Mark one for the good guys. We’re not all the way there just yet, but NH allowing civil unions for homosexuals is definitely a step in the right direction.

Gay couples in New Hampshire will be able to join in civil unions starting next year under a bill Gov. John Lynch signed into law Thursday.

“We in New Hampshire have had a long and proud tradition taking the lead and opposing discrimination,” Lynch said. “Today that tradition continues.”

Couples who enter civil unions will have the same rights, responsibilities and obligations as married couples. Same-sex unions from other states also would be recognized if they were legal in the state where they were performed.

The inevitable liberal shift is coming in the next decade, I believe. The civil unions will spread around, then the marriages will come along. Then within a generation, the anti-homosexual crowd will be looked at the same way someone arguing for segregation looks today.

EDIT: Thank you to a few astute readers who pointed out that “arguing against segregation” is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to say.

Continuing off of the former post, I’d like to quickly make mention of a fantastic Dubya comment on skeptics of the immigration bill, which actually nicely ties in to a question I’ve had for some time.

Bush repeatedly cast the matter as one of political courage.

“Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don’t like,” the president said. “If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it.

“You can use it to frighten people,” Bush said. “Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all.”

There is nothing that irks me more than the accusation that someone “doesn’t want to do what’s right for America.” It’s idiotic, because it completely ignores the obvious question: why not? What in the world would one’s motivation be for purposefully doing what’s bad for the country? Does the president actually think that there are people who are putting their time and effort into harming the nation internally?

This is the kind of thing one says to a child who won’t eat their vegetables. “Well fine, if you don’t want to grow up big and strong, go ahead and throw away your corn…” It’s not what you say to someone you consider your peer and equal. It’s condescending in the utmost, and the irony of Bush talking down to people as though they were less intelligent would be funny under other circumstances.

I feel guilty doing posts like this, since it’s your candy-from-a-baby/fish-in-a-barrel type affair, but nonetheless it’s always a good exercise to look at something our mighty leader uttered and reflect upon just how bad we’re all going to look to our descendants.

Speaking under overcast skies after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and meeting privately at the White House with the families of some fallen servicemen and women, Mr. Bush called the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a part of the nation’s destiny. He said they follow a rich tradition of similar American sacrifices throughout this country’s history.

…

“Those who serve are not fatalists or cynics,” he added. “They know that one day this war will end, as all wars do. Our duty is to make sure this war was worth the sacrifice” and that the fighting men and women succeeded — and “where tyrants and terrorists are frustrated and foiled … where our nation is more secure from attack.”

“This is our country’s calling,” Mr. Bush said. “It’s our country’s destiny.”

That’s right, folks. It’s our destiny. I’m not exactly sure when we re-defined “destiny” to involve “fighting and fighting until we’ve justified something that we did,” but hey. Naturally I don’t need to mention that we’ve only frustrated/foiled one tyrant, and a pretty limp one at that, or that there are more terrorists and acts of terrorism now than even a year ago, or that we aren’t remotely more secure from attack, but that’s gratuitous.

I also feel bad railing the president about something he said commemorating our troops, but honestly, they deserve far better than this idiot. We all do.

Sometimes when I read stories about Darfur, I wonder if they get any stories from the United States, and if they hear the kind of rhetoric coming out of our politicians mouths about freedom and liberation from evildoers. Then I wonder if they try and think about how those statements mesh with the head-in-the-sand attitude we’ve taken toward their plight.

The seven women pooled money to rent a donkey and cart, then ventured out of the refugee camp to gather firewood, hoping to sell it for cash to feed their families. Instead, they say, in a wooded area just a few hours walk away, they were gang-raped, beaten and robbed.

Naked and devastated, they fled back to Kalma.

“All the time it lasted, I kept thinking: They’re killing my baby, they’re killing my baby,” wailed Aisha, who was seven months pregnant at the time.

The women have no doubt who attacked them. They say the men’s camels and their uniforms marked them as janjaweed — the Arab militiamen accused of terrorizing the mostly black African villagers of Sudan’s Darfur region.

The most depressing line from Al Franken’s “The Truth (with Jokes)” was him discussing a hypothetical Gore presidency, noting that our soldiers would likely be returning from victory in Sudan by now.

That’s the only way I can explain the remarks he keeps making, this time in a speech at West Point Academy. Some of these talking points were okay in 2003, but in 2007 it just seems stupid.

“We’re fighting a war over there because the enemy attacked us first,” Cheney said. “These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds.”

The terrorism fight now centers on Iraq, the vice president said, because that is where the enemy has massed. “The security of this nation depends on the outcome,” Cheney said.

Do I even need to point out the problems? Al Qaeda attacked us, not Iraq, and the enemy only massed in Iraq because we put the war there. Honestly it’s like he thinks we’re all children, too naive to second guess anything he says.

It seems like the liberal world has been alight with harsh criticisms against Democrats who basically went against everything they were put into office for. The latest version of the Iraq spending bill removed a timetable for withdrawal, which leaves me wondering what in the hell we elected these people for. Initially the Democrats with their heads on straight was a small list, with only Edwards and Kennedy making public statements against the bill, but now we’ve got Obama and Hilary joining in. Sure, it passed, but at least they took a stand.

Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney blasted Obama and Clinton for not supporting U.S. troops — a criticism certain to linger into next year’s general election campaign and the November 2008 vote for the White House.

“I was very disappointed to see Senator Obama and Senator Clinton embrace the policy of surrender,” said McCain, an Arizona senator who backed the bill.

“This vote may win favor with MoveOn and liberal primary voters, but it’s the equivalent of waving a white flag to al Qaeda,” he said.

I try not to swear on here very often because I consider it tacky, but… fuck you, McCain. From the bottom of my heart. Explaining why just isn’t worth the time or effort any more.

Awesome, simply awesome.

Clinton, as leader of the NATO alliance, is seen as the man who decided to bomb Serbia to force the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, effectively handing victory to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Pristina already has a road named after him, graced by a 12-metre (25 foot) tall mural of the former president. Pristina municipal authorities say they expect to erect the statue somewhere along Clinton Boulevard later this summer.

The only way there’s ever going to be a statue of Dubya in Baghdad is if Bush himself commissions it. Personally, I think he should go for the guy who made the statues of Saddam. Other than the fact that he’s good at it, the irony would just be delicious.

Apparently eager to show us all what a complete failure his post-9/11 response was, President Bush decided to let the world know about an al Qaeda plan to set up base in Iraq for purposes of attacking America from there.

This information expanded on a classified bulletin the Homeland Security Department issued in March 2005. The bulletin, which warned that bin Laden had enlisted al-Zarqawi to plan potential strikes in the United States, was described at the time as credible but not specific. It did not prompt the administration to raise its national terror alert level.

Bush said that in the spring of 2005, bin Laden also instructed Hamza Rabia, a senior operative, to brief al-Zarqawi on an al-Qaida plan to attack sites outside Iraq.

“Our intelligence community reports that a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Faraj al-Libi, went further and suggested that bin Laden actually send Rabia, himself, to Iraq to help plan external operations,” Bush said. “Abu Faraj later speculated that if this effort proved successful, al-Qaida might one day prepare the majority of its external operations from Iraq.”

One of these days he should just come out and say it plainly: I didn’t catch any terrorists or dismantle any terrorist groups, and the War in Iraq has only served to help them coordinate with one another, turning multiple disorganized groups into one giant network. All done in a nation that was previously rather devoid of terrorism.

Look, I’m all for evidence that the Muslim population in the United States isn’t as crazy as FOX and friends make them out to be, but I have a feeling coming right out and asking them if they’re for or against Al Qaeda isn’t our best strategy. Opening paragraph: encouraging.

The USA’s estimated 2.4 million Muslims hold more moderate political views than Muslims elsewhere in the world and are mostly middle class and willing to adopt the American way of life, according to one of the most comprehensive surveys of this segment of the nation’s population.

The Pew Research Center study released Tuesday found that “Muslim Americans are very much like the rest of the country,” says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “They do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.”

So far so good. They’re moderate, they’re like us. So let’s see the poll results.

How Muslim Americans feel about al-Qaeda, by age group

Age group - Percent who feel favorable

18-29 - 7%
30-39 - 4%
40-54 - 4%
55 and up - 2%

Age group - Percent who feel unfavorable

18-29 - 74%
30-39 - 67%
40-54 - 67%
55 and older - 69%

Are you kidding me? That’s like being polled if you’re for or against killing the president, no one in their right mind would ever say yes to a question like that. Which makes me wonder who in the world those people who answered “favorably” to the question were. The article even explains why its own poll is worthless.

Muslims in the USA have been under intense scrutiny since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. More than half of those surveyed say it is more difficult to be a Muslim since then and believe that the government singles them out for extra surveillance.

I’m sure these Muslims, worried that they’re under surveillance, would be totally honest about whether or not they support al Qaeda. Especially in this post-9/11 no-habeas-corpus PATRIOT Act enforced nation of ours.

An article in the Washington Post discussed the seeming disparity between the GOP’s foothold on the internet versus the Democrats’. It seems like no matter which way you look, the left is simply outdoing the right. For example:

Looking at the Web sites of presidential candidates from the two parties, it found that former senator John Edwards’s site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat’s wife, Elizabeth, announced that she had a recurrence of cancer. That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).

Furthermore, ABC PAC, the conservative fundraising site, has raised $385 so far for Republican presidential hopefuls; Act Blue, its liberal counterpart, has collected about $3 million for Edwards alone.

…and the list goes on. Democrats get more hits on their sites, they have a stronger presence on social networking sites, and online fundraising is absolutely dominated by the left. No matter your metric, the competition isn’t even close.

Digg and Reddit, two extremely popular social networking sites whose pages are directly controlled by user input, are undeniably dominated by left-leaning stories. On Reddit’s most popular links page, we have headlines such as:

• Bush Proposes new plan to Congress that will give him control of the ENTIRE Federal Government, not just the Executive Branch, when responding to an attack.
• Gonzales proposing new Orwellian thought crimes law
• Salon: Why Bush hasn’t been impeached - Too risky, politically? Not necessary? Or simply “Battered Wife Syndrome” on a national scale?
• GOP State Senator Arrested for Child Rape, Molestation of Pages

Now let’s take a look at Digg’s “Political News” page, the top headlines here include:

• That whole voter fraud thing? Yeah, that was another Karl Rove lie
• John McCain’s Indecent Double Standard
• Decline and fall of the neocons

There are more sites, of course. Let’s take a look at del.icio.us’s popular politics pages:

• Why the US Government Is Hated All Over the World by Fred Reed
• A Conversation With Stephen Colbert - Google Video
• bush crime family tree

Technorati includes “bush” and “global warming” amongst its most popular tags and Ron Paul (a GOP darling of the left recently) tops the search list. On Technorati’s popular news items list showed the only high-popularity news item not clearly liberal: an article claiming to debunk global warming. Though it seemed as if many of the links to that page were arguing against it.

To quickly cover my butt, I ignored Fark because Fark is the only “social bookmarking” site that is controlled by moderators, and this skews what the readers themselves may lean towards.

Returning to the original article, we find this rationale:

One reason for the disparity between the parties, political insiders say, is that the top Republican candidates are not exciting voters the way the Democratic front-runners are. Another is that it takes a certain level of technical skill and understanding to be an online strategist, and Republicans admit that “the pool of talent in the Democrats’ side is much bigger than ours.”

But an underlying cause may be the nature of the Republican Party and its traditional discipline — the antithesis of the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet.

I disagree. Looking at current polls, we find that the Iraq War is extremely unpopular, very few people like the president, popularity for Democrats is generally quite higher than Republicans, and there was a massive turnaround in Congress just this past year. Radio, television, and print are generally controlled by people with the resources. The internet is free for whoever wants to use it and at every turn where the people get to decide, they are on the left. What does this tell us?

It tells us that the people, the future, are sitting comfortably in the liberal aisle. Are these people all young uneducated people? No, it’s generally a good cross-section of the people at large. Liberals rule the internet, and it’s not for any reason other than that the majority of the people on the internet support liberal causes. We control the horizontal, we control the vertical.

The right must be extremely frustrated to see that the emerging forum of free and open information exchange has proven everything they stand for extremely unpopular. I’d feel bad for them if, y’know, they weren’t messing everything up.