Who could withstand the onslaught of warm air and occasional drizzle? But they should have known. The Washington state legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage on February 8, and the day before that a court in California struck down laws against same-sex marriage. This punishment through horrible warmness and light rain is the natural outcome.

At least that’s what fundamentalist Christian leaders John Hagee and Pat Robertson and Stephen Bennett and John Piper and Graham Dow and Yehuda Levin say. They say that weather is God’s divine judgment against communities embracing sodomicious equal rights. So yea, people of Seattle, tho ye quaver and ye shake yon fisties at the heavens, know this is a Mighty Tepid Mist of DOOM! Los Angeles, you’re next! In a few weeks! Maybe!

“Marriage is defined and has always been defined as ‘one man and one woman.’ We simply cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage.”

We cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage? Why not? For that matter, what choice do we really have?

Most people who have been married for any length of time understand that every married couple has its own definition of marriage. There are millions of different definitions of marriage in the America today. That’s life.

Rick Santorum does not live in the same world you and I inhabit. Santorum lives in a fantasy land where everyone has the same idea about what marriage is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to work. It’s an outdated Leave It To Beaver model of marriage that wasn’t even accurate back in the 1950s.

We need a President of the United States who can deal with the world as it is, not the world as he wishes it could be. In the real world, several states recognize that the scope of marriage is bigger than what’s imagined in Rick Santorum’s small vision.

Marriage is not and has not always been defined as only between one man and one woman. That’s a fact. If Rick Santorum still doesn’t feel ready to learn the facts, that’s his business. Let’s just not allow him to bring his ignorance into the White House.

Standard 1: If a candidate has been one of the following… “Vice President, United States Senator, Member of Congress, Presidential Cabinet Member, Head of a federal agency, Governor, Mayor of any of the largest 100 cities in the United States, Chairman or Chief Executive Officer or President of any corporation or nonprofit corporation or philanthropic organization with 1,000 or more employees, President of a national labor union with 100,000 or more members, military officer who has attained flag rank [General or Admiral], Ambassador, and President of an American-based university with more than 4,000 members” … then the candidate is Automatically Qualified as a presidential-quality candidate and has to collect just 10,000 clicks of support from 10 states to appear on the ballot.

Standard 2: If a candidate does have the experience referenced above, but the Americans Elect’s corporate Candidate Certification Committee steps in and decides that the candidate is qualified to be president anyway, “in view of the Contingently Qualified Candidate’s equivalent experience and demonstrated capability,” then the candidate is deemed Contingently Qualified as a presidential-quality candidate and has to collect 50,000 clicks of support to appear on the ballot.

Standard 3: A candidate not Automatically Qualified or deemed to be Contingently Qualified by the Candidate Certification Committee can still qualify for the ballot IF the Candidate Certification Committee vote to reject the candidate was not unanimous. In order to obtain ballot qualification, a majority of all people who have ever been registered as Americans Elect delegates will have to visit the Americans Elect website and affirmatively vote to support the candidate’s access to the ballot.

The first candidate to be drafted for the Americans Elect presidential nomination today was one Craig Ennis. As you can see from this screen capture of Craig Ennis’ draft candidate page, Americans Elect has placed him into the Automatically Qualified category:

“Because this candidate has a similar level of experience as past presidents, he or she needs at least 1,000 supporters in each of 10 different states to qualify.”

How did Craig Ennis get Automatically Qualified?

Has he been Vice President, United States Senator, Member of Congress, or Presidential Cabinet Member?

No.

Has Ennis been head of a federal agency, Governor, Mayor of any of the largest 100 cities in the United States, or Ambassador?

No.

Has Ennis been Chairman or Chief Executive Officer or President of any corporation or nonprofit corporation or philanthropic organization with 1,000 or more employees, President of a national labor union with 100,000 or more members, or President of a University?

No. Ennis lists work as electrician’s apprentice. That’s honorable work, but it’s not what Americans Elect describes in its qualifications.

Has Ennis been military officer who has attained flag rank [General or Admiral]?

Apparently not. Ennis lists himself as an Army veteran and a National Guard veteran, but he is not listed in any public document as having obtained the rank of General or Admiral.

Despite this lack of qualifications in line with the rules for Automatic Qualification, Americans Elect has brought Craig Ennis up to the top-level Automatically Qualified status.

What qualifies Craig Ennis to be Automatically Qualified?

He doesn’t appear to have held any elective office. He ran for the Virginia House of Delegates and got 24.5% of the vote against a Republican who was running otherwise unopposed. His affiliation: Independent Greens of Virginia, a conservative political party not affiliated with the Green Party.

The June 10 2009 Wayback Archive of craigennis.com shows off his civic qualities as he begins his first run for political office:

Here is a call to Arms, I put forth a call to all of those who oppose.The roots of Liberal Agenda has not had the time to spread.These roots are weak and vulnerable, they are susceptable to destruction.

In 2009 you the voter of the 28th House District of Va. will have a part in this Rebellion.I will need volunteers for this Guerrilla War against the Obamanizing of Virginia. I will need people to help spread the message, I will need precinct Commanders to help organize the operation.

The question is how committed to the cause are you?

Join the Rebellion!

Vote Craig Ennis ( Delegate) 28th House District ,November 3 2009
Eastern Stafford and Fredericksburg

That “call to arms” could be just metaphorical, right? How about Craig Ennis’ Twitter account? He begins September 6 2009 with this thought:

TEST TEST TEST is this thing on? This is my first tweet please bare with me. If you hang around I am sure its gonna get good.

Oh, it got good all right. On April 17 2010, Ennis writes across a series of twitter posts using his account ABLE DANGER. You have to read them backwards to read them correctly:

P.S. Shut the hell up Bill Clinton I had Bin Laden for you to kill in 1998 and you were a pussy like the letter of Nov. 28 1998 said yu were
17 Apr 10 Favorite Retweet Reply

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
to bottle us up. You have insulted to many honest citizens and now you are hearing the voices of your demize. It is over for yall. Your move
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
The people have had enough. The last call will be to the people itself, the people you work for. You have said to much called to many names
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
The second call will be to all Law Enforcement Personell in America, the call will be to protect the citizens. You all are stompin on rights
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
will call to the military to make the choice support a fool or defend the Constitution.
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
I put this open direct words to you, if you try to infringe on the Constituion, I Craig E Ennis will put out the real call to Arms, I first
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
a one term chump and recorded as America’s worst President this is your history I write it Now. Pelosi is a fool the rest of you are clowns.
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
by utilizing the work and intelligence and secret details of the GWOT for political gains will come back to haunt you. You are gona be
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
the 2008 elections was a sweep for the Dems so you got to have health careI speak of the deal we had the White House Bush Admin an Gang of 8
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
When President Bush handed that package off to you, you were given the details of my work you know what I speak of. Here is the truth!
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
Kicking the Liberal foundation out from underneath you. Surprise Mr President this is for you and all to see. Hook Line and Sinker you bit.
17 Apr 10

ABLEDANGER Craig E Ennis
Starting the Rebbellion, Putting the call to all Patriot’s ,Tea Partiers join forces now. It is time to take up arms fight the Liberals. USA
17 Apr 10

“Time to take up arms fight the Liberals.” Charming. I have the screen captures saved in case the account gets deleted, by the way.

If you didn’t get Craig Ennis’ drift enough, try this message of October 24 2010 posted as a comment on a conspiracy website:

I have this messege for you those who think you can cover this up I will show you what a motivated pissed off American can do when he sets his mind to it. BOOOOOOOMMMM it will be the biggest attack America has seen and you the people who cover this up will be to blame watch for it.

For this man, Americans Elect has pushed aside its own official rules and issued the Automatically Qualified status. What a precedent. If any AE candidate following Ennis is denied Automatically Qualified status, we’ll all have to ask what gives. Loudly.

Newt Gingrich would have had a point if he supported policies of freedom and self-determination in marriage for other people. But he doesn’t. Newt Gingrich is all about freedom for himself, and all about taking freedom away from other people. What a despicable man.

How DARE he? He’s running in a presidential contest and the American people have the collective memory of, oh, what’s a dim, slimy little scurrying animal with incredibly low self-awareness? Right, a Newt.

The possibilities for a new Gingrich campaign slogan are plentiful:

Gingrich 2012: “I’m Open, America”

I think maybe I should start seeing other candidates, Newt.

Gingrich-Edwards 2012: A Mistress in Every Pot

Gingrich-Ensign 2012: Traditional Marriage, heh heh.

Newt Gingrich for President, Carrot Top for Pope

Gingrich 2012: If We Let Lesbians Marry, Where Will I Pick Up Chicks?

Tawdry-Inappropriate 2012

Newt Gingrich: A New Era of Openness (OK with Callista)

Gingrich ’12: Traditional Values, Unless Your Name Rhymes with “Flute”

Newt ’12: Lookit what the Gays did to my marriages!

There must be more than this. Can you come up with the new Newt Gingrich presidential campaign slogan in this new era of Openness?

I feel that it’s necessary for me to state explicitly that it’s a very rude thing for anyone to piss on any other person’s dead body. Most people would be shocked to see that being done to the dead body of a dog, or a horse. For this reason, it’s good that people are condemning the creation by U.S. Marines of a video showing four soldiers from the Marine Corps emptying their bladders on the dead bodies of three dead Afghan men.

Now that I’ve joined in that condemnation, though, I have to wonder at the bizarre perspective that regards it as perfectly acceptable to kill another human being, but is nonetheless outraged upon finding out that a person was urinated on after having been killed. Guns kill. Pee doesn’t.

If someone offered me the choice between being shot to death with gunfire or being pissed on, I might grimace at the thought of it, but I would not hesitate in making my choice. I would choose to let other people pee on me, even if they recorded the humiliation on a video camera.

Many Americans are now resorting to a knee jerk response that’s developed to all news of outrages committed by American soldiers. They utter their pro-war mantra, “Support Our Troops!”, and then say that the corpses that were urinated on were Taliban, and so they deserved it.

The truth is, it isn’t known whether the dead people shown in the video were affiliated with the Taliban in any way. A caption added to the video says that they were Taliban, but then, consider the source of that claim. Can people who smile while pissing on dead human corpses, and then show videos of that activity to their friends, be considered credible?

What if the corpses did belong to members of the Taliban? We still wouldn’t know what these Taliban members did, if they were violent, and whether they joined the Taliban in order to help Osama Bin Laden or were merely more recent recruits trying to fight against a foreign invasion and corrupt central government. Those who apologize for the post mortem pissing ritual are making very quick judgments against people they don’t know at all.

The most laughable statement in reaction to the video came from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which said, “This disrespectful act is inexplicable and not in keeping with the high moral standards we expect of coalition forces.”

It’s sad, but the urination by U.S. Marines on dead human corpses is entirely in keeping with the moral standards of the U.S. military and other military organizations. It isn’t inexplicable. On the contrary, it’s easy to explain. When you take impressionable teenagers who have no experience of the world outside of the care of their parents, and teach them that it’s an honorable thing to punch, kick, stab, shoot, bomb, and in other ways brutalize other people merely because they’ve been ordered to do so, it is quite predictable that those young people will lose their moral foundations and perform all manner of disrespectful acts.

War is not moral. War is not respectful. That’s the simple message that’s been lost in the coverage of the U.S. Marine golden shower video.

YouTube requires people seeking to view the videos of the U.S. Marines pissing on dead human bodies to confirm that they are 18 years or older. What a shame YouTube does not place a similar requirement on U.S. military recruitment videos.

Looking around on Occupii, I’m finding a huge amount of useful information about protest efforts and organizations. Among those is the Magicians Alliance, a group of Occupy movement supporters seeking to discuss “esoteric/occult” ways to support the Occupy movement.

I’m no Wiccan. I don’t believe in Magick, and I’m skeptical of religious methods of activism. I think that when people hold prayer vigils to try to confront injustice, for instance, the approach is worse than ineffective, because the prayer doesn’t change reality and because the prayer meetings take activists off the street, where they might be engaged in more practical efforts.

That said, I understand the need of many activists to be motivated by symbolic systems of meaning. So, if practitioners of Magick, or of any other religious path, want to get together to have rituals or talk about how their beliefs inform their activism, that’s okay with me, just so long as these religious groups don’t try to push their beliefs and rituals on other activists, and as long as the rituals and talk aren’t all that takes place.

I still was somewhat disturbed by one element of the Magicians Alliance on Occupii. The moderator warned members that “RIGHT paths and CENTER paths are welcome, LEFT paths will be asked to use a different website – and banned should they refuse to take their craft elsewhere.”

What was this? Although it has a minority of libertarian participants, I look upon the Occupy protests as a primarily leftist movement. So, was the Magicians Alliance attempting some sort of right wing spellbinding coup within the Occupy movement? Are Wiccans and their ilk anti-liberal? Why couldn’t a left path participate?

I found it difficult to believe that any group within the Occupy movement would exclude a liberal perspective, so I did a bit of additional research. What I discovered is that, in fact, within the arena of Magick, the terms Left and Right have quite different meanings than they do within the political realm.

For practitioners of Magick, the Right Hand path is understood to represent morally-focused approaches, whereas the Left Hand path is amoral, and aims to transcend ethical boundaries. Some Magickal folk interpret this division as one of good versus evil, or light versus dark, or higher versus lower. Others, however, merely regard the distinction as one of philosophical outlook, and say that the rejection of the Left Hand path is merely a residual influence of Christian ideology.

Looking at this context, it seems that the moderator of the Magicians Alliance on Occupii is among those practitioners who hold to the model of moral dualism. The rejection of the Left is not a refusal to admit liberals, but an admonition for those who intend to apply the esoteric arts for the benefit of the Occupy movement to do so with an ethical framework in place.

• Stephen Bennett
• Harold Camping
• Graham Dow
• John Hagee
• Yehuda Levin
• John Piper
• Pat Robertson

… have repeatedly insisted that God uses the weather as an instrument of punishing judgment when gay and lesbian people in a community step out of hiding and engage in the sort of acts public affection that straight people take for granted. Holding hands. Getting married. Kissing. That sort of thing, according to the religious leaders listed above, will lead to killer tornadoes, floods and hurricanes.

A perfect test for this notion arose on December 22 of 2011 when two women in the Navy were granted the public honor of the “first kiss” after arriving in port in San Diego, California. Navy-sanctioned photos of the two women kissing each other, and of sailors applauding, spread around the world. It’s the sort of thing that’s happened for straight military couples for over a hundred years, but this was the first same-sex “first kiss.”

So what hit San Diego for the offense of hosting this public display of sapphic love? Was it a hurricane? A tsunami? An earthquake? A volcano?

Nope. The day of the kiss, San Diego was cursed with warm air and sunshine. The next day, too.

What’s next? Will Yahweh send accursed same-sex couples to the comfy chair?

336th Way to Exasperate a Liberal:

Force them to sit down and watch the movie Patton.

Then ask them just how well we’d have done in World War II with an army led by men like Barack (“We could learn from the Nazis’ outreach to Islam”) Obama, draft-dodging Bill Clinton, Al (“All these explosions must be bad for the environment”) Gore, Jimmy (“America has to get over her inordinate fear of National Socialism”) Carter…

I’ve just finished reading every single one of President Barack Obama’s White House statements regarding Nazis and the Holocaust. I’ve searched through newsbanks and done a plain old Google search too. I can’t find a single shred of evidence that Barack Obama has ever said “We could learn from the Nazis’ outreach to Islam” or anything even close to those words. He hasn’t uttered the sentiment either.

Moving on, there’s no evidence that as Vice President (or at any other time) Al Gore ever spoke the words “All these explosions must be bad for the environment.” Even if he did say it, well, a lot of explosions are bad for the environment. And finally, James Delingpole has either suffered the most amazing case of slipped fingers on the keyboard or he’s just deliberately misquoted former President Jimmy Carter to make him look like a Nazi-lover. Search Google quickly today for the phrase “America has got to get over her inordinate fear of National Socialism.” If you have access to a newsbank, search it any time. The one and only reference to that quote is made by James Delingpole himself. Jimmy Carter never said those words.

What did President Jimmy Carter say? June 1977, Notre Dame Commencement Speech:

Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed. For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.

Communism and Nazism (“National Socialism”) are not the same thing. And in his remarks President Carter was warning against taking the principles and tactics of our enemies in order to defeat them, an entirely reasonable moral stance that we would do well to observe today. Delingpole would have you believe that in his speech Carter was talking about cuddling up with Nazis.

There’s no gray area here. These are falsehoods, plain and simple. In a pundit’s inversion of the classic Lionel Richie song, Delingpole is once, twice, three times a liar — and that’s just today. I expect more of the same tommorow.

The U.S. Department of Labor maintains a list of items that it has a “reasonable basis to believe” are made in a country through the use of forced child labor.

Toys made in China have made that list.

When you go shopping for gifts this year, will you buy toys made by enslaved children?

It’s your choice.