Ok, so gravatars (those little pictures next to comments) are sooooo 2002, but things come slowly to this website, as you will no doubt have gathered from the 1999-era layout. Anyway, if you go here: http://en.gravatar.com/ and upload a picture, and then sign your comments with the same e-mail you used to register at gravatar.com with, your gravatar will show up next to your comment. Hopefully they’ll be a bit bigger in the future, once someone figures out how to accomplish that.

Failed cosmonaut Lance Bass is reportedly furious that failed pop star Clay Aiken chose to come out of the closet the same day that Bass began his comeback in the season premier of Dancing With The Stars. Bass, previous holder of the record for “World’s Worst Kept Secret,” famously outed himself several years ago. “It’s sad,” vented Bass, “that this bitchy queen took it upon himself to steal my headlines in my moment of triumph–I’m going to go home, have a good cry, and bite my pillow.” Bass joined the current season of Dancing With The Stars to promote gay marriage rights, and to “make up, in some small way” for the years of horrendous pop music that he and his N’Sync bandmates inflicted on the public. “I’m particularly saddened for the poor souls who followed us around the country, going to multiple concerts, dancing and singing along to the soulless tripe we pushed out. We made the Backstreet Boys look like the Beatles–we were pitiful, just pitiful . . .”

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U.S. Republican vice-presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin
sits with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari during a meeting in New
York September 24, 2008.

Say what you will about Slow Joe, but at least he manned up about it.

LIE:
In Elko, Obama tried to anticipate his critics and called on the crowd of about 1,500 to sharpen their elbows, too.
“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” he said. “And if they tell you that, ‘Well, we’re not sure where he stands on guns.’ I want you to say, ‘He believes in the Second Amendment.’ If they tell you, ‘Well, he’s going to raise your taxes,’ you say, ‘No, he’s not, he’s going lower them.’ You are my ambassadors. You guys are the ones who can make the case.”

I remember when the first Knight Rider came out–back in the day, Dukes of Hazzard ruled the redneck roost. Can you imagine if people came to school today with the General Lee with the Confederate flag on it? All hell would surely break loose. Anyway, before it came out, they had this marketing campaign comparing the capabilities of the General Lee to KITT, and they showed this scene where they throw a brick at KITT. The next day, this idiot kid (easily the stupidest kid in my class, and probably in the running for stupidest kid in school), came up to me and said “Did you see the new KITT car? ::yokle chuckle:: They threw a brick at the windshield at it and it BOUNCED OFF!” This was the same kid, who in third grade, when asked what “extinct” meant, said “smelly?”. Not surprisingly, the poor guy got killed in an accident when he got sucked into some industrial machinery a couple years back. They never put “Most likely to die in an occupational accident” in yearbooks, but if they did, it would most definitely have been bestowed upon this guy. Ah, good times.

USA -USB from fi5e on Vimeo.

SAN FRANCISCO — — The California Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on simian marriage Thursday in a broadly worded decision that would invalidate virtually any law that discriminates on the basis of species. The 4-3 ruling declared that the state Constitution protects a fundamental “right to marry” that extends equally to simian couples. It tossed a highly emotional issue into the election year while opening the way for tens of thousands of simians to wed in California, starting as early as mid-September.
The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, declared that any law that discriminates on the basis of species will from this point on be constitutionally suspect in California in the same way as laws that discriminate by race or gender, making the state’s high court the first in the nation to adopt such a stringent standard. The decision was a bold surprise from a moderately conservative, Republican-dominated court that legal scholars have long dubbed “cautious,” and experts said it was likely to influence other courts around the country.
But the scope of the court’s decision could be thrown into question by an initiative already heading toward the November ballot. The initiative would amend the state Constitution to prohibit simian unions.
Conservative and religious-affiliated groups denounced the decision and pledged to bring enough voters to the polls in November to overturn it. Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, called the decision “outrageous” and “nonsense.” “No matter how you stretch California’s Constitution, you cannot find anywhere in its text, its history or tradition that now, after so many years, it magically protects what most societies condemn,” Staver said.
“What the court recognized today is that it’s time for that historic prejudice to end and the state should no longer participate in it in any way,” said Therese Stewart, a deputy city attorney who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Want your stuff back after RNC? Most who were arrested get theirs, others go away empty-handed.
More than 800 people arrested during Republican National Convention protests had their first opportunity on Monday to get their belongings — keys, wallets and cell phones — back from police, but some were stymied.
“This is the epitome of insult to injury,” said Kris Hermes, a National Lawyers Guild legal observer at the St. Paul police impound lot, where people were sent to get their property. “There were a large number of people today who returned to homes across the country empty-handed.” Hermes said most people were getting their property back, including those arrested on the first day of the Sept. 1-4 convention after having to wait a week.
But there were snafus.
Some were told police couldn’t find their property, and some were missing things, including a man who said his prescription sunglasses were no longer in his bag, Hermes said. Others didn’t have the identification needed to show police to get their property, because their IDs were with their impounded property, Hermes said. Some were told police would call them about their property, though their cell phones also were in police custody.
St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh said the “vast majority” of people were getting their property back Monday. He said he thought there were “very few” cases of property not being found. Normally, after a St. Paul officer arrests a person, he or she goes to the property room at police headquarters to retrieve belongings. But because of the number of RNC-related arrests, police designated the impound lot as an overflow site. Three men jailed last week filed a petition Thursday in Ramsey County District Court, saying their personal effects weren’t returned when they were released. A judge dismissed the petition Friday, saying the attorney should have used a different legal action to recover the property. Walsh said Monday was the first day people could get property back, because a security perimeter had been set up around police headquarters and some of the property was there.
On Monday, many who went to the Grove Street headquarters were directed to the impound lot, off Concord Street on St. Paul’s West Side. Nathan Barten, who said he was cited Thursday for presence at an unlawful assembly, couldn’t drive because police had his car keys. When he found his property wasn’t at headquarters, he biked over to the impound lot. It’s about three miles by car, but Barten said he couldn’t take a direct route because bikes aren’t allowed on U.S. 52 At the impound lot, Barten said he was told he had to go back to headquarters to get his tracking number, needed to find his property. The number was supposed to be on a wristband given when he was arrested. He brought the band with him Monday, but the number wasn’t there. “I’m pretty frustrated,” said Barten, of Delano. “I didn’t resist at all when I was arrested, I gave my full name, and now I don’t have a (tracking) number they never gave me.”
Nicole Armbruster, of Washington, D.C., got her property Monday but was trying to pick up belongings of two friends who had returned to work in Boston. Armbruster, who said she was cited for presence at an unlawful assembly, said they were told she could present photocopies of her friends’ driver’s licenses, along with signed notes saying she had permission to get their property. But on Monday, Armbruster said, police told her the notes needed to be notarized. She was trying to get her friends to fax the notarized copies to police. Because some people didn’t give their names to police, sorting out their property was a problem. One woman who used the alias Jessie Sparkles, as did others, was trying to get her belongings. The woman, who didn’t give her name to a reporter but said she was from Indiana, said she was told police had “thrown the stuff together” with that of others who hadn’t given their names and that it could be two weeks before she got her property back. The woman said some people booked as John or Jane Doe had gotten their property back.
Walsh said if John or Jane Does identify themselves and their property, they’ll get it back. He said he was unsure of the timeline. “People did what they could to obfuscate and confuse the issue,” he said.”They’re trying to be held unaccountable for their actions and get their property back.”
Michelle Gross, Communities United Against Police Brutality president, said she gave police her real name when cited for presence at an unlawful assembly Thursday night. But Gross, who lives in Minneapolis, said police had her property logged as belonging to Sara Faith Gross (she doesn’t know where Sara came from; Faith is her middle name) and it took about 90 minutes to get her purse back Monday.
Matt Connell, of Minneapolis, said he had to go without his medication for a few days after his arrest Sept. 1. Connell said he was held for about six hours and released with a citation for presence at an unlawful assembly. He didn’t have keys to get into his apartment or for a lockbox that holds prescription medication he takes daily. Connell said he had to break into the lockbox, at his girlfriend’s home, to get the medicine. At the impound lot Monday, Connell said, police told him they couldn’t find his property, but that it might be in the property room at headquarters. He checked; it wasn’t there, and he went back to the impound lot, where Connell said he was eventually told his property was at the Bloomington police department, though he was arrested in St. Paul. He was heading to Bloomington late Monday afternoon. “I was so angry all week,” Connell said earlier. “Now, I’m just tired.”

An answer to the question “What is a community organizer” from community organizers themselves . . .
Community first: Organizers explain what they do
Elana Wolowitz, communications director for Wellstone Action!,
“A community organizer is everything from someone who brings people to meetings …[to someone who] reaches out to a large group of people by having conversations with them either door to door or in coffee meetings or where they work or where they live,” Wolowitz said. “A community organizer then tries to harness all that information that they gather from listening to people’s stories and what they care about and what they want and what they need, then use that information to move toward change while building the leadership [skills] of others and not putting themselves first, and not taking the credit, but by giving other people opportunity to participate in helping their own community.”
Chuck Repke, longtime executive director of the District 2 Community Council in St. Paul, said
“The big thing of a community organizer is empowering the citizens to be able to take control of their communities, to give a voice to people who normally are voiceless, to empower those people who tend not to have much power and to facilitate the development of leadership in the community. It’s about making other people have power, not power for yourself,” Repke explained.
Michelle Martin, executive director of Minneapolis’s PEACE Foundation,
. . . a community organizer has to be able to write a budget, understand and make organizational flow charts, maintain good relationships with government officials, secure funding, speak publicly, manage personnel and volunteers, and much more.
Gary Bennett, a board member and past chair of the Kenwood Isles Area Association — a neighborhood group in southwest Minneapolis
His own organization is made up of volunteers “who want to take the time to serve the community, specifically their neighborhood. People doing this kind of work are what creates the fabric of a community.”
Note that the only coherent explanation involved obtaining funding.