Throw Down the Jams

Outer Limits
President Obama walked out of high-level negotiations Wednesday, saying according to a Republican aide, "I've reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I won't yield on this." (Foxnews.com, 7/13/2011) 


After Obama stormed out, liberal columnists at the Washington Post who had previously criticized Eric Cantor for walking out of a debt meeting, promptly apologized.  Just kidding!


Good One     
"Creating twice as many donors as American jobs in the first quarter, we always knew Obama was the best fund-raiser in history,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “Unfortunately for Americans, it’s clear that despite his claims that he’s focused on creating jobs, his priority is saving his own.” (NYT, 7/14/2011)


Afterburner
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, basking in the afterglow of a legislative session that he described as “unusually successful,” said Wednesday that his top priority next year would be limiting retirement benefits for new state and city workers. (NYT, 7/14/2011)


Whereupon the SEIU organized a sit-in at the Capitol building, teachers walked off the job in protest, and labor declared Cuomo a target for recall.  Just kidding!


By The Way
The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is privately telling American officials that it wants their army to stay here after this year. The Americans are privately telling their Iraqi counterparts that they want to stay. But under what conditions, and at what price to the Americans who stay behind? American combat deaths are on the rise here, an ominous harbinger of what lies ahead if an agreement is reached to keep troops here after the withdrawal deadline set for the end of the year. (NYT, 7/14/2011) 


If George Bush were still President, you can rest assured that the rise in combat deaths would be front page news and Code Pink would be protesting somewhere.  Instead, we get this almost off-hand reporting.  Why? Because the state-controlled media (Rush's term) does not want to embarrass Obama.


The 1% Solution
“The new census data shows that lesbians and gay men are woven into the fabric of Vermont, and are raising children and living and working alongside their heterosexual neighbors,” Susan Murray, a lawyer who lobbied and worked for civil unions and marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples, wrote in an email. She added that predictions of “disaster” occasioned by Vermont’s passage in 2009 of a same-sex-marriage law have not come true. “Straight and gay Vermonters are living side-by-side in harmony,” Murray wrote. Vermont’s same-sex households (2,798) comprise about 1.1 percent of Vermont’s total households (256,442), one of the highest percentages in the country.  Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA in California who studies gender and sexual-orientation issues, said the highest percentage he has seen so far is for California, where same-sex households account for about 1 percent of the total. Gates had yet to evaluate 2010 data for Vermont before the official release today.  (BFP, 7/14/2011)

At last we have a number!  After the oceans of ink from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Burlington Free Press (to name a few), we find out that gays account for 1%. That 1% sure gets an inordinate amount of attention from the press and the politicians.  It makes you wonder if there is a 5% minority population out there that is being ignored.