Random Musings

Carlos eyes are not getting better, though we knew that was the case. We saw a doctor in Charleston last month and he told her he was thinking of starting to use a white cane because ... and this is just one more reason I love him ... then people would see him coming, get out of his way, and he’d feel less nervous being in strange places. Even the doctor said that was a wise way to look at it.

So, about a week later, his cane arrived in the mail; he only uses it when he’s in places he’s unfamiliar with, and just so that people see him coming and adjust accordingly and he can focus on looking ahead instead of looking down; the cane does the “looking down” for him.

Now, that said, at a staff meeting at his job this past week, his boss asked him to tell the office about his eye condition—Retinitis Pigmentosa—and to explain that he might be using the cane on occasion and this is what he said:

“I have RP, which a person gets when they have sex under a Black Moon.”

Luckily most people laughed but a few—and remember we’re in South Carolina—laughed nervously.

But it broke the ice and several people then talked with him about the cane and if he ever needed anything ... all in all, except for the Black Moon Sex, it was a good thing.

Remember last spring when House Majority Whip, and Republican, Steve Scalise was shot while playing baseball by some lunatic with a gun?

Well, Scalise returned to Congress just a few days before the mass shooting in Las Vegas and he says this latest shooting—which left 59 dead and over 500 injured—has only reconfirmed his opposition to gun control.

Yes, he was shot by a deranged man with a gun and then watched the events in Las Vegas and still doesn’t think we need any form of gun control.

Asshat.

UPDATE ... Last month I posted the story of Family Values Conservative Republican Tim Murphy’s adulterous affair proving he’s a lying hypocritical pig, and now, well, it’s worse.

It appears now that pro-life asshat Tim Murphy urged the woman with whom he was having that affair to abort her pregnancy during what turned out to be an “unfounded pregnancy scare” in January.

And on the very same day this story broke lying hypocritical pig Tim Murphy voted for legislation that would ban abortion after 20 weeks.

He’s pro-life when it comes to you but pro-abortion when it comes to his mistress being knocked up. And now, Murphy—from Pennsylvania—has announced he will not seek re-election when his current term is up:

"After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek reelection to Congress at the end of my current term. In the coming weeks I will take personal time to seek help as my family and I continue to work through our personal difficulties and seek healing. I ask you to respect our privacy during this time."

Personal difficulties? While married you began an affair with a married woman and then asked her to have an abortion and you want to play this off like you have some difficult issues?

The only difficulty you have is being a lying cheating adulterous hypocritical pig.

I need some Hot Men to calm me down ... or heat me up ... so without further ado, the Men of Liar ... the story of a well-respected doctor who goes on a date with a teacher and then she reports that he raped her.

Ioan Griffudd plays the ALLEGED rapist, Dr. Andrew Earlham, while Richie Campbell is Liam Sutcliffe, the ALLEGED victim’s brother-in-law, with Warren Brown as Tom Bailey, the ALLEGED victim’s boyfriend.

One show, triple the Eye Candy.

UPDATE ... this past week I posted about _____’s DOJ getting involved in a case about a gay man being fired for being gay and coming down on the side of the employer ... meaning the _____ Administration is fine with gay folks being fired for being gay.

Well, it looks like the DOJ got smacked down somewhat by the court after EEOC attorney Jeremy D. Horowitz explained why “sexual orientation cannot be separated from sex”:

1. The “but-for” theory ... argues that anti-gay discrimination qualifies as sex discrimination because, but for the gay person’s sex, he would not suffer discrimination.

2. The sex stereotyping theory ... SCOTUS ruled that sex stereotyping—punishing a worker for her failure to conform to gender norms—is a kind of sex discrimination. At first, courts only applied sex stereotyping to masculine women and feminine men, but the Seventh Circuit Court explained that gay people are “the ultimate case of failure to conform” to sex stereotypes, since men and women are typically expected to date only individuals of the opposite sex.

3. The associational sex discrimination theory ... holds that anti-gay bias constitutes sex discrimination much like anti-miscegenation laws constituted race discrimination.

That set up Assistant Attorney General Hashim Mooppan—arguing to legalize discrimination—to make his case ... which did not go well.

Chief Judge Katzmann wanted to know why the DOJ didn’t defer to the EEOC on Title VII, as it almost always does and Mooppan said it was because the DOJ was the nation’s “largest employer” and had an interest in retaining its capacity to fire gay people for being gay. Then as Judge Katzmann began asking more questions about interactions between the EEOC and the DOJ Mooppan declined to answer, basically Pleading the Fifth, which did not sit well with the court.

It was a terrible start for Mooppan, and it only went downhill from there because, as he explained: sex discrimination must always involve a belief that one sex is inferior to the other. Anti-gay discrimination does not rest on such a belief, and so it is not sex discrimination.

That theory is ridiculous for a few reasons, though, as the court pointed out, the most obvious one is that decades of case law disprove it. The Supreme Court has never held that an employer must express animus toward one sex in order to violate Title VII but need only take sex into account in any adverse employment action to run afoul of the law.

Judge Jacobs asked Mooppan whether he can refute the EEOC’s associational discrimination theory and its parallel to interracial and interfaith marriage, and Mooppan responded:

“When you discriminate against interracial marriage, you are promoting racial superiority. When you discriminate against interfaith marriage, you are promoting religious superiority. That makes the comparison to homosexuality moot.”

Except, to the judges it seemed to make the EEOC’s stance true that the DOJ was peddling a “radical reinterpretation of Title VII.”

The arguments concluded, but because of Mooppan’s refusal to answer certain questions, and the fact that his own arguments seemed to support the other side, it looks like the court might rule in favor of the EEOC and disallow the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable to fire someone for being gay.

Fingers crossed; we may have dodged a bullet.

This week, two weeks after the hurricane, _____ finally went to Puerto Rico and wasted no time in congratulating himself and putting down the people of Puerto Rico and saying the island should be “very proud” of its low official death count:

“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died and you look at what happened here with a story that was just totally overpowering.”

And then he downplayed how dire things are in Puerto Rico, where more than half of the people don’t have power, running water, or cellphone service two weeks after Hurricane Maria

“What is your death count?” Trump asked Puerto Rican governor, Ricardo Rossello. “Sixteen, certified” he replied. “Sixteen people certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands,” he said, comparing it to Katrina.

And, since most of those are brown-skinned people who speak Spanish and therefore didn’t vote for _____ what’s the big deal?

Oh,. And let’s not forget that he told an island filled with people asking for help with the basic necessities of life that Puerto Rico has “thrown our budget a little out of whack.”

Says the man who costs this country millions of dollars so he can haul his fat white lazy ass to the gold course every weekend.

In Good News ... this week the US Census Bureau reversed a previous decision to exclude a question on sexual orientation from the Census after many in the LGBT community demanded to be included; Rea Carey, Executive Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, issued the following statement:

“Make no mistake—public pressure on the _____ Administration works. It was messages from the members of the National LGBTQ Task Force and our partner organizations that compelled the Census Bureau to reverse their appalling decision to stop counting us.”

Resist, and you will see change.

Last week the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva voted to condemn “horrific laws” that condemn people to death because of their sexual orientation; 27 nations voted in favor of condemning the resolution; 7 nations abstained; 13 nations voted against condemning.

The thirteen who voted against the resolution?

Bangladesh, Botswana, Burundi, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates ...

... and the United States of America.

Yes, we did. We voted not to condemn countries that give gay people death for being gay.

Carlos has been fighting a cold this week so I am the cook. I cooked dinner last Friday, Saturday, Sunday—I made Chicken Soup for his cold—and Monday. On Tuesday he said he’d cook and then he ... wait for it ... microwaved the pasta sauce that I made the day before and reheated some leftover pasta, too, and called it dinner.

When we sat down to hit, he said, sarcastically, to me:

“Uh, thanks for dinner?”

To which I sarcastically replied:

“Uh, when you microwave pasta sauce and reheat yesterday’s noodles, that is not cooking. Thank you’s are not necessary; but if they were, you could thank me for making the sauce and noodles that you could simply warm up.”

I’m lucky not to have ended up with a face full of marinara!

Man how shocking was it to hear that Tom Petty died this week at 66? I mean, I saw him, and the Heartbreakers, in concert several times and it was always a great show.

Petty suffered a heart attack last Sunday night and then passed away later at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital. He had just ended a tour celebrating the band’s fortieth anniversary with three sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl.

I guess he wanted to go out on a high note.

RIP Tom; thanks for all the music, and enjoy The Great Wide Open.