serve no purpose because any injury I've endured was unintended by you. More to the point, my injuries have been self-inflicted. I have tried to convince myself that friendship with you is possible. It's not. My desire to help you has many sources - most legitimate - but I have denied certain emotional reasons in the hope that altruism and the honest desire to see you free from your struggle would over-shadow my insane romantic desires.
I'm not _____. I don't have an agenda based on how I picture MY life. But nor am I a potted plant. I have feelings, facts be damned.
I remember writing a letter to my parents after first arriving in San Francisco 19 years ago. In describing my affection for my new neighborhood, North Beach, I recall writing about how I awoke to the smell of coffee beans roasting at the Graffeo Coffee Roasting Company every morning, which reminded me of Saturday mornings at my grandmother's house when I was a child -- the smell of burnt toast, and all the happy feelings of childhood I had associated with that memory.
I've briefly written about this before, but the incident -- the memory and its re-telling (now and when I first wrote about it to my parents) -- has taken on a greater significance to me. It's unsettling to realize how many of my experiences have gone unexamined and simply accepted -- and relayed as anecdote, charming or otherwise.
I've come to many things late in life. So be it...this is my "Madeleine Moment."
For hours, the words come pouring out of Abu Omar as he describes his years of torture at the hands of Egypt's security services. Spreading his arms in a crucifixion position, he demonstrates how he was tied to a metal door as shocks were administered to his nipples and genitals. His legs tremble as he describes how he was twice raped. He mentions, almost casually, the hearing loss in his left ear from the beatings, and how he still wakes up at night screaming, takes tranquilizers, finds it hard to concentrate, and has unspecified "problems with my wife at home." He is, in short, a broken man.
I wonder if Dominick Dunne and Ted Kennedy are in proximity to one another right outside the Pearly Gates? If they are, I'll bet Dominick is giving St. Peter an earful regarding Kennedy's impending entrance into heaven.
President Barack Obama guaranteed on Thursday that health care reform will be achieved, and he stuck by the public option as his preferred choice for revamping the insurance market.
In an interview with Philadelphia-based radio talk show host and MSNBC analyst Michael Smerconish, Obama continued to talk about his desire to bring Republican lawmakers on board. He also chastised, ever so slightly, the press and progressives for getting "a little excited" in their suspicions that he was abandoning the public plan. "Our position hasn't changed," he said.
During the presidential campaign, one of then-candidate Obama's oft-spoken themes was that it was time to turn the page. To get beyond the partisan politics of the past and forge a new, post-partisan way forward, beyond the rancor of business as usual in Washington.
One of the most horrifying scenes in the movie The Shining is when Shelly Duvall's character, Wendy, discovers that her novelist husband Jack (played by Jack Nicholson), who has been ostensibly working on his novel, discovers reams and reams of paper with the sentence, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." She turns page after page after page of paper to discover the same words written over and over and over again, albeit in different styles.
Health Care Reform is taking a back seat as post-racial President Barack Obama meets with Henry Louis Gates (still sporting inked fingers from his recent booking), Sgt. James (Yo Mama) Crowley, Vice President (Can I call you Joe?) Biden, and Spuds McKenzie for a few brews and a walk down memory lane.
You won't be seeing Nancy Pelosi sporting the pantsuit look made famous by Hillary Clinton in the near future. Why, you ask? Because the pants will show off a somewhat unattractive (for a woman) bulge that is growing between the legs of the House Speaker and members of congress, in general. Yes, the Congress is beginning to grow "a pair."
[Alchohol Alert -- for Lauren S's benefit, if she even continues to lurk at this site. Truth be told, a couple of (2) Maker's Mark Mahattans, up. And Lauren, no sex -- although a very cute, albeit partnered, young man was checking me out...I have my standards].
I moved from Pittsburgh, PA to San Francisco in January of 1992. I thought my life was going to be soooooooooooo different. In a word, normal (God, I hate that word as much as I hate Andrew Sullivan -- which is a considerable amount)...or, at the very least, different than if I had stayed in Pittsburgh. Nineteen Ninety-Two was a breakthrough year, and not just for me. It was the year, 17 years ago, that the nation finally put a Democrat back in the White House. Not only did this country elect a Democrat, but one who promised to, with a stroke of his pen, end the ban on gays to serve openly in the military. That was 17 years ago.
Seventeen years ago.
Jack's Smirking Revenge was what...10 years old? Nine?
Two same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses as a result of Proposition 8 filed [a] challenge in federal district court in San Francisco. The suit charges that Proposition 8 violated federal due process and equal protection guarantees, issues that were not raised before the California Supreme Court
Guess who won't be defending Prop 8 in the proceedings. The Attorney General of the State of California, that's who.
Instead of killing abortion doctors, pro-life nuts should simply render the doctor to a state like Mississippi or Arkansas, illegally detain him, beat and then waterboard him. If they would just do that, instead of shooting them, these right wing nutcases would have nothing to fear from the Department of Justice.
Uh...Attorney General Holder, aint you too busy defending John Yoo to be making speeches?
Late Friday afternoon, Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White rejected all but one of John Yoo's arguments to dismiss the civil suit filed by Jose Padilla which alleges that Yoo violated Padilla's constitutional rights while he was detained as an 'enemy combatant'. Although White rejected Padilla's claim that his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination was violated, he left open the door for Padilla's attorneys to amend the lawsuit to add information to support that claim.
White, a former Nixon Justice Department attorney, was appointed to the Federal Bench by President George W. Bush on July 25, 2002, and received his commission on November 15, 2002. Obviously, Judge White is no flaming 'legislate from the bench' type of jurist.
I like David Souter. I call him 'The Sleeper Cell' Justice. What a disappointment he has been to conservatives, and what a surprise he has been to liberals -- especially considering he was appointed to the Court by George H. W. Bush (Thomas being Bush's other appointment).
Also, I have my suspicions regarding his proclivities...which makes him a rather charming, and supremely sad, public figure. I sincerely hope he enjoys his retirement in ways that being out of the spotlight can afford him. He deserves the happiness that a quiet life of anonymity retirement will afford him.
Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes. As their meanings become clear, these collocations gain an aura of horror. In the past century, final solution and ethnic cleansing were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon. In this young century, the word in the news - though not yet in most dictionaries - that causes much wincing during debate is the verbal noun waterboarding.
If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for "twist," means anything (and it means "the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce"), then waterboarding is a means of torture.
William Safire
On Language New York Times MagazineMarch 9, 2008
[Emphasis added]
Question: Thank you, Mr. President. You've said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture. Torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?
Obama: What I've said -- and I will repeat -- is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion; that's the opinion of many who've examined the topic. And that's why I put an end to these practices.
I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, "We don't torture," when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.
And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
And -- and so I strongly believed that the steps that we've taken to prevent these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques will make us stronger over the long term and make us safer over the long term because it will put us in a -- in a position where we can still get information.
In some cases, it may be harder, but part of what makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals even when it's hard, not just when it's easy.
At the same time, it takes away a critical recruitment tool that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have used to try to demonize the United States and justify the killing of civilians.
And it makes us -- it puts us in a much stronger position to work with our allies in the kind of international, coordinated intelligence activity that can shut down these networks.
So this is a decision that I'm very comfortable with. And I think the American people over time will recognize that it is better for us to stick to who we are, even when we're taking on an unscrupulous enemy.
