Before you turn up your nose and huff "He's so disgusting!" you need to listen to this, but first I'll set the stage... In the final segment of each show Robin Quivers reads the news. On this particular day one of the articles she shared was about the anti-gay group One Million Moms demanding that JCPenney fire Ellen DeGeneres as their new spokesperson because she's openly gay, which set Howard off. He talks about why Rosie O'Donnell was upset with David Letterman's remarks about how she met her fiance, about One Million Moms and then why Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann are "the worst people on the planet."
For the record, One Million Moms is an arm of the American Family Association. In 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the AFA as a hate group because of the "propagation of known falsehoods" and "demonizing propaganda" about homosexuality.
The clip is about twelve minutes long, but worth listening to. As a warning, the language is colorful, so this is not safe for work or around little ears.
I also recommend that you listen to Ellen's response to One Million Moms after they attacked her as not sharing their values. "Here are the values I stand for: I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you'd want to be treated and helping those in need," she said. "To me, those are traditional values. That's what I stand for."
I finally got a chance to watch Conan O'Brien Can't Stop. I thought it was a concert video, but it's actually a behind-the-scenes documentary. When NBC screwed Conan (and royally screwed themselves in the process), he was contractually prevented from appearing on TV, radio and the internet for six months. To fill that void he put together The Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tourand hit the road visiting 30 cities across the US.
The documentary reveals the team's shenanigans to be the sort of nonsense one would expect to go on considering the subject matter. But it also shows Conan's sadness and frustration with being away from his family for days and weeks at a time, and occasionally that frustration turns into more-than-justified anger directed at NBC.
A little of the backstory... When Johnny Carson retired in 1992 The Tonight Show should have gone to David Letterman, but NBC went with Leno and Letterman went to CBS. When Leno finally stepped down making room for someone with genuine talent, the obvious choice was Conan. NBC gave Conan the job but set him up for failure, something that I suspect Leno may have had a hand in. I don't believe that Leno wanted to leave The Tonight Show. I believe that he was nudged out as part of one of NBC's poorly thought out decisions, but then orchestrated his return by putting on a crappy show at 10 pm. His show was so horrible that viewers fled NBC and never returned. NBC likes to think that it was Conan that the viewers didn't care for but it's well documented that NBC's affiliates were complaining that Leno's lead-in was killing the ratings for their 11 pm news broadcast. When NBC said they were moving Leno's horrendous show to the 11:35 slot and pushing Conan back to 12:05, Conan did the honorable thing – he defended the institution that is The Tonight Show and said that it never had, and wouldn't under his watch, start after midnight. Well, NBC is Leno's bitch and Leno wanted the 11:35 slot, so Conan lost the battle. Conan could have compromised his principals and taken the 12:05, but again he did the honorable thing and told NBC to get stuff. Good for him!
It's still a mystery to me what NBC was thinking when they decided to return Jay Leno to the Tonight Show. Don't believe the stories that Jay is a nice guy. He's a scumbag, plain and simple. He's a thief (he's stolen bits and staff from The Howard Stern Show), he's shallow and insincere, he's a manipulator, and he's just not funny. Letterman and Conan each have more talent and comedy genius in their little finger than Leno has ever dreamed of having. NBC mistreated their talent, the two biggest talents in late night TV, so now their only option to replace Leno is Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy is funny, way funnier than Leno, but I fear that NBC and Leno have mortally wounded the Tonight Show leaving Jimmy to inherit nothing but a long-dead carcass.
But I digress. The documentary is not about Leno, it's about Conan, and it's really well done. Get the DVD, watch the film and be sure to check out the extras where you'll find some fun deleted scenes and an interview with Conan.
For the past week I've been craving cold peanut noodles with cucumber. I first had this dish in Beijing in the summer of 2010. My partner, Lu, is from China and while visiting his parents in Shanghai we traveled to Beijing. It was at the National Zoo - I was determined that I would see a panda on my first trip to China but there wasn't time to visit Sichuan on this trip - that I noticed people with takeout containers of noodles with a creamy light brown sauce, fresh scallion and julienned cucumbers on top. After Lu explained what it was I decided that would be my lunch. I make it a point to try the local cuisine no matter where I travel, and if this was the Beijing equivalent to a hot dog from a Manhattan street vendor then I was going for it. It was great! Sweet, savory and a little spicy and the cucumber set it off.
Lu has made this once or twice and it's always tasty, but I've never given it a shot... until today! The noodles and the cucumber are the easy parts - boil some angel hair pasta and julienne a seedless cucumber. It's the sauce that's the key, and it's here that I decided to get creative. The fundamental ingredients are peanut butter, light soy sauce and chicken stock (or water). Other typical ingredients are scallion, chili oil, sesame oil, hot red pepper flakes and grated or minced ginger.
I look at recipes as suggestions meant to inspire your creativity. Now if you're baking, which is not my strong suit, it's a different story. Today I coated the bottom of a small sauce pan with vegetable oil, heated it to a shimmer and added thinly sliced green onion (white and green sections) and some julienned ginger. After a few minutes I added a dollop of peanut butter, a few splashes of soy, a splash of sesame oil, a splash of chili oil and enough warm water to make a smooth sauce. When everything is well blended and the sauce is smooth I set it aside. The noodles were drained and a handful go into a bowl, a few spoonfuls of sauce are added and lightly tossed and then the whole thing is topped off with julienned cucumber and fresh thinly sliced green onion. It was exactly what I'd been craving, and I ate the whole thing.
Where do I begin? This man lives in his own alternate reality, and he's trying to suck the rest of us in with him. This little tirade of his is lunacy!
No one asked the right to change its religious views. What has been asked is that they stop trying to impose their religious views upon the rest of us! They can maintain “traditional marriage” in their churches; doing so is protected by the First Amendment. It's from that same Amendment that the concept of separation of churchand state comes; and in the spirit of the First Amendment I must ask Mr. Santorum and his supporters to cease at once their selfish attempts to cram their god down my throat! I do not want the theocracy that Mr. Santorum seems to so fervently believe he was divinely chosen to bring to the White House. This guy goes on like it's up to him to save the world, if we would only abandon our own belief systems and adopt his. Theocracies are dangerous – take a look at the Middle East. A government ruled by religion is one where the people are free to engage in a tyranny of the majority against the minority.
Santorum accuses the government of being secular, like that's a bad thing. Is he serious? Again, First Amendment, please! He also claims that questioning the pro-equality movement results in being “ostracized from the public square.” If that were true he would have been run out of town years ago!
Here's the bottom line... Denying me the right to marry my partner denies me equal protection under the law and effectively makes me a second-class citizen, and in doing so you cause me harm and denigrate me as a human being. Granting me the right to marry my partner denies you nothing. Nothing! It doesn't change your life one bit. Your rights remain as intact today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow. So, Mr. Santorum, let me be clear... My intolerance of you is not because of your religion. It is because you are an ignorant and frightened man that irresponsibly spews his hatred without thought or care for consequence and wraps his bigotry in the robes of his church, hiding behind his god while crying victim. Please, just respect “the wall of separation between church and state” and stop trying to deny me my rights.
Oh, and everyone please Google "Santorum".
Here's a transcript of Rick Santorum's remarks regarding the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional as seen in the video above:
“The Ninth Circuit decision yesterday said that marriage, if you believe in traditional marriage between a man and a woman and exclusively that, you are in fact – the only reason you could possibly believe that is because you are a bigot. There is no rational basis for you to have marriage as an institution between man and woman. There's no, NO, rational basis. Your belief of marriage between a man and a woman is purely irrational based on hatred and bigotry. That's what they just wrote. Four thousand years of human history... Irrational hatred and bigotry toward a group of people is the only reason you could possibly be for marriage between a man and a woman. Now, where's the tolerance in that? Where's the tolerance of someone having a belief structure that is based in nature, is based in reason, that is based in faith, and to ignore all of that, based in history, based in common sense, but yet all of this is ignored and you are bigots and haters. You are not to be tolerated. And if you think it ends there well just look what happens, look what happens when the government says “Here's the right I'm gonna give you and if you don't play the way we want we're gonna force you to do things you don't wanna do whether your religion says that or not.” This is the intolerance of the left, the intolerance of this secular ideology. It is a religion unto itself. It is just not a biblical based religion. And it is the most intolerant, just like we saw from the days of the atheists in the Soviet Union. It is completely intolerant of descent because they fear descent why? Because the descent comes from folks who use reason, common sense and divine revelation and they want no part of any of those things. They want their world view to be imposed without question, and if you question them you're haters, you're bigots and you should be as a result of that ostracized from the public square.”
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
It's that last bit, "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws", that's particularly important and makes clear that Prop 8 is/was unconstitutional.
The justices concluded that the law had no purpose other than to deny gay couples marriage, since California already grants them all the rights and benefits of marriage if they register as domestic partners.The measure "serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the court's most liberal judges, wrote in the 2-1 opinion.
It's still not clear to me why the Prop 8 proponents are so hellbent on denying marriage equality to gays and lesbians. They say they must "protect traditional marriage", to which I respond "From what?". Newt Gingrich and Kim Kardashian have done far more damage to traditional marriage than all of the married gays and lesbians in CT, IA, MA, NH, NY, VT and Washington DC combined! Others try to object on religious grounds. I don't quite understand that either, but then again I'm not one for organized religions. As the saying goes, "I don't have religious views, I have views on religion", and in my experience a lot of people hide their fear, hatred, intolerance and bigotry inside the robes of religion. I plan to explore the concept of objecting to equal rights for gays and lesbians on religious grounds, and as my knowledge base expands I'm sure you'll see more posts on the topic. In the meantime, you're welcome to share your thoughts here...
