Welcome to the Friday edition of your open thread. We’re supposed to get beautiful weather today and I’m going to the Italian Festival tonight. I’m ready for the weekend!
Our Senate is wacked, that’s the only way I can explain it. It’s completely bass-ackwards that a huge environmental disaster in our waters makes energy/climate legislation less likely. (It’s the same with immigration reform – Republicans squawking about immigration means no immigration bill). Congress won’t act on climate so the EPA will and Congress is mad:
Lisa Murkowski’s resolution blocking the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon failed in the Senate today, 47 to 53. Six Democrats crossed over: Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Jay Rockefeller, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu. Some people were surprised that Bayh crossed, but I’m not. He’s retiring, but his votes will reflect on Brad Ellsworth, who’s running to replace him, so he’s going to stick with the state’s most important interests. Zero Republicans voted against Murkowski.
Republicans are completely tied in knots over this BP disaster – just look at John Boehner’s multiple walkbacks on his BP remarks. Amazingly, Republicans are still blocking lifting of the liability cap for oil companies. Buying Senators is a good investment, since you only really need one or two because any one Senator has a veto. Senate reform now!
In their ongoing effort to make the word “family” an epithet, the American Family Association produced this gem about gays in the military:
If we connect the dots here, the inescapable conclusion is that gay sex is a form of domestic terrorism.
Every time an HIV-infected male has sex with another male, it’s essentially the same as plunging an infected heroin needle into his arm. He’s passing on a potential death sentence, just as the Taliban seeks to do on a foreign battlefield.
It is because of the risk of HIV transmission that the FDA will not allow a male homosexual to donate blood if he has had sex with another male even one single solitary time since 1977. The second riskiest behavior for HIV infection is injection drug use.
Now if gays are allowed into the military, they will be inevitably be put in battlefield situations where donated blood from soldiers may be necessary to save the lives of wounded comrades. An HIV-infected American soldier whose blood is used in those circumstances may very well condemn his fellow soldier to death rather than save his life.
If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won’t need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV. Our own soldiers will take care of that for them.
I think the logic is that all gay men have HIV (more women than men have HIV, actually) and that will lead to HIV-infected blood somehow. Military blood donations go through the same testing process as all blood donations and the ban on blood donations by gay men was wrong in the first place (and rightfully ended).