Friday, August 20, 2010

Fantasy Films Friday

Okay, so, here's the deal. If you have a twitter acct - every Friday you come up w/some awesome films/film names you'd like to make/see made. They can be a clever play-on-words or just an all-around awesome ideer. You tag it with #FantasyFilmsFriday. See my #FantasyFilmsFriday Twitter posts for examples. GO!GO!GO!

Click here to see what I'm sayin'!

NOTE: scroll slightly down the page to see #FantasyFilmsFriday examples

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Good and Evil Sisters of Journalism

This entry is brought to you by yet another example of Responsible Journalism beset by her ugly step-sister, Unethical Reporting. You might have heard by now about Oklahoma Republican Senator Steve Russell authoring a bill to opt Oklahoma out of the federal law protecting people from hate crimes based on, among other things, their gender and sexual orientations. In other words, he was voting to take hate crime protection away from the GLBT community. That story on that can be found here.

That in and of itself is straight up ridikulus ("ri-dik-uh-luss") but, to take matters from abominable to comical, Senator "Gays are the New Necrophiles" Russell mislabeled the statutes in the bill and actually took hate crimes protection away from people based on their religion, not sexual orientation. The story, broken by Oklahoma Daily reporter Ricky Maranon in late March of this year, can be found here.

There's the most rudimentary version of the background on my rant.

National GLBT newspaper The Advocate published an oddly similar version of Ricky's story just six days later. Ricky received credit for breaking this story from both other local and national news sources that followed up on it. However, The Advocate reporter Michelle Garcia used an unattributed quote Ricky said came directly from his story - "a legislative error". Except for the last paragraph and quote, her entire report reads like a summary of Ricky's original yet nowhere in Garcia's story does she give him one bit of credit, either for breaking it or for the information he said she took from it. You can read the stories and be your own judge but, since this is a blog, I will go on record as saying that it looks to me like some Grand Theft Byline went down on Michelle Garcia's part.

You can read Ricky's Cease and Desist letter to The Advocate for further explanation on the background and exactly why/how he believes Mrs. Garcia done messed up.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Dear Ignorants,

America is not, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation. The very idea of this country basing itself on any one religion is so erroneously against the purpose of its founders' original intent that to call it unconstitutional should be a job left solely to Captain Obvious. That said, if you oppose the building of the Islamic community center and mosque in New York, you do so only on the grounds of personal dislike for another religion. There is no standard of patriotism grounding your arguments. Washington, Franklin and Hancock are not only on the other side of the debate from you but thanks to your falsely arguing in the name of nationalism, they're setting world records for the number of consecutive rollovers done in a grave.

That was (mostly) fact. This is opinion backed by fact:

Building an Islamic community center is more than appropriate. It's essential. Although many, including myself, have explained this before, it bears repeating that the extremist attacks on 9-11 are not representative of the majority of moslems in this world and especially not in America. For conservatives, especially Christians, to act as though other religions exist only for the purpose of war-mongering against their God and country is not only ignorant, it's hypocritical. Lest we forget, Christianity has a long, and I do mean loooong history of immoral, ungodly violence acted out in the name of God. See: The Crusades (1096-1270 a.d.), the Catholic church's conquering, I mean, converting of South America's natives. The list goes on but not here.


Despite its blood-muddled history, many still think of Christianity as the peaceful standard by which our government should make its every move. This causes Christians to act as though any other faith is not just a direct threat to their religion but to their country. John Locke called for the separation of church and state with good reason. It was to keep jingoists like Sarah Palin from associating their personal, unconstitutional beliefs and bigotries with the rest of this country. If you feel moslems should not enjoy the same freedoms you do, fine. That's your opinion. It's a terrible one but it's yours all the same. Running around screaming it at the top of your lungs while waving an American flag doesn't make it patriotic. Just idiotic.

::edit::

8-5-2010

Despite Eric Rothwell's implications to the contrary, Michael Moore did not write this blog entry. Also, yes, it is extremely opinionated and is not riddled with facts. It's based around one central fact and the rest is just me ranting sharing my thoughts and yes, feelings on the subject. Also, Kristin Frosco says I'm right.