With his wife by his side and holding back tears, Mayor Sanders reveals that his daughter Lisa is a lesbian. Speaking of her, and of the gay and lesbian members of his staff, he says:

“In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife, Rana.”

And perhaps a more recent sign of gayness is that I should enjoy a cocktail with these ingredients:

THE PINK PEAR:

• Grey Goose pear flavored vodka (“Grey Goose La Poire“)

• Soda water

• Splash of cranberry juice

As you might imagine, I intend no chest-related double meaning here. Instead, the only double meaning is perhaps a suggestion that you order two at once.

Also, I recommend that you not substitute the Grey Goose pear vodka with the more common Absolut pear vodka. Both vodkas taste of pear, but in my opinion Absolut Pear has hints of an underripe pear laced with DDT.

[There might already a drink called the Pink Pear, but since I don't know about it, I'm crediting myself with inventing the name. Add another second to my 15 minutes of fame! Justin gets a h/t for introducing me to Grey Goose Pear vodka. Mmmm.]

“Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”

Her answer was spectacular:

If you think about it for a minute, Caitlin Upton’s answer does provide valuable insight into some of the root causes of the problem.

For your enjoyment, here’s an attempted transcript:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as South Africa and The Iraq and everywhere like, such as, and I believe that they should — our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. — er — should help South Africa, and should help The Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our ch–.”

“U.S. Americans?” “The Iraq?”

h/t to Larry M.

“If you support the war, why aren’t you serving in the military?”

The results are hilarious.

Blumenthal doesn’t just cover the war in his visit with the Chickenhawk College Republicans. When he interviews some Republicans about their feelings about gays, at first there’s some old fashioned GOP anti-gay garbage. But it gets really interesting when a member of the College Republicans lets us know that he’s been dealing with some suppressed feelings:

Republican Guy: “Everybody at one time in their life has had the inclination towards the other — uh — towards the same sex. . . . But just because you have the inclination does not mean you’re gay because if you have the inclination because you’re curious and stuff like that. . . . But if you accept it, and then suppress your feelings and you pray about it to god, and know that you’re not — are are so much stronger than some other people.”

Max Blumenthal: “Have you accepted it?”

Republican Guy: “Yes, I have accepted it, I have prayed about it to God, and I know for a fact that I am not gay.”

Not quite convincing… but funny to watch.

Anyway, here’s the video:

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian version of Facebook (the social networking website) rejects membership for anyone with the last name “Gay.” The paper reports that any attempt to register a Facebook membership under the last name “Gay” results in the following error message:

“Please enter a legitimate name.”

Ouch! As if the inevitable playground taunts weren’t bad enough for children with that last name, now this.

Clearly, Facebook isn’t trying to discriminate against The Gays. The problem is no doubt the result of some oversensitive software filters. I’m sure Rudolf Lipschitz would have faced a similar challenge had he survived long enough to create a Facebook profile.

On the other hand, why is “gay” on the list of terms that are filtered out? I’ve made the point before, but the word “gay” is not a profane term. It doesn’t need filtering.

You would have thought that the software filter gurus would have learned this lesson after the “Enola Homosexual” incident. This incident occurred on September 5, 1994, when the Northwest Herald (a paper in suburban Chicago) ran a story with the following headline:

“ATOMIC BOMBERS CRITICIZE ENOLA HOMOSEXUAL EXHIBIT”

This nonsensical headline resulted when the word “gay” was mistakenly replaced with “homosexual.” The Northwest Herald’s story was actually about a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, where part of the fuselage of the famous plane the Enola Gay was to be placed on display. For younger readers, the Enola Gay — not the Enola Homosexual — is famous for being the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.

FREE BONUS MATERIAL!
Training material for newspaper editors and Facebook IT employees:
How to tell when “gay” means “homosexual”

Example 1: “Gay” doesn’t mean “homosexual”

Example 2: “Gay” means “homosexual”

Thanks to YouTube we’ve seen that Mitt Romney can movingly (and with the appearance of the deepest sincerity) express the exact opposite opinion from one he movingly expressed a few months before.

One could argue that this flip-floppery doesn’t set Romney apart from other politicians. But to me, Romney does seems different. His hollowness goes deeper, it’s more complete.

For example, what kind of a person puts a pet dog into a carrier, straps the carrier to the roof of the car, and then drives for 12 hours?

Yeah, according to the Boston Globe, that’s exactly what Romney did back in 1983. As if that wasn’t strange enough, the Boston Globe adds this disgusting but revealing detail:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.

I mean, I’m sure the station wagon was crowded, but who treats the family dog like a suitcase?

The DLC is not the Democratic Party. It’s a separate organization, run by a group of people who wrongly see themselves as leaders of an effort to “modernize” Democratic politics. Up until the 2006 election, they had tremendous influence on the direction and campaign strategies of Democratic politicans and candidates. They steered our party the wrong way in every election since 1994.

The DLC was useful once, back in the early 1990’s. But ten years later and they’re woefully out of touch. Just look at this comment made last April by Harold Ford, homophobe and new Chairman of the DLC:

“we should all remember that the DLC played an instrumental role in giving Bill Clinton – then an Arkansas governor – a policy platform to campaign on and from in 1991.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell.

The DLC is stuck in 1991, seeing every election through an aged and dusty lens. They fail to recognize the changes in the GOP and in the American electorate in the intervening period. After helping bring us victory in 1992, their myopia brought us a nearly unbroken string of election disasters starting with the unimaginable loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, the razor thin Gore victory in 2000 (stolen by the Supreme Court), and a nearly hegemonic GOP by 2004.

Following the DLC’s playbook, we lost an election in 2004 that should have been ours by a landslide.

It’s hard to imagine it now, but until very recently the DLC was convinced that the Democratic party would suffer terribly if Democratic politicians and candidates spoke out publicly against the war in Iraq. The DLC considered it dangerous for democrats to be seen as “anti-war.” In their minds, being anti-war means hippies, marijuana, flower children, and John Lennon. Bad images that they thought would be off-putting for the rest of the country. “Too liberal,” they said.

The GOP has been governing solely to their base for the last six years, maybe longer. Under the DLC’s direction, the Democratic Party has done the opposite. Embarrassed by, ignoring, and discounting the base. This was slowly driving the party into the ground, creating a party that stands for nothing at worst, or “Republican Lite” at best.

The Party largely followed the DLC’s deadly advice on the Iraq war until John Murtha, Howard Dean and a few other started ignoring the DLC’s advice. And guess what happened? We started winning.

The 2006 election was the first moment in a decade where the Party slipped from the DLC’s death grip.

Try and forget for a moment how morally wrong the DLC’s advice was on the war. Ignore temporarily how wrong and harmful it was to the country and the world for so many Democrats to sit quietly while Bush steered the country into disaster. With that out of your mind, focus on the how absurdly wrong the DLC was in their claim that being “anti-war” would cause the democrats to lose elections. In other words, not only was their advice immoral and damaging, it actually hurt the party at the ballot box. They can’t even do Machiavellian politics right.

Just look at how a confident Bob Shrum, Democratic political adviser, recalls his profoundly dim-witted and Machiavellian advice to then-Senator John Edwards to vote for the Iraq war:

“…But Edwards didn’t want to look “liberal” and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council…” [source: TMP memo emphasis added]

By any objective measure, this was horrible advice. In sum: Support the war because you don’t want to look like a sissy and because you want the support of the DLC.

It’s hard to imagine that any Democrat would still listen to the DLC. Yet some Democrats do. Hillary Clinton does. This is the main reason why I won’t — I can’t — vote for her in the primary.

The 2006 election was the first nail in the DLC’s coffin. If Hillary Clinton wins, she’s going to pry open that coffin and bring all of her DLC advisers and policy people back into the White House and back to the top of Party leadership, where they can start messing things up again. We need a candidate that repudiate the DLC’s backward ways, and move the Party — and the country — forward.

No doubt fed up with other attacks on nature that were taking place in the 1970s (e.g., polyester), Mother Nature always loses her temper after she mistakes Chiffon for real butter, stirring up wind and lightning and uttering her famous line: “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

In the version posted below, the scene opens as Mother Nature (apparently taking a break from controlling the seasons and the crop cycle) reads “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to seemingly random mix of animals.

Modern audiences are not impressed by a little wind and flash of lightning. If the commercial were re-made today, CGI graphics would show lightning bolts shooting out of her hands, perhaps even striking and killing the TV announcer to punish him for his trickery.

Take yourself back to a time when Liberace was seen as an eccentric heterosexual with a penchant for fur and candelabras.

The video below was produced during the waning days of what I call the Paul Lynde Era — a time when a person could appear on television in full gay flame, and still be considered heterosexual by the most people.

That Era is clearly over. When you watch the video below, try and take yourself back to the mid-1980’s, when it was still widely believed that George Michael was a heterosexual. I don’t think this could happen today.

(Not sufficiently gay? If the opening sequence doesn’t convince you, make sure you check out the shorts and gloves he’s wearing near the middle of the video.)

Now I wouldn’t say that Amanda Lear is talented — in fact I’d describe her singing style as a disco-muppet version of Marlene Dietrich. However, she’s incredibly fun to watch. This video was apparently made for Italian TV in 1983. Dig that 80s style!