Cowboy Confessional

Dykes on bikes need to put their shirts back on.

The lead entry in every year’s San Francisco Pride Parade are the dykes — motorcycle riding lesbians, anyone of whom is more of a man than most men I know. A number of the DoBs ride topless. Now I’m not objecting to bare boobs — I’ve always liked those. I’m not offended by the fact that some of the shirtless DoBs have the type of physiques that should remain covered. Nor am I worried about the mammary road rash they might suffer if they had to lay down one of their hogs.

However, riding topless in the freezing June San Francisco weather will make a women’s nipples protrude further than a pair of #2 pencils, and could poke some-body’s eye out. See, it is a public safety issue.

Today was San Francisco’s 38th Pride Parade and clothing optional sexual expression fete with occasional fetishes fostered. Footage from past parades have been broadcast across the country, scaring millions of middle Americans out of their television comas. Nothing like footage of a young, buff and all-but-naked Latino thrusting his sequined g-string into your face to make a Kansas farmer believe the Apocalypse has arrived.

The changing name of the parade says something about the oddity that is an open-air asylum called San Francisco. Back in the 1970’s, the parade was the domain of homosexual males who came out of their closets and immediately filled those closets with evening gowns. In those comparatively quaint times, the parade was called “Gay Freedom Day” and later “Gay Pride Parade”. It was all about being male, gay, unashamed and undressed in public. In San Francisco, ass-less chaps count as “reasonably covered”.

This simply would not do! If San Franciscans believe in nothing else, they believe in tolerant inclusion of all peoples, lifestyles and beliefs … except for conservatives and Republicans who are lynched on sight. A parade devoted to only gay men was completely unacceptable said the gay women of the town. Lesbians insisted on being allowed in the parade, and given that they were bigger, stronger, and a damn sight meaner than the average effete fairy, the gays instantly acquiesced.

Propensity for rapid surrender is why generals don’t want gay men in the military.

So “Gay Pride” became “Gay and Lesbian Pride”. A couple of syllables longer, but you could still fit it on a bumper sticker, which the parade organizers did. These bumper stickers attracted the attention of the transgenders. With great pride they demand their inclusion rights as well, threatening to throw a collective hissy fit until men in dresses, women in work boots, various hermaphrodites and people part-way through surgical conversions were allowed in the parade.

I’ll admit, it is a little disconcerting when for the first time you see a person with bulging boobs and a bulge in their boxers.

Now the event was called the “Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Pride Parade”. Bumper stickers were out. Even the parade billboards were getting a little wordy. Television reporters could not recite the sexual orientation roll call with flubbing a line or laughing out loud. Undeterred, the parade continued each year despite it taking longer to say the name of the parade than the parade itself lasted. Say it loud, say it proud, we are out of time!

All the shouting from the accumulated boinking branches got the bisexuals to look up from whomever they were doing and ask why they were not in the parade.

(Just a brief aside: Not much in this world scares me, but the bisexuals do. I’m one of the most lustful libertines I know. Despite having a sex drive that would make a migrating salmon blush, I’m content having half of the human race as possible bed mates. The bis are not, which means they are actually hornier than I am, wanting to bang everyone they meet. This is truly frightening.)

Since the parade had already become a sexual orientation lexicon, adding yet another group was the simple part. Fitting them onto the marquee was something else. The common abbreviation for the “everything except heterosexuals” community — LGBT — cannot be pronounced in any known human language, and thus lacks marketing appeal. In an inspired move the parade committee abandoned cramming the entire carnal catalog into the press releases, and called it “Pride Parade”. Simple and not straight.

The event has been a “must see” for San Francisco Bay Area citizens and startled visitors. To say that some of pride parade’s participant are “colorful” is akin to saying thermonuclear warfare is noisy. Like legions of oppressed people before them, liberated gays allowed their emotional pendulum to swing far to the other extreme. They didn’t leave their closets, they exploded from them as if their leather harnesses had grown teeth and were chasing them out. The parade was a moment every year where gays were surrounded by people more or less like themselves and in a city where eccentric behavior is mandatory. Thus nothing, including clothing or discretion was necessary. “Pride” gave way to public predilection replete with feathered boas, burly boys in leather, and a growing mob of spectators encouraging ever more flamboyant behavior.

Shame really that the Pride Parade has peaked and is now heading downhill. Gayness now suffers from mainstreaming.

This year’s parade bordered on boring. Most of the parade’s color has been licked off thanks to mass acceptance. When the populace at large accepts you, there is little use in jumping about naked and demanding to be recognized. Gay marriage finally became legal in California, driving the first of the nail into Pride’s coffin. The parade route was littered with the newly wed and the children they had been creating all along. Raunchy and raucous has given way to matrimony and diaper changes. Pride has gone parental. If you never had a chance to see San Francisco at its most flaming flamboyant, well you’re too late. Those days are in decline.

Gay marriage has produced a new class of humor however. A large number of couples walked down the street carrying signs that read something like “Together 12 years, married for nine days.” My thought was “There you go ruining a perfectly good relationship by getting married.”

But my favorite were a lesbian couple who had not yet tied the knot (no, not in their bondage-and-discipline gear … the marital knot). They shyly carried a home-made sign reading “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re registered at Macy’s!”

click here for more entertaining photography from Pride’08

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This post will be updated throughout the campaign. Bookmark it now.

I politics, it is more important to vote against bad actors than it is to vote for heroes. That said, I present an ongoing and occasionally updated list of reasons to vote against Barack Obama (don’t worry, I’ll pick on McCain as well):

Obama is a racist: Obama uses race as a tool and a wedge to divide people instead of uniting them, talks like a bigot, and has kept company with some radical racists.

Obama is a liar: Last year Obama promised to use public campaign financing if his opponent did. McCain is a champion of public financing, and committed to doing so. Once McCain locked in to this lower level of funding, Obama switched in order to raise ungodly amounts of cash (which if unspent in the election can be used for graft) and blamed his duplicity a non-existent issue.

Obama associates with known terrorists: Obama has a long-term relationship with former Weatherman William Ayers. The Weathermen were a violent revolutionary terrorist group, responsible bombings in the United States. It is no surprise that the Weathermen have a socialist-to -communist political philosophy (notice how Ayers, in the photograph to the right, is standing on the American flag in a dirty alley — quite apropos for a terrorist).

Obama breaks under pressure: The presidency is a tough job. But Obama can’t handle the pressure of a simple debate. When debating Hillary in her attack mode, he stumbled badly. He is running away from McCain’s challenge for town hall debates which are designed to put candidates under pressure. If he can’t handle a simple debate, how will he handle Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or even a pack of Girl Scouts selling cookies?

Obama is at best a socialist, and leans communist: As if his terrorist and religious friends were not unsavory enough, Obama has career-long relationships with any number of people who believe government power is more important that individual liberty, which is antithetic to Americans. Obama’s proposed policies rack-up about a trillion dollars in new spending, and by his design this spending buys a stack of new and omnipotently oppressive regulatory regimes and restrictions on individual liberties. In short, his proposals make people poorer while enslaving them.

Obama keeps company with criminals: Granted, being a politician in Chicago automatically makes you a criminal associate. But Obama’s seedy criminal friends almost equal the number of Obama’s seedy ecclesiastic confidants. Most recently was Obama’s buddy Tony Rezko, convicted 16 times on corruption charges for influence peddling. Obama and Rezko’s intertwined and unusually profitable real estate arrangements are highly suspect and indicate Obama is not immune to quasi-criminal activity, if not the fully involved variety. The fact that Rezko’s criminal reputation preceded Obama’s entry into politics, and the fact that Obama created a relationship with Rezko despite this, shows alarmingly poor judgment on his part.

Obama doesn’t understand basic Americanism: Symbolism is important in every culture, including the inclusive American variety. A case in point concerning Obama’s indifference to American sensitivities is when Obama hijacked the Presidential seal. Obama reformatted, adding a new Latin phase. Aside from his ham-handed attempt to prematurely presume the mantel of office, he committed three symbolic sins: he co-opted a sacred symbol, he desecrated it with his campaign logo (see the rather spooky Obama ‘O’ on the eagle’s chest) and worst of all, he swapped the uniting phrase of the nation E Pluribus Unum (”out of many, one”) with Vero Possumus (”in truth we are able”). The reason this linguistic assault is heinous is that the message “out of many, one” is the recognition that America is composed of people from all over the world, and that we co-exist peacefully (are one) when all are free. To remove that national mantra means he doesn’t respect the basic principles of America (which may explain why Obama’s wife said she had never been proud of America).

Obama makes very stupid personal decisions: He has admitted to using cocaine (widely known to be powerfully addictive) and he cannot give up cigarettes. Can a man with such little self-control be an effective leader of the free world?

Obama doesn’t even know who he is: Take something as simple as race. In order to land votes, Obama calls himself black. But only Obama’s absentee father was black — his mother was white. That makes him mulatto. Yet when Obama is race baiting the public, he won’t use the accurate term to describe his genetics. Let’s be nice and simply assume his cocaine snorting blew-out a few brain cells.

Obama has no experience: The President is an executive, and as such must manage the largest organization on the planet. Barack has zero executive experience, and has only held elected offices for a decade. He has only been a U.S. Senator for two years, and he was absent for nearly 1/2 the votes that occurred during that period. He lacks the worldliness necessary to lead and command.

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In close elections, everything is decided by the undecided.

Registered independents are the perpetual American swing vote. They tend to be researchers and free thinkers. They rarely make up their minds until the last week before an election. But when you can get an early read on them it tends to prophetic.

Independents will crush Obama.

Several nationwide random surveys show a tight race between McCain and Obama. Some polls have the Dem and the Repub candidates less than two percentage points apart, well within the margin of error. Barr-ing a significant disruption, the 30% of America’s voting populace that declare themselves to be independent voters will decide our next President.

And right now, they ain’t backing Barack.

In a separate Times/Bloomberg poll (granted, these are two names not to be trusted) 54% of independents think that Obama is too inexperienced. Inexperienced in economics, foreign policy, energy policy … life. The one trait people rank as most important for the leader of the most powerful and occasionally clumsy nation on earth is a little experience.

Doing the math, a little north of 16% of Americans would vote against Barack today. If he and McCain are only a few points apart in most polls, then the game goes to McCain.

Bye bye Barack. Glad we hardly knew ya.

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The United States Supreme Court has ruled that executing a man who rapes a child is unconstitutional. They believe that the “cruel and unusual” clause of the Constitution forbids such penalties because in relationship to the crime, the punishment would be disproportionate.

I agree that the punishment is disproportionate. Death is too lenient. Drawn and quartered comes closer to parity.

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George Bush the 1^st learned that mucking in markets is madness.

Bush the Elder imposed a 10% luxury tax during his only term as President. This tax on consumption by well-heeled folk had the peculiar effect of eliminating most of the Florida yacht building industry. Wealthy people (Republican-defined wealthy, not Democrat-defined) ran the numbers, determined they could buy yachts in neighboring countries for less and take a nice little vacation to pick up their boat with the spare change. And they did.

Fiberglass layers, engine mechanics, and sail makers … you know, the blue collar vote … all lost their jobs while Sunshine State yacht building companies tanked.

If anyone is wondering why gasoline prices are so high these days, a good first place to look is government and how they have mucked in the markets.

China admitted as much today as they raised gasoline prices by 18%, which is not a price hike at all.

China and India both are in hyper growth modes. Since most of their population is poor, and since continued industrialization requires energy and transportation, these countries subsidize gasoline prices. So does Iran, Venezuela, and other nations run by advanced-stage syphilis patients.

Gasoline in those countries is less expensive than the market would otherwise demand, and as a result, gas and oil consumption is higher than it would otherwise be. This artificially high demand creates artificial shortages, which causes prices to artificially rise.

Oil has risen, climbing 100% in the last year alone.

An unintended consequence of market meddling is that the difference in the artificially low price of gasoline and the artificially high price of oil is paid for by these insane regimes. This is the real reason why China is reducing subsidies in order to raise prices: they can’t afford to keep paying the ransom they created.

Monkey with any self-balancing system (like an open market economy) and the system falls out of balance. Typically it falls on the people who tossed the monkey wrench into the machinery.

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