Monthly Archives: November 2008

Last week, just prior to his meeting with leaders from all of the G20 countries, President George Bush spoke to a group of businessmen and women at the Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City about the economy.

Here’s a part of what he said, “While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today’s problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.

“In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure…but the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems that we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to all across the globe.” read more

Heaven knows I’ve had a lot of time and experience to learn lessons in the debate over gay rights. I started my career in Washington DC the year that Congress first began to deal with AIDS. It was the same year of the first Gay March on Washington to get Congress to approve federal funding for AIDS. I still remember writing a press release for my congressional boss that included these words, “How much money do we have to spend to tell people not to bugger each other?” And, with that, a much maligned, but very effective, homophobic career was born. read more

My dad was born in 1926 in Raymond, Washington. The first black man he remembers seeing wasn’t until the family moved to San Francisco in 1933. Even then, dad attended Catholic school and the black kids attended public school.

Dad fought in the Pacific during World War II…the day after he turned 18, he was at boot camp and less than one year later he was at Iwo Jima. For the two and a half years dad spent over seas in a segregated military, he only saw black men once, and that was while he was in a hospital recovering from an injury. He told me that he never understood why the military was like that. He figured a man was a man. read more