BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2003
He's here, he's queer, he can't
get not-for-profit status. Harvey
Silverglate passes along
this absurd story
from the New York Law Journal. It concerns one Christopher
Barton Benecke, who considers himself to be "gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender" (all four?), and who wants to obtain not-for-profit
status for a group that he founded called Queer Awareness.
It looks like it's not going to
happen. Benecke ran afoul of the language police who work for the
state of New York. They ruled that the word queer is indecent
and degrading, and therefore is banned by a state law governing the
names of not-for-profit corporations.
Thus, for Benecke, the price of
being queer includes not being able to claim tax-exempt
status.
Benecke is suing on First Amendment
grounds. Needless to say, he should win.
Dark days for the Dark Lord.
Newsweek has a tough cover
story on Dick Cheney, and
how his paranoid fear-mongering within the White House helped make
possible the war in Iraq.
Even with all the weasel words,
it's not a flattering picture:
[I]t appears that
Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those
snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while
discarding others that don't. He is widely regarded in the
intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for
the worst-case scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or
at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the
suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he
wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice
President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of
free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal
policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza
Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel
government that became the real power center.
posted at 9:01 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
