It's just been a bad day overall for civil liberies. First we have anti-gay anti-women pastor Rick Warren "included" in the upcoming inauguration at Obama's request. (Not that that's exactly today's news, it's just I've been thinking about it alot today.) Now this:

Daily Kos: Bush issues health care 'conscience' rule

* The controversial rule ( Read more... )

So, Rick Warren, noted homophobe (oh, and pastor) has been invited to do something religious at the Inauguration Ceremony. Progressives are a little upset.

I've heard a lot of sad aimed at our President-Elect as a result of this. I just want to mention that there are reports that this is a Congressional decision, not a Change.gov decision. As ( Read more... )

For those that haven't noticed, we've got military units deployed within the US these days ( Read more... )

ACLU: VICTORY: Florida Law Barring Gay People from Adopting Ruled Unconstitutional

Highlights:
* The court ruled that the ban violated the equal protection guarantees of the state constitution because it singles out gay people and children raised by gay people for different treatment for no rational reason. The court also found that the ban denies ( Read more... )

This is a kind of fun ballot judging wossname that the minnesota public radio has put up:
MPR: Challenged Ballots: You Be the judgeIt shows about 10 pics of challenged ballots, explains why they were challenged, and offers a poll for each to see what readers think. Interestingly, there were very few that seemed controversial from a Genius Of Crowds ( Read more... )

Colbert Report: Nov 11th 2008

Dan Savage made an appearance on the first half of Tue's Colbert Report to help Stephen understand some of the ramifications of Prop 8. Watching these two spar is better than ice cream.

Click to view

Highlights:
* Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know...It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person. Just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.
* You want to honor your God and the ( Read more... )

Ok. Three, no four, of these are sort of highly applicable to me.
The seven wonkiest things you never thought you'd say

In particular: "Tomorrow? Can't. Phonebanking."
heh.

We worked hard, and we got a good president. It won't always happen, but for the next 4-8 years, we have a reprieve. Maybe some of the scary crazy can get rolled back. Maybe we can restore some of the good things about the pre-Bush years, and make some new good things to replace the stuff that was never really working in the first place ( ( Read more... )

Did some GOTV with the Obama campaign in my neighborhood. Fascinating: almost everyone we made contact with had already voted. I only did one round of canvassing, as all the stairs in this neighborhood were killing my knee. So, I did phone banks for a bit after I got back from that. Again, if I made contact with a person, they'd already voted. Of ( Read more... )