Did Congressman Kucinich Try To Help Gaddafi Stay In Power?

From a report by Al Jazeera, documents found in Gaddafi's compound indicate that Rep. Kucinich had contacted representatives for Saif, one of Gaddafi's sons, seeking information to discredit the Libyan Nationa Transitional Council based in Benghazi.

It details a request by the congressman for information he needed to lobby American lawmakers to suspend their support for the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) and to put an end to NATO airstrikes. According to the document, Kucinich wanted evidence of corruption within the NTC and, like his fellow countryman Welch, any possible links within rebel ranks to al-Qaeda.
The document also lists specific information needed to defend Saif Al-Islam, who is currently on the International Criminal Court's most wanted list.

The Way The Oil Business Works In Russia

I know the term 'kleptocracy' gets thrown around a lot (ok, well maybe not that much), but Russia's dealings with major oil companies is getting transparently corrupt. Yesterday, Exxon signed a deal with a Russian state-owned oil company to drill in the Arctic and Black seas. Any doubts about how closely the Russian government was involved in the deal are wiped away by the fact that Vladimir Putin was at the signing of the contract.


Then today, there is this:

BP has confirmed that bailiffs have raided its offices in Moscow.
The company said their arrival was linked to a case in a regional court in Western Siberia relating to the collapse of BP's Arctic oil exploration deal with Rosneft.
The deal collapsed because of a legal challenge from its Russian partners in the joint venture TNK-BP. The deal has now been done with Exxon Mobil instead.

I guess that this is the new normal for business in Russia these days. The winner gets a huge deal orchestrated by the former President, current Prime Minister, and possible future President. The looser gets a government raid related to a civil suit. Now, these shenanigans might not dissuade oil companies from doing business in Russia, as those executives would sell their mother for access to a great untapped oil field. But can you imagine that this will encourage other businesses from doing deals with Russian companies?

These Kids Will Never Get Good Presents Ever Again: Two Children Have Their Father Sue Their Mother

From the Chicago Tribune:

Two grown children have spent the last two years pursuing a unique lawsuit against their mom for "bad mothering" damages allegedly caused when she failed to buy toys for one and sent another a birthday card he didn't like.
The alleged offenses include failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then-7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact police, "haggling" over the amount to spend on party dresses and calling her daughter at midnight to ask that she return home from celebrating homecoming.

The kids were represented by their father. It is rather redundant to say that the couple is divorced. 

Hurricane Irene Was A Top

Hurricane Irene was a top

It showed the trees who’s boss

It lashed their leaves

And soaked their trunks

Hurricane Irene was a top

Hurricane Irene was a top

It threw those tree’s branches around a lot

It covered them in its juice

All the bottoms, even the spruces

Hurricane Irene was a top

Hurricane Irene was a top
DC is a town of bottoms
Irene came in and made a splash
We perked up and covered our rears
Hurricane Irene was a top

Hurricane Irene was a top

It flooded Manhattan up its rear

It didn’t play safe

Now it can’t come out and play

It’s been retired up to Vermont

Hurricane Irene was a top.

People Watching Field Notes From The National Zoo

I should begin by noting that I find a very strong presumption of heterosexuality in our society. To my gender theory brothers out there, this is a ‘heteronormitive’ bias. I try to do everything in my power to counter this. Chiefly, I assume most people are gay until proven otherwise, and even then I largely suspect they might be bisexual.

Anyone can go to the Zoo to look at the animals, but how long can one look at a panda eating bamboo? After awhile, the people become supremely more interesting. I spent a Saturday there observing the most interesting species of mammals: tourists.

Is The Gay Community Post-AIDS?

Great new article from Michael Harris in Walrus Magazine, which is much more serious that the name implies:

I’m the same age as the epidemic. By my first birthday, eight young gay guys in New York had developed purple tumours on their skin, which turned out to be a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Those boys had AIDS, though there wasn’t a name for it yet.

"You'd be amazed how gay Marines are when they don't believe there's anyone gay around"

Terrific article from GQ on the end of don't ask don't tell, and what it is like for soldiers to serve in the closet. There is certainly a wide range of impacts-from spending a long military career in the closet, getting kicked out, or coming out and having no one care.
Then there is this incredibly tasty morsel of an interview:

Marines #1: "Since I'm a single officer in the Marine barracks and I've got the highest security clearance you can get, I also serve at the White House in close quarters with President Bush and President Obama at social events. Very seldom was the president ever alone, but one time the president had said, 'Go and get the vice president,' and all the straphangers went, and the president went in the Blue Room and was just standing there waiting for Biden. And there was no Secret Service around or anything, and I went, 'Fuck it, I'm going to go and talk to the president about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." ' He was looking out south—there's an incredible view down past the Washington Monument to the Jefferson. And I just stepped in and said, 'Sir?' and he turned around and walks to me and I just started: 'You know, sir, I want to let you know that there are a number of us that work very close to you who appreciate very much what you're doing on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—more than you probably realize.' And he was shaking my hand, he looks up and it's like...he got it. I said, 'I want to thank you for this.' And he goes, 'No, I want to thank you. Thank you for your service, and thank you for your courage.' "

Important Question: How Did The Animals React To The DC Earthquake

The National Zoo has a press release detailing how different animals reacted to the earthquake. Zookeepers must have a lot of free time: 

• About five to ten seconds before the quake, many of the apes, including Kyle (an orangutan) and Kojo (a Western lowland gorilla), abandoned their food and climbed to the top of the tree-like structure in the exhibit.

• About three seconds before the quake, Mandara (a gorilla) let out a shriek and collected her baby, Kibibi, and moved to the top of the tree structure as well...

• The red ruffed lemurs sounded an alarm call about 15 minutes before the quake and then again just after it occurred...

• According to keepers, the giant pandas did not appear to respond to the earthquake.

I can report that this mammal dove under his desk like a scared cat.  

Obama Wins In Libya

Sorry for the triumphant title, but I feel as if someone must say it. The apparent downfall of the Qaddafi (sic?) regime in Libya has come in the most unexpected (for me) but the best way possible. I had though that the fighting would eventually lead to some stalemate and an entrenched front dividing the country in two, and some rouge guard or lucky NATO bomb would take His Majesty of Sunglasses out. A successful rebel drive on the capitol, considering the state of the rebel's professionalism for most of this fight, was not what I had foreseen. But a fight to the last man at Qaddafi's headquarters is the best outcome, if only because it cements this as a victory for the rebels, for the Libyan people themselves.

On the death of Osama bin Laden, and Abraham Lincoln

(Originally published May 15, 2011)


“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

--Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4 1865

One advantage of living in the nation’s capitol is being in proximity to great and momentous events. The disadvantage is that others abuse this closeness and take it for granted.

When the news broke on late Sunday, May 1, that Osama bin Laden was dead, many of my fellow young Washingtonians flocked to Pennsylvania Avenue right outside the White House to cheer the event. Most of them were students from the very close George Washington University, a fact not lost on me since I was among the exact same crowd two years ago in the same spot, celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Then, as well as two weeks ago, there was a palpable sense that this was, in the ever articulate words of our esteemed Vice President, a Big Fucking Deal, hence a desire among our generation to celebrate. It seemed a natural response to a moment of such great magnitude.

For me, I reacted not by celebrating, but by shedding tears. Not out of celebration, but rather out of relief. You see, for our generation, the attacks of September 11, 2001 marked our entry into adulthood, of knowing about the world outside the bubble of childhood. As children we are insulated in that bubble-and rightly so. But adulthood demands of us to know about things like terrorism, death, and hatred. The events of that day are vividly etched into my memory, every second recounted as if my mind instinctively knew how important that day was. And it was not just that day that was important, but all the days after it, a whole decade of them. Days of war, days of fear. This is what has defined my generation’s adult life, and so I shed tears when bin Laden was killed. Relived that maybe, just possibly, the insanity of the last decade would end.

People Should Speak More Latin

In an article for Slate on how fewer people are learning and speaking Latin, Ted Scheinman has the temerity, nay, the gall, to write this sentence:

Like its nouns, Latin continues to decline.

Oy vey.

Though I do still remember all these years later the opening line of my sixth grade Latin textbook: (pardon the endings, its been about a decade)

Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Claudia. Claudia sendantus sub arbore. 

I'm A Gay Liberal, And Ted Olson Is My Hero

Ted Olson, the Republican super-lawyer, who represented George W Bush in the Bush v. Gore case and went on to serve as Bush's Solicitor General, is my hero. In the wake of the Proposition Eight vote in California, he teamed up with Al Gore's lawyer, Davis Boies, to take up the fight for same sex marriage.

While organizations like the Human Rights Council, who I refuse to support until they change their name to the Homosexual Rights Council, take the path of least resistance, Olson went right for the jugular. Lamda Legal and the ACLU turned down the case, too afraid to make an argument for same sex marriage in federal court. Olson ignored these critics and went ahead with the suit, Perry v. Schwarzenegger (now there's a name to be associated with the sanctity of marriage).

Christopher Isherwood, Matt Smith, and the Joys of Being a Novelist

A few weekends ago I finally got around to seeing 'Christopher and His Kind,' a BBC bio-pic about Christopher Isherwood, staring Matt Smith in the title role. Now, I will admit that the main reason I wanted to watch was to see the Doctor playing gay (they portrayed him as a top, strange as that's how I pegged Auden). For those unaware, the English Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin in the early 1930s for, as he put it, "the boys". And he found them in spades. He went on to write two novels based on his time there, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. Together, they would be turned into a stage play, I Am A Camera, and a little movie by the name Cabaret. Decades later, he wrote a nonfiction account of his time in Berlin, which the BBC used as the basis for the movie of the same name.

It is also a fascinating lesson in how to write a novel. Rarely has a writer written both a fictionalized story of their experiences as well as a non fiction one. Holding the two up together is wonderfully educational.

Evan Bayh is a Schmuck

Sorry Daily News, but sending texts and pictures to girls you never met does not make you a schmuck. But declining to run for reelection, decrying the negative influence money and hyper-partisanship has on politics, and then prostituting yourself out to those same moneyed interests? That's being a schmuck.

My views on lobbying are mixed; yes it is a constitutional protected right (check your first amendment), but the implicit promise that 'you do what I want and the campaign check will follow' certainly is not good for any governmental system. So I do not mean to say that all lobbyists are corporate shills, indeed some of them do noble work for worthy causes. But Bayh is a special case.

Libertarianism, Robert Nozick, and the Intellectual Stupidity of a Movement

A tour de force article on Robert Nozick's long and storied history with the libertarian movement on Slate from Stephen Metcalf, that is certainly worth reading in full. First, as to the importance of Nozick's work:

The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative...

The heart of Nozick's philosophy: 

Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private property and freedom of contract. When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion. 

Life Lesson: Don't Try To Scam An Investigative Journalist

Chris Butler, who ran a private detective agency (emphasis on the past tense, we'll get to that), contacted Diablo Magazine in San Francisco hoping to get some media coverage. Butler was interested in getting a reality TV show made about his agency, hence the desire for publicity. (Read the whole article here)


This did not work out very well.


For one, the journalist, Peter Crooks (yes, his real name), was taken along on a 'sting' operation where the detectives spied on a man suspected of cheating on his fiancee. The problem: it was completely fake, a set up. The journalist had been emailed after the scam by someone who had previously worked for the agency.  Crooks looked into it, and was convinced that he had indeed been hoodwinked. Then he got this email:

Why Is The DC Metro System So Screwed Up?

Two current Metro employees and one former employee were arrested for theft. That's not the important part. This is:

The complaint alleges that the former supervisor, Mr. Atanga, provided the two employees – both customer information specialists – pay for hours that were not worked in Metro's Office of Customer Service. Following the arrests, the two current employees were placed on paid administrative leave [emphasis added] pending the outcome of an administrative investigation, as provided for in Metro's collective bargaining agreement.

Are they trying to make everyone in this city hate them? Two current employees get arrested because they were grossly exaggerating the time they worked, and Metro continues to pay them as they sit in jail. I do not try to sound like some cranky guy sitting on his porch complaining about workers today, but this is really just ridiculous. I can see why their union would push for paid administrative leave while an investigation was being conducted. But to still be paid after being arrested for stealing money through your paycheck, well, the mind boggles. 

David Frum Has A Susan Sontag Moment

The half-Canadian GOPer has a revelation:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

This statement of course echoes Susan Sontag's from 1983, in which she challenged Communists' blindness towards what truly happened once a government adopted Marx as a governing text. Sure, American and European leftists were willing to point out the foibles and failings of their own societies and governments, but were totally unwilling to turn that criticism towards the Soviets or the Chinese. They felt it would have undermined their cause, and it would have, but the rigors of intellectualism should hold truth above allegiance to ideology. Sontag might have gotten booed of the stage, but the moment marked the beginnings of a reevaluation on the left of what Communism was, not just what they wanted it to be.

Could this be the same turning point on the right? The moment when those in the conservative movement more dedicated to truth and reason step back and are forced to see where their movement has taken them? Can William F Buckley finally vanquish Barry Goldwater? One can hope. Though I most likely will never vote for a Republican for anything more advanced that city councilman, I look forward to the day when the decision takes more than a moment of thought.

I would also like to point out that last night, I actually was reading the section of Christopher Hitchens' memoir in which he talked about that Sontag moment. Frum must have been looking over my shoulder. 

Michael Lewis Is My God, Con't

His article on Germany is, as is his usual, excellent. A taste:

The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but it has become over the past few decades something else too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt, named Aaron Kirchfeld, put it to me, "You'd talk to a New York investment banker, and they'd say, 'No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!' " When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit-default swaps all but certain to fail so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the main buyers were German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against—a bond that Paulson hoped would fail—the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, is based in Düsseldorf—which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street bond trader who was buying all this crap during the boom, he might well say, simply, "Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf."

Michael Lewis Has A New Article! Party At My House!

I admit that I am way too excited about the fact that Michael Lewis has a new article in Vanity Fair, but in my defense he is unquestionably the best financial journalist in the world today. Following up on his previous tour-de-force articles on Greece (Beware Greeks Bearing Bonds), Ireland (When Irish Eyes are Crying), and Iceland (Wall Street on the Tundra) comes his latest article on Germany: It's the Economy, Dummkopf!

My mouth salivates at the goodness. I would normally skim the article in order to excerpt some juicy quotes, but I want to study this work. I'll check back in with you all later.

Welcome To My Blog

Logically it would make sense to post this entry first, but I think posting it later is more dramatic. Welcome to my spot on the internet, where I can ramble on and pontificate as much as I see fit.

This is my second blog, so I've been around the block a few times. Today and tomorrow I will be importing a few choice previous posts, so enjoy.

I'm a young gay professional in Washington DC, which makes me very unique. Well, unique in the sense that I don't live in Dupont or around U Street/Columbia Heights. My job is boring, useless, and in no way lets me take advantage of my desire to write interesting things, which is to your benefit, you blog readers you. And since I don't have an editor, I will take full advantage of using the Oxford comma in situations such as this, this, and this.

I have an interest in cooking, politics, reading, and homosexuality. I'm a bit of an Anglophile, and adore Andrew Sullivan and Stephen Fry. Musically, my tastes range from overweight black American blues musicians from the 1940s and '50s, to white middle class British guys from the 1960s and '70s who try to sound like overweight black American blues musicians from the 1940s and '50s. I'm a good liberal in that I enjoy NPR and PBS, and feel like a serial murder for buying things in a store and forgetting to have brought a 110% recycled bag, the proceeds of whose purchase goes to save the baby seals.

As for this blog, I plan a mix of serious thoughts, irreverent humor, and only accidental links to pornography. I will also try to link to great examples of long-form narrative journalism (my favorite kind of narrative journalism), before those publications firewall the articles.

 You can also follow me on twitter @DronesAndGroans

Rick Santorum Is A Pirate (No, Not That Kind)

He might be that kind of pirate, but I'll wait for further confirmation of that. In the mean time, the company that designed Rick Santorum's campaign website (sorry, it's obligatory for card-carrying homosexuals to link to that) is being sued. A Dutch company says that the designers stole their trademarked font, and are seeking $2 million in damages, though they might be persuaded to accept lube as punishment. You know how crazy the Dutch are about lube.

Great Example of Bad Local Journalism

This article, from Washington, DC's WUSA about a 'flash mob' robbery, is truly a bad exercise in journalism. Aside from the subject, which plays up the all female nature of the act as if women never commit crimes, the article rests solely on interviewing random unnamed people. No experts, no spokesman, just "one man in a parking lot"and "a woman who declined to give her name." Do these people offer any insight into the crime? No, just "Wow, that's crazy."

I dislike these man-on-the-street interviews on general principle (the principle being that the average man on the street doesn't know what the hell he's talking about), but to take it to this extreme borders on satire. The anonymous interviewees, the goal of the anonymity missing from the article,  offer nothing to the article. If the reader believes that this crime is crazy, they are capable of forming that opinion themselves without being told that some completely random stranger thinks it's crazy as well.

It could be worse though. I remember a bit on DC's local NBC station, who in a report after the meltdown at the Fukushima plant, alternated between interviewing experts who said that DC was at no risk whatsoever and people on the street who were afraid of the radiation. The two were giving equal airtime, as if they were competing political viewpoints that merited that equal time.

This is why I just watch the local news for the weather.

Jon Huntsman Has Made Himself Inneligible For The GOP Nomination

He tweeted this:

To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

Well that's the end of his campaign.

The SEC Is Completly Corrupt, Ctd.

In a very related note to the Matt Taibbi story, I found this little jem. After graduating from law school, a man named Peter Simonyi went to work for the SEC. You can guess the next step (worked there a few years and then got a job at Goldman Sachs). Simonyi made his way up to Vice President before moving over to a separate lobbying firm, though essentially doing the same work.

But the next step takes the case. Simonyi changed his last name to Haller and went to work for Rep. Darrell Issa (Very R-CA), working on banking issues. To be exact, he is now pushing for less regulations for companies like... Goldman Sachs.

Now, doing the SEC to Goldman two step is one thing, but to then move back into the federal government takes chutzpah. Changing your name so no one will notice just makes you a jackass, particularly once people notice.

Matt Taibbi On The SEC Covering Up Investigations

In Rolling Stone this month, Matt Taibbi takes time off from bashing Tom Friedman (which is really getting too easy now) to allege that the SEC has been destroying it's records. Specifically:

For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Being In A Chinese High School Sucks

And I thought studying for the SAT (and SAT II's, ACT, regents, etc) was hard:

When I persuaded Bob in February to interrupt his gaokao prep to talk with me, he was five months into what had become a daily routine. He rises before dawn to be at school by 7:30 a.m., six days a week. After school lets out at 5 p.m.--3:30 p.m. on Saturdays--he studies at least five hours more. "Last summer, we did karaoke. Last November, we went to seeHarry Potter 7," he tells me. "The next time we really hang out will be after the exam. The pressure has gotten higher and higher."

Did The British Cover Up The Assassination Of A UN Secretary General?

Stunning new article from the Guardian that alleges that UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, who was killed when his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia in 1961, was assassination. Moreover, the British covered the assassination up after the fact, and left an American crash survivor to die in a hospital without proper medical care.

A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the crash in 1961 on pilot error and a later UN investigation largely rubber-stamped its findings. They ignored or downplayed witness testimony of villagers near the crash site which suggested foul play. The Guardian has talked to surviving witnesses who were never questioned by the official investigations and were too scared to come forward.
The residents on the western outskirts of the town of Ndola described Hammarskjöld's DC6 being shot down by a second, smaller aircraft. They say the crash site was sealed off by Northern Rhodesian security forces the next morning, hours before the wreckage was officially declared found, and they were ordered to leave the area.

Martin Peretz Commits Heinous Acts Of Writing

Thank you for joining me on the second installment of a hopefully limited series of the horribleness of Martin Peretz, The New Republic's demoted former editor. Guess what he's writing about today. If you guessed Israel, you don't get a prize, because that is always the answer.

Let's dive in.

His article is titled "If Palestine Declares Statehood, It Won't Change Anything On The Ground," which is then followed by a thousand words or so on how horrible it would be if Palestine declared statehood.

Peretz then claims that President Obama will insist on the 1949 boarders. Not because Obama has said that, but because "that's exactly what he intended and almost said." Yes, what he didn't say is exactly what he meant. 

Martin Peretz is a Putz

The demoted New Republic author reports about people not loving Israel enough from Cambridge, as opposed to his usual perch of complaining about Arabs from Tel Aviv. More specifically, he belies that there is a growing trend of anti-Semetism on the left, and in fact this is becoming 'fashionable.' To Peretz, of course, anti-Semitism means voicing any opposition to anything Israel ever does, and a growing trend is a few select cherry picked examples. His examples are unusually far fetched, even by the standards of Peretz. I will do you all the favor skimming the article for its highlights, though doing so will most likely shave off at least some time off my life.

Let us dive in.