August 2004 Archives

OK, so I'm trying to make myself listen to the Republican National Convention on NPR. It's a challenge.

I've already heard a couple of bullshit speeches, including one from an Iraqi woman who reminds us that Iraq "has been at war for the past 30 years... Saddam was at war against his own people." (Yes, and this would be around the same time he was our best bud and that photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with him was taken. History is so inconvenient.). Then there was the guy who explained why the Patriot Act wasn't really a bad scary thing like those liberals keep trying to say it is. Somehow, I wasn't reassured. And there was something about these fake news programs that were making or showing at the convention — they have the format of traditional reporting, but they are publicity pieces. I want to find out more about this.

And NPR's reporter kept trying to interview Michael Moore, who is writing from the Convention for USA Today all week (I have so much more respect for them now!) but the Secret Service kept shooing her away — for "security reasons", although there was hardly anybody around.

I guess they don't feel there's any reason why they should make his job easy.

I'm sure Bush will get a post-Convention bounce out of this. He's got all those moderate speakers out there, after all, and he can deliver a good speech when he's prepared. But stilll, don't people notice there's something rather... hollow in all this? Invoking family values on the one hand, and bringing up scary bad guys on the other? Is fighting (or trying to look like we're fighting) terrorism all we can aspire to? Is there no bigger vision or plan?

"Bush... he's not as nasty as Saddam Hussein!"

Yeah, that's the ticket.

So, some group kidnapped some French people in Iraq, are holding them hostage, and are threatening to decapitate them unless they... no, not leave Iraq...no, not agree to put pressure on the United States to leave Iraq... no, it's unless the French government agrees to rescind the headscarf ban in France's schools!

So, OK. On the one hand, I don't like that ban. It seems really invasive and unfair, and it's certainly a reminder that France's definition of secular is rather more restrictive on personal freedoms than ours is (or was.)

On the other hand... this also seems proof that the group behind it has no productive goals whatsoever. This tactic plays right into Bush's hands. It was so considerate of them to pull this nasty little stunt right before the GOP convention, so the chickenhawks there can point to it and say, "See? They really do hate freedom!" It's also designed to reinforce a bad image of Islam in the world's eyes. The French government can say that it justifies their policy.

Good going, guys!

Really, this has been a horrible week for the three major monotheistic religions. The Jewish community has gotten a bunch of embarrassing news too. That Paris JCC fire? It was set by a Jewish ex-employee. Then there's the Doug Feith office/AIPAC scandal a-brewing. And last but not least, the "God's Own Party" Convention in New York (yes, somebody really said that.) Hey, guys, when you alienate a normally loyal group like the Log Cabin Republicans, you've fucked up. MKay?

I can't think of anything more intelligent to say about it all then "Feh."

From an evening wandering around San Francisco.

Pictures I took at Michael's office party, which was on a houseboat in Sausalito.

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/23350/format/html/displaystory.html

Jewish officials say it’s in their interest to back both the Republicans and the Democrats: That would force both parties to work to garner Jewish support, ensuring that Jewish issues remain on the radar screen no matter which party is in power.

So the country can stay under Republican rule and go to hell. Great idea. And no, that's not good for Israel.

It's odd that the Repubs picked New York for their invasion, convention, since not only have they failed to help it much after September 11, but they seem to take every opportunity to dis the place that they can.

Well, I know for a fact that this is all a terrible misunderstanding. In fact, at the RNC, they plan to unveil a beautiful new design proposal for Ground Zero to show there are no hard feelings. I've got your architectural rendering right here!

I ordered two 256 meg SD cards from http://www.shop.kingston.com in June before a trip, when they had a rebate offer. I printed the rebate form out, and when the stuff arrived, I carefully cut out the UPC codes and sent the whole thing in along with my receipt. Foolishly, I didn't keep copies.

So a month or two later, I get a postcard telling me that the UPC symbol I submitted was invalid. I call them, explain that I got the forms and placed the order on their site, only to be told by the nice lady on the other end that since I hadn't kept copies, she could do nothing for me.

I'm never, ever ordering from them again. They're just awful.

You are very wise, humble and pious, Katherine...
from this day forward you will now be known as the holy Reb Nota Gavril Falk of Lachwa ,
also known as the 'Weezer Rebbe'...now let your chassidish adventures begin, your talmidim are waiting!

http://bangitout.com/script/hassidname.php

From ABC:

DAVENPORT, Iowa Aug. 24, 2004 — Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, spoke supportively about gay relationships on Tuesday, saying "freedom means freedom for everyone."

At a campaign rally in this Mississippi River town, Cheney was asked about his stand on gay marriage an issue for which his boss, President Bush, has pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban such unions.

Bush backs a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage, a move Cheney says was prompted by various judicial rulings, including the action in Massachusetts that made gay marriage legal.

"I think his perception was that the courts, in effect, were beginning to change, without allowing the people to be involved," Cheney said. "The courts were making the judgment for the entire country."

What a sack of ... whatever it is that man is.

Fine. Why don't we recognize interracial marriages but only give special tax incentives to the all-white couples? To couples that go to church every Sunday?

This is a mostly-Christian country. Why don't we have a vote. If most people agree, let's put big crosses in every city center. Why not? The majority agreed it was a good idea!

I wonder how he sold his soul. EBay? Think he got a lot for it?

Found by way of Raed in the Middle is this photoblog maintained by his mother. Very cool pictures and web journal. (The family that blogs together....? )

While we're all distracted by the Swift Boat controversy, nobody has to notice that teens were abused at Abu Ghraib, that the new overtime rules screw over workers, that the war in Iraq continues unabated...

Forgeddaboutit!

From TalkingPointsMemo: I've excerpted it, but you really need to read the whole thing.

A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

As I've been saying here for the last couple days, the issue isn't that Bush ducked service in Vietnam. It's that he tries to smear other people's meritorious service without taking responsibility for what he's doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him. Again, that image of McCain calling him on his shameless antics and his look of fear, his look of feeling trapped.

The key for the Kerry campaign to make is that the president's moral cowardice is why we're now bogged down in Iraq. It's a key reason why almost a thousand Americans have died there. President Bush has set the tone for this administration and his moral cowardice permeates it.

Oh, and Debra Saunders is a big biznatch, and the Chronicle is missing the point.

Edited to add: Paul Krugman gets it, though.

Thirty years after Vietnam, American soldiers are again dying in a war that was sold on false pretenses and creates more enemies than it kills.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Mr. Bush - who must defend the indefensible - has turned to those who still refuse to face the truth about Vietnam.

All the credible evidence, from military records to the testimony of those who served with Mr. Kerry, confirms his wartime heroism. Why, then, are some veterans willing to join the smear campaign? Because they are angry about his later statements against the war. Yet making those statements was itself a heroic act - and what he said then rings truer than ever.

The young John Kerry spoke of leaders who sent others to their deaths because they wanted to seem tough, then "left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude." Fifteen months after George Bush strutted around in his flight suit, more and more Americans are echoing Gen. Anthony Zinni, who received a standing ovation from an audience of Marine and Navy officers when he talked about the debacle in Iraq and said of those who served in Vietnam: "We heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"

Mr. Kerry also spoke of the moral cost of an ill-conceived war - of the atrocities soldiers find themselves committing when they can't tell friend from foe. Two words: Abu Ghraib.

Let's hope that this latest campaign of garbage and lies - initially financed by a Texas Republican close to Karl Rove, and running an ad featuring an "independent" veteran who turns out to have served on a Bush campaign committee - leads to a backlash against Mr. Bush. If it doesn't, here's the message we'll be sending to Americans who serve their country: If you tell the truth, your courage and sacrifice count for nothing.

I myself cannot rise to that level of eloquence, and am not feeling very coherent yet, but...

This man was working on a documentary about Iraq's archeological sites. He is one of the good guys, a fact lost on his kidnappers, of course. And his mother lives in Newton, where I was last weekend (my fiance is from there and his parents still live there too.)

My pedantic brain couldn't help noticing just how poor this story about the kidnapping was, though...

Updated to add: he was released safely, thankfully!

This story, about a journalist working on a documentary about Iraq's archeological sites who has been kidnapped there, caught my attention — talk about "no good deed going unpunished"!

Got this off (what else?) a blog.

What is it? It's basically a guy standing on a box outside of concerts, exhorting attendees to refrain from actually entering the venue, and informing them that if they're over 20, the only acceptible reason for them to be there is as chaperones for those too young to know better.

(His targets? Hoobastank, Christina Aguilera, Justin  Timberlake, Staind, Train...etc.)

There are several video clips of his appearances at these concerts, which are pretty funny. My only complaint is: dude, you used gif images for ALL of your layout and text? Image maps? No alt text? Come on. Don't make me create a website called You Have Appallingly Poor Web Coding Skills Dot Com.

http://www.youhavebadtasteinmusic.com

:-)

One of my coworkers was asking whether it was more apporpriate to use "political consciousness" or "political conscience" in a piece she was working on. She wasn't quite sure of how these phrases were defined.

So I said:

"Well, political consciousness is when you know who the president is. Political conscience is when you feel guilty because you voted for him."

O.K. so I'm no Geoffrey Nunberg. (But I'm no William Safire neither.)

Saw this on a blog today. Although I was annoyed by the little dig against Oakland, it's probably from years ago (Biggy Smalls, hello!?!?) and it's pretty funny to see rap lyrics interpreted in such a deadpan way... Here's a sample.

Lyrics:

First things first, I poppa, freaks all the honeys
Dummies - playboy bunnies, those wantin’ money
Those the ones I like ‘cause they don’t get nuthin’
But penetration, unless it smells like sanitation
Garbage, I turn like doorknobs
Heart throb, never, black and ugly as ever
However, I stay coochied down to the socks
Rings and watch filled with rocks

TRANSLATION:

As a general rule, I perform deviant sexual acts with women of all kinds, including but not limited to those with limited intellect, nude magazine models, and prostitutes. I particularly enjoy sexual encounters with the latter group as they are generally disappointed in the fact that they only receive penile intercourse and nothing more, unless of course, they douche on a consistent basis. Although I am extremely unattractive, I am able to engage in these types of sexual acts with some regularity. Perhaps my sexuality is somehow related to my fancy and expensive jewelry.

Arnold Schwarzenegger may be more socially liberal on some things than some of his Republican thug buddies, but at heart, he's one of them too, something abundently evident with his sudden insistence that the Bay Area pay for their own damn bridge. Unbelievable. As someone pointed out in the letters to the editor section of the Chron this morning, does that mean we get to keep our water and stop paying for extra law enforcement in Southern California now?

I guess he figures most of the Bay Area didn't support him, so he's got nothing to lose.

I (along with most of the Bay Area, I suspect) have long thought that it was ridiculous that 15 years after the last big earthquake, we're all still driving over a bridge that could fall down in the next one. We don't have time to mess around, and yet mess around is exactly what we (or our exalted leaders) did. This should change. But I don't see how screwing over the Bay Area will accomplish anything.

How soon can we terminate this jackass?

And if you voted for him... shame on you.

The California Supreme Court declared that San Francisco's same-sex-marriage ceremonies earlier this year were invalid, because the city didn't have the authority to buck the state law.

But:

In its decision, the justices focused on whether the mayor had the authority to marry gays rather than the broader arguments whether the state constitution must allow gay marriage.

Briefs in a lawsuit on the broader issue are expected before a lower court next month and the state Supreme Court said it was not signalling its views on that case.

"Should the current California statutes limiting marriage to a man and a woman ultimately be repealed or be held unconstitutional, the affected couples then would be free to obtain lawfully authorised marriage licenses," the court said.

Gavin was just (slightly) ahead of his time, I think, and I'm still glad he did what he did. Hopefully people will eventually come to their senses and realize that it's foolish and wrong to tell consenting adults that they can't marry their equally adult and consenting partners, or give rights to some families, but not others.

Jesse Jackson mocks Bush's way with words, most amusingly. (You need RealPlayer to hear this.)

Usually (I thought this was the case, anyway) it's the old fogies bemoaning the state of the music scene and harking fondly back to a golden era of sound, while conveniently forgetting all the sucky tunes that were really popular at the time. This time, though, the bemoaner appears to be a 17-year-old guy.

"Our generation has had absolutely nothing in the form of timeless music. Where are our Beatles, Elvis or Hendrix? We don't even have an Aerosmith-caliber group that we will be able to remember fondly."

Oh, really? Maybe they're no Beatles, but what about Franz Ferdinand? The White Stripes? The not-as-famous-as-they-should-be New Pornographers? Not sure how timeless they'll turn out to be, but they do rock.

"The last great movement in music was grunge rock from Seattle in the early '90s, and before that the hip-hop/rap rising led by groups like Run-DMC and N.W.A. So, we're in that horrible spot in the musical cycle with no definitive voice. We're waiting for our Rolling Stones or Madonna. Until they arrive, we'll have to settle for G-Unit and Britney Spears topping our charts."

Yeah, stick to ClearChannel and that's true. But change the dial! Tune it to a college station. Go online and sample some free songs from Epitonic or BetterPropaganda. Listen to some of the radio stations on the web like Boombastic Radio. (These are all in my navigation bar so I'm too lazy to link to them here again.)

Or look outside our borders — check out somebody like Rachid Taha, who mixes rockabilly and rai in "Kelma", or Mano Chao, whose music doesn't sound like anybody else's in the world, but is all about the world.

There is great music being made all the time today. Yeah, it sucks that it isn't topping the charts, but the truth is, many of the bands we love today didn't chart that high at the time either.

And Alex... I don't think the music industry was ever beloved. Only the music itself.

--> "Our generation is lacking a worthy soundtrack", Alex Terrazas, San Jose Mercury News, August 10, 2004

From JTA

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 (JTA) — A White House booklet called “President George W. Bush: A Friend of the American Jewish Community” has some of the Jews quoted and pictured inside feeling less than friendly.

Several of those quoted represent non-partisan organizations and are concerned the booklet implies an endorsement from them or their group.

Others believe the material crosses the line into overt campaigning for Jewish support by the White House less than four months ahead of the election.

The booklet raised a stir among Jewish officials in Washington this week. Several Jewish leaders said they were not contacted before their names appeared, and that it does not accurately reflect their group’s sentiment on the administration’s track record.

“I hate to be used,” said one Jewish leader quoted in the book, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of angering the White House. “The president selectively chose a statement where we praised him. There have been several comments that have had an opposite point of view expressed.”

Other Jewish leaders quoted said it was a fair use of their statements and the political overtones were to be anticipated in an election year.

The Bush administration and re-election campaign have been overtly courting Jewish voters for more than a year now, portraying Bush as a strong defender of Israel and a fighter against terrorism.

Those qualities have drawn praise from a diverse array of Jewish leaders for Bush’s international leadership — but many Jewish community leaders remain opposed to his domestic policy and other decisions he has made since taking office.

Jewish leaders privately said the booklet, which includes praise from leaders of several Jewish organizations that frequently have challenged the Bush administration, could be misconstrued to reflect endorsements from a wide gamut of influential Jews.

Mailed Monday to Jewish leaders, the booklet touts Bush’s efforts against anti-Semitism and terrorism, and his work supporting Israel and providing mechanisms for federal funding for Jewish sites and organizations.

Feh. Did I mention, feh?

The National Jewish Democratic Council says Bush's Israel record is "far from perfect", and you can read it on their site.

Still no sign of the now-infamous brochure on the White House website...

The  guy is truly desperate.

NICEVILLE, Fla. (Reuters) - President Bush said Tuesday that abolishing the U.S. income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax was an idea worth considering.

"It's an interesting idea," Bush told an "Ask President Bush" campaign forum here. "You know, I'm not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it's the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously."

Hey, Dubya, this is how seriously you should explore this idea:

When Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation scored the Linder proposal 4 years ago, it estimated that it would actually require a tax-inclusive rate of 36 percent, not 23 percent, to equal current federal revenues. Calculating the rate in a normal, tax-exclusive manner would mean a 57 percent rate.

Economist Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution notes that supporters of the sales tax assume that there will be no tax evasion under their proposal and that the size of government will not grow, even though they would send a large annual check to every American in order to offset the regressivity of the tax. Making realistic assumptions, Mr. Gale estimates that the tax-inclusive rate, comparable to Linder’s proposed 23 percent rate, would actually have to be about 50 percent. A rate comparable to existing sales taxes would be close to 100 percent.

And let us not forget that state and local sales taxes would come on top of the federal sales tax, pushing the total rate even higher.

And...

The Linder bill (H.R. 25) is also deceptive in its basic assumption that all consumption of goods and services in the U.S. would be taxed. Implicitly, Americans would be taxed on, among other things, all medical care, purchases of new homes, and services provided by state and local governments if Linder’s bill became law.

This means that if you are sick and have large doctor bills, you are going to pay 30 percent on top to the federal government. (Alternatively, you would pay 30 percent more for health insurance.) If you buy a new house listed for $150,000, your actual purchase price is going to be $195,000, including the sales tax. (Alternatively, there could be a tax on the imputed rent homeowners pay themselves for living in their own homes.) And if your children receive $20,000 worth of education each year from the local public schools, somehow or other you are going to have to pay an additional $6,000 to the federal government.

Next up: President Bush believes the earth is flat! Let's hope his reelection campaign flatlines as soon as possible too.

Unbelievable.

Update: The White House is now backpeddling furiously on this one.

Funny.

Not so funny. Scary, in fact.

The percussionist for the group The Polyphonic Spree got nabbed by the FBI for a suspicious item in his luggage which caused an airport security panic. A friggin' microphone, of course, but the bomb squad somehow didn't figure that out in time to prevent what happened next:

No word of the scare had reached the Birmingham Airport Thursday evening when Teasley arrived in Alabama, where he currently resides, though he was disappointed to discover his luggage hadn't arrived. So he filed a complaint with American Airlines, then proceeded to do what anyone else in this situation would do: He went to Taco Bell.

It was upon arriving back at home that [Brian] Teasley was approached by an FBI agent. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, the agent asked, "Are you Brian Teasley?" When Teasley replied in the affirmative, the agent stated calmly into his lapel, "We got him." As Teasley tells it, cars immediately came from every direction at once, blocking off the driveway and thoroughly congesting the street. It turns out that after the airport security discovered the device in one of Teasley's bags, five gates were shut down in the C terminal, the bomb disposal robot was called out, and the FBI was contacted.

My favorite part of the piece:

"I don't want to over-dramatize the situation... but there were two or three minutes when I thought I was going to be in Guantanamo Bay with the Abu Ghraib people holding a thumbs up while pointing to my penis. I wasn't really scared about Guantanamo, I just didn't want people to see my penis. I'm a very private person."

It's funny, until you remember that every minute that our "protectors" spend on this kind of diversion is a minute they could have used for actually tracking down real terrorists.

Read about it at Pitchforkmedia.com

From the Progressive, via Alternet:

On June 16, the commission charged with investigating the events of September 11 announced that Al Qaeda's early attack plans had included "unidentified nuclear power plants." You might think the Bush Administration would respond by doing all it could to prevent a terrorist-triggered disaster at these plants.

Think again. The Bush Administration is actually relaxing the fire safeguards there.

Instead of insisting that the plants have heat-protected mechanical systems in place that will shut down reactors automatically in case of fire, which is the current standard, the Bush Administration would actually let the power companies rely on workers to run through the plants and try to turn off the reactors by hand while parts of the facilities are engulfed in flames.

Why would the Nuclear Regulatory Commission do something so foolish?

Amazingly, because many nuclear power plants have not been abiding by current regulations to put up proven fire barriers. Rather than demanding better fire safeguards or insisting that nuclear power companies at least abide by the current ones, the NRC wants to let them off the hook. It's as if car drivers were regularly going 90 mph, so the government raised the speed limit to 90.

And of course...

The rulemaking started after the NRC met with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, which admitted that many of its members did not have the required safeguards in place. "NEI indicated that the use of unapproved operator manual actions in the event of a fire is pervasive throughout the industry," noted William D. Travers, then the NRC's executive director for operations, in describing the proposed rule to the commissioners. (Procedures for shutting down a reactor by hand are called "operator manual actions.")

Read the whole thing. Then maybe you should contact President Bush and thank him for thinking of his nu-cu-lar power industry campaign contributers your safety.

Friend? Is this some new and extremely unpleasant definition of "friend" that I was not previously aware of?

From JTA...

White House touts Bush and Jews

The White House published a 23-page booklet called “George W. Bush: A Friend of the American Jewish Community.”

Mailed Monday to community leaders, the booklet features photos of Bush meeting with Jewish leaders and visiting a Holocaust memorial and quotes from Jewish leaders praising his support for Israel, his fight against anti-Semitism and his fight against terrorism. Some of the quotes compare Bush favorably to President Clinton. The National Jewish Democratic Council described the booklet as an “outrage” in an election year.

http://www.jta.org/brknews.asp?id=116695

Yeah, friend, my ASS!

As of this afternoon, I could not find the booklet in question, either on the Bush Cheney campaign or the White House's website. I will link to it if it turns up... but I won't hold my breath.

Send him or her this article in USA Today.

Leak allowed al-Qaeda suspects to escape (August 10, 2004)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - The disclosure to reporters of the arrest of an al-Qaeda computer expert allowed several wanted suspects from Osama bin Laden's terror network to escape, government and security officials said Tuesday.

Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer, was nabbed in a July 13 raid in the eastern city of Lahore. He then led Pakistani authorities to a key al-Qaeda figure and cooperated secretly by sending e-mails to terrorists so investigators could trace their locations.

His arrest was first reported in American newspapers on Aug. 2 after it was disclosed to reporters by U.S. officials in Washington. Later, the Pakistan government also confirmed his capture but gave no other details.

Two senior Pakistani officials said the reports in "Western media" enabled other al-Qaeda suspects to get away.

"Let me say that this intelligence leak jeopardized our plan and some al-Qaeda suspects ran away," one of the officials said on condition of anonymity.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that Khan's name had been disclosed to reporters in Washington "on background," meaning that it could be published, but the information could not be attributed by name to the official who had revealed it.

The Pakistani officials said that after Khan's arrest, other al-Qaeda suspects abruptly changed their hide-outs and moved to unknown places.

The first official described the publication of the news of Khan's arrest as "very disturbing."

Yeah. I feel so much safer, knowing these clowns are on the case.What on earth...

Today's spam (caught by our spam-blocking service) was a message with the choice heading "a vagina - date one today."

I enjoyed imagining what the actual text of the thing would say.

"Want the convenience of the female genital region without the inconvenience of having to deal with the rest of her?"

"Your fantastic plastic pocket pal!"

Hey, I'm good at this! Or maybe I'm just really weird.

Delete!

So, there have been several rock musicals coming out in the last few years, yes? That is, rock musicals using the songs of a band and wrapping a plot around them. So, first we had "Mama Mia", featuring the music of ABBA. Currently, in San Francisco, "Movin' Out" is playing, with songs by Billy Joel.

But that's not all that's coming.

When we were in London a couple of weeks ago, we passed posters advertising: a Queen musical and a Rod Stewart musical. Yes. Not making it up. I swear.

Before you read further, would you like a chance to guess what they're called?

Everybody around here seems to know the liberal arguments against the Bush administration. We're kind of all preaching to the converted. But what about arguments against it and him that would appeal to conservatives? I've started collecting articles that I think fit the bill. Does anyone know of any others?

Righteous Anger /  The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush, Doug Bandow, The American Conservative, December 1, 2003

Six Reasons Why Republicans Should Vote Against Bush, NewsTarget.com

Do The Math, Michael Kinsley, Washington Post, July 30, 2004

That terror alert in New York, New Jersey and Washington D.C.? It's based on four-year-old information! I guess Karl Rove figured it was worth giving some people on the East Coast coronaries if it would take the attention away from Kerry...

The sad part is, we will get hit by terrorists again, sooner or later, and none of this bullshit busywork will have made a bit of difference. Fuckers.

What this am I talking about?

This this.

According to this article, the Democratic party platform (emphasis mine)...