Because gay-bashing is central tenet of the GOP, Iowa legislators are trying to start the process to undo the state's marriage law:

Iowa House Republicans will attempt to bring about a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on Monday, the Iowa Independent reported.

The paper is reporting that gay rights group One Iowa believes Republicans will attempt to fish a bill that seeks to define marriage as a heterosexual union in the Iowa Constitution out of committee and put it up for a floor vote. Committee members have not acted on Democratic state Representative Michael Reasoner's proposed bill that aims to overturn the Iowa Supreme Court's April 3, 2009 ruling legalizing gay marriage.

“While legislative leadership has stood firm in support of equality, extremists are attempting to overthrow House rules and push an anti-marriage amendment to the floor!” One Iowa said in an email alert.

The procedural move to pull a bill out of committee requires a 51 vote majority. Seven Democrats would have to cross the aisle and vote with Republicans for the procedure to succeed. At least one Democrat, Reasoner, is expected to do that.

Republicans go to great lengths to burnish their anti-gay cred.

A writing habit is cultivated by two things:

1. Writing a lot.
2. Reading even more.

The more you write, the more you get to practice flexing vocabulary and voice as well as how to put your ideas into clear thoughts. The more you read, the more you capture lessons about tone, sentence structure, cadence, and idea flow.  And the more you do both, the more everything you touch, see, hear, and read becomes the seed of something else to write about.

There are some great posts out there about cultivating a writing habit, like these:

• Cultivate a Writing Habit: Chris Brogan
• 10 Steps to Create the Habit of Writing: Write to Done
• Seven Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School: Copyblogger
• Posts on Better Writing: Men with Pens
• Complete Your First Book with These 9 Simple Writing Habits: Dumb Little Man

These practices apply whether you’re blogging or penning a novel. Writing is an active discipline. You have to do it. Often.

But absorbing the written word in lots of different forms makes you a better writer. Period. Read blogs, articles, business books, biographies, fiction, whatever suits your fancy right now.

Not sure what to read? I piled a bunch of recommendations for books in my Twitter favorites. Scroll through them and you’ll find lots that have been tossed to me by my Twitter friends.  And I keep an Evernote file called “Book List” where I capture all the titles I haven’t read, but want to, so I’m always prepared at the bookstore or the library.

Reading more helps you identify good writing AND bad writing, and how to tell the difference between the two. You’ll start learning to spot words that are smooth to read versus overly dense, the pace of delivering ideas and organizing them in a flow, length of sentences that are easy or hard to read, vocabulary that’s too high brow or not nuanced enough.

Julien Smith tells you how to read a book a week in 2010. I probably average that if not more, in addition to all the blogs I read and online articles, news, whitepapers, etc. I read a ton, and I write every day. If you hate to read, that’s going to be harder for you, but it’s important nonetheless.

If delivering content on the web in written form is something you seriously aspire to – for the sake of contribution of ideas or to make money or both – you’ d better learn what it takes to write well, and reading is an important step to doing just that.

There is no shortcut.

Are you a writer? Reader? Both? Do you agree? What are you reading right now?

image by moriza

Wanna Write? Read Voraciously.

How the Super Bowl ad featuring David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno came together.

We met the first time when I was six, when his mother started dating my father. (Our parents lived together for a few years and married when I was eleven.) We didn’t see much of each other that first year, because our weekends rarely coincided. When we were around each other, I found him to...

[[[Please forgive the partial feed, it is to protect the survivors in the event that any one of these posts should need to disappear from the Internet for any reason. Please click through to read the full story and show your support.]]]

From a Columbia Law School press release:

(New York) Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic has won asylum for a gay man who feared persecution because of his sexual orientation if forced to return to his native Brazil.

The grant, issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, comes at a time when conditions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals in Brazil are becoming more dangerous.

“In Brazil, I lived in constant fear for my life,” said  Augusto Pereira de Souza, 27. “I tried to hide that I was gay, but still faced repeated beatings, attacks, and threats on my life because I was gay. At times I was attacked by skinheads and brutally beaten by cops. After the cops attack you and threaten your life for being gay, you learn quickly that there is no one that will protect you. For me, coming to the U.S. was a life or death decision.”

Brazil has one of the highest rates of hate crimes against GLBT people in the world. Grupo Gay da Bahia, the leading GLBT rights organization in Brazil, reports that between 1980 and 2009 there were 2,998 reported murders of homosexuals in Brazil. In 2008 alone, over 190 GLBT people were murdered, and the actual number is likely to be much higher since many of these killings go unreported.

“Mr. Pereira de Souza’s story is unfortunately not unusual for a gay man in Brazil,” said Rena Stern, a student who worked on the case. “The number of attacks and murders based on sexual orientation in Brazil has actually increased in recent years.”

Pereira de Souza, who will live in Newark, N.J., was referred to the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic by Immigration Equality, a national organization focused on immigration rights for GLBT individuals that provided important assistance in the case.

“In Brazil, police routinely fail to investigate violence committed against GLBT individuals,” said Brian Ward, another clinic student who helped Pereira de Souza prepare his asylum application. “In this environment, skinheads and other groups are free to persecute, torture, and even kill GLBT individuals with impunity.  Asylum will allow Mr. Pereira de Souza to stay in the United States where he will no longer have to fear for his life.”

Since September, three students from the Sexuality and Gender Clinic—Ward, Stern, and Mark Musico —have provided legal assistance in preparing the application for asylum. The students spent many months conducting interviews, drafting affidavits, researching country conditions, filling out the necessary forms, and preparing the client for his interview.

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.

Sponsor

UPDATE: While we're still waiting for an official response from Google's PR team, we've been invited to an event at the Googleplex tomorrow "to see some innovations in two of our most popular products." The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time - stay tuned tomorrow for RWW's live coverage of the event!

This is the current option for updating statuses in Gmail:

Google's new tools, however, will better integrate with Google's multimedia sites, YouTube and Picasa. (Currently, Google Talk users can share YouTube videos via chat, which prompts a miniaturized version of the video to pop up above the chat in progress.) Users will also be able to see "a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with."

We're contacting Google for more information and will update this post as we learn more.

In the meantime, however, we're wondering how this feature will integrate with other status-sharing sites. Will Gmail/Google Talk's new feature act as Google's first steps into developing a social media client (like Tweetdeck) in its own right?

The new feature could start appearing on users' screen as soon as this week. If you had this tool, would you use it?

Discuss

You might have caught that the amorphous conservative think tank, The Sutherland Institute, is pushing the Legislature to revise state law to make it easier for people who have signed an initiative petition to pull their signatures off the petition. Read their news release here.

It didn't take long for Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, to scoop up the banner and run with it.  You can read The Trib story about it here.

There's a little history to this one. In 2002, a group of residents circulated an initiative petition that sought to stick it to Envirocare by raising the tax levied on the radioactive waste disposal site. Stephenson didn't like that proposal either, and complained -- through his daytime employer, the business-backed Utah Taxpayer Association -- that people could be duped into signing the petition.

That initiative failed to make the ballot when backers couldn't muster the signatures they needed to qualify for the ballot. How'd it happen?

Well I am told that it didn't help that the company sent representatives to people's homes with the forms needed to remove the names from the petition and made the case to pull their names off the list. They targeted the small counties where a handful of signatures makes a difference, and the initiative failed to make the ballot.

Flash forward about a hundred months, and the Legislature, and specifically Stephenson, is again riled up about another initiative, this time imposing rigorous ethics rules on the Legislature. And Sutherland and Stephenson are proposing legislation that would make it easier to pull a signature off a petition.

Maybe the backers of the ethics drive have wised up and aren't going to turn in their signatures early this time. Or maybe it's going to be deja vu all over again.

-- Robert Gehrke

02/08/2010- by Natasia Langfelder

Rachel Maddow wants you to know that she is not getting married. Maddow is currently living with her long term partner, artist Susan Mikula. Maddow and Mikula met when Maddow was a grad student. Maddow shoveled Mikula’s driveway…among other things.

Maddow released a statement today saying:

“This spring, we will have been together for 11 years, and our relationship is serious and happy, mature, monogamous. We like having the right…but we’re making our own decision about whether we should exercise it.”

I don’t want to delve into the validity of Maddow’s relationship. However, statements such as these generally occur right before the couple in question breaks up. This applies to gay or straight relationships. Ladies, feel free to get your hopes up.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lez Ask The Femme: Time to Break-Up (lezgetreal.com)
• Kirsten Gillibrand on Rachel Maddow (lezgetreal.com)

Orlando's Florida Family Policy Council, headed by John Stemberger, was very upset when a judge gave custody of a 1-year-old boy to her foster parents, because her foster parents are lesbian couple Vanessa Alenier and Melanie Leon. In notifying its mailing list about the "arrogant judicial activism," the FFPC included a photo of the pair (at left) to show supporters just how repulsed they should be by the adoption case. Except that's not the adoptive couple; that's them, on the right. They're a couple of good looking women who are the perfect, media-friendly faces for the same-sex adoption debate. It was a stupid ruse, and FFPC, an affiliate of Focus On The Family, has been fairly called out for their sensationalism. But this website is not above sensationalism. Which is why, in reporting on this story, we're going to substitute the original photo of John Stemberger — who also served as chair of Florida's Yes2Marriage.org — for a scarier version.

CONTINUED »

---

Permalink | 1 comment | Add to del.icio.us
Tagged: ffpc, Florida Family Policy Council, Focus On The Family, John Stemberger

NBC is considering scrapping the time delay when it airs the Emmys on Aug. 29, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

The TV show typically airs live on stations on the East and in Central time zones, with a delay for the West coast.

But keeping the show live across the country will allow the conversations on Twitter, Facebook and mobile apps to happen in real time.

Chatty spoilers would already spill onto social networks by the time the awards aired on the West Coast. A live show might keep them tuned in to the actual broadcast.

NBC just made the move when it aired the Golden Globes on Jan. 17, and it was all in the name of Twitter. It seems to have paid off. Viewership for the Golden Globes increased by 14%, making it the network's largest viewing (excluding sports) in six years.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Fox, ESPN, Time Warner Wrestling NBC For Olympics Rights
• NBC Wants 200 Million Viewers For Olympic-Sized Payback
• Jeff Zucker's Master Plan to Fix NBC

Are you suspicious of those sexy avatars and "marketingbizpro" accounts following you on Twitter, but don't have the time or inclination to block and report them one by one as they pop up?

We've just found a new, completely free app that will zap those bots and bad users in just one click. It's fully customizable, so you can tell the blocker what you personally consider to be a spam account. And you can choose to simply unfollow those users, block them or report the accounts to Twitter, as well - again, all with just one click. StopTweet is definitely one of the more useful apps we've seen lately, and it also helps us all do our part to clean up the Twitter universe.

Sponsor

We just tried it on an account and caught around 50 spam followers; pretty exciting, no?

Here's how it works: You tell StopTweet what behavior you think is spammy by defining a few important parameters. The first parameter is follower/friend ratios, which StopTweet considers on a scale of one to 100 percent. I personally think it's sketchy when none of the people you follow have returned the favor. I like my friends to be engaged and engaging.

Next, you tell StopTweet how many tweets you'd like your followers to have on a scale of zero to 30. This won't work on the spambots that ping 500 people with the same "LOOK AT THIS CRAZY BRITNEY VIDEO!!1!", but it'll certainly get rid of inactive accounts and users who aren't really adding much value to your network.

It works for followers and friends, and you can take one of three actions (unfollow, block or report) on the account StopTweet finds. StopTweet also comes with three convenient presets for light, medium and aggressive scans.

The app also has a tab to see your own list of spammer accounts, but we weren't able to click through due to a possible bug in the very new app.

"We didn't like any of the applications that were already out there. They were all too complicated for the average Twitter user," wrote creators Joi Company, who also created Twitstatus, a keyword-based Twitter widget generator. "The application is extremely easy to use, and allows you to only block who you want to block without hassle. On top of all this, it's free. Most of the apps we found charge a monthly or yearly fee. We do not."

We think StopTweet is a genuinely useful app, and we recommend that you give it a shot and let us know how it works for you.

Discuss

LAYTON -- Neighbors said they were shocked Sunday to learn of the death of a 4-year-old Layton girl late Saturday.

Safety officials believe gas from a pesticide may be responsible for Rebecca Toone's death.

read more

There’s nothing I hate more than tax time. Well except for going to the post office. I fucking hate the post office.

Oh, and I hate grocery shopping.

And the doctor’s office waiting room.

So, yeah, I HATE STUFF.

Anyway. Taxes suck. Luckily an old co-worker of mine is an accountant. Every year I have to track her down. I suspect she changes her phone number and email just to keep me from bugging her about finances. Or I just suck at organization and lose the info. Good think I have trusty AK to keep track of people for me. He’s way better than any iPhone assistant app.

“Hey, what’s Angie’s email address? I need to see if she can do my taxes. Not DO as in have sex. I do not want Angie having sex with my taxes.”

He laughs… jerk.

“Can you imagine how awkward that would be? Ohh, Angie, sorry that my taxes gave you the paper-cuts. And what if you can’t treat vaginal paper-cuts?”

“Sarah, I’m trying not to imagine this.”

“No need. I’m sketching a picture of it now. I’ll take a photo and send it over.”

And to think he didn’t even appreciate the drawing. People need visuals. Duh.

Comments (1)

©Sarah Nielson—Tales of Wit and Charm All Rights Reserved...Or Else

I suddenly have empathy for all things EMO, because no one understands my art. is a post from: Sarah Bellum's Tales of Wit and Charm. Click here to read comments!

By GottaLaff

''No political party has a record good enough on LGBT civil rights that it can rightfully claim to be entitled to our money on a party-wide basis.... No longer will we let any political party take our money and volunteers with one hand, and slap us in the face with the other when we seek full equality.''

Steven Goldstein of Garden State Equality in a press release announcing the end of the large New Jersey organizations' unanimous decision to stop donating to political parties (a/k/a Democrats). They have opted to support individual candidates instead. In January, members of the New Jersey State Senate voted against a proposed marriage equality bill for gay and lesbian couples. Even though the result was expected, it was seen as a stinging defeat from the mostly gay-friendly lawmakers because the state's new, incoming Governor has said he will not sign a bill allowing gay marriage. (Garden State Equality via Facebook)