This blog is designed to be a place where ordinary people who also happen to be bloggers can post about issues that are important to them, and be heard by wider audiences. If you write for your own blog or for a group blog, you are more than welcome to crosspost those essays here, but we ask that you use that opportunity to tell your readers “this entry is crossposted at the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance. You are also encouraged to post links to stories written by other contributors here. The fact is, the more we get in the practice of linking to each other, the better it is for all of us.
As far as ideology, I expect that we will be something of a mix of moderate to liberal viewpoints, not necessarily loyal to a particular party. Nobody is their best self all the time, but I expect us to make a genuine effort to treat each other with respect, even when we disagree.
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The first time I saw these bizarre photographs, I imagined an ad posted in the "Casual Encounters" section on craigslist: "Hi! I'm a bisexual, radioactively-enhanced Arachnid-American stud looking for freaky but open-minded humans. Let's have some hot 'n' sexy interspecies fun!"
From doing further research I learned they're posters for a safe sex campaign. (No, not in the United States, silly; it's in France. What's the chances of something this controversial and overtly sexual getting a green light here?) The subtext, of course, is: Be careful choosing your sexual partners because you never know what vermin you might pick up. Ewwwwww. O.K., maybe it's not subtle, but it's clever and I think it's sure as hell effective. Hey, whatever works. In spite of what disgraced hypocrites like Randall Tobias might think, Ignorance Isn't Bliss.
Call it bad luck, God turning a blind eye to your value, karma, or the indifference of a vast universe, but for some people life is always going to be uglier than it should be, while other people get a free ride. If you're a priest, Nazi war criminal, baseball player, cop, rapist, ex-bank teller or the President of The United States, it really doesn't matter. What happens to you, bad or good, has nothing to do with your merits as a human being.
But sometimes justice happens, even if it’s by accident.
Just ask Randall L. Tobias, the deputy secretary of state responsible for U.S. foreign aid, who resigned after it was discovered he was a frequent customer at an upscale escort service allegedly involved in prostitution. Wait, it gets better. Remember, Tobias was an abstinence-only zealot who was also the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief. Never mind unholy nonsense like sex education or condoms, just cross your legs and say a prayer.
ABC: Brian, I know you were the only reporter to talk to Tobias late this week before his resignation. What did you learn from him?
ROSS: Well, David, I talked to him one day before he resigned and told him that we had found his name and personal phone number on a list of clients of the so-called DC Madam’s escort service in Washington. And what he told me was that he in fact had been a customer of the service, but that he had not had sex. He had had what he called gals come over to his condo to give him a massage. He claimed there was no sex but that he was stunned by the fact that we were aware he was a client and that was his conversation. I asked him if he knew any of the young women, their names. He said he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza.
Oh, Mr. Tobias? See Mark Foley and Ted Haggard over there? Get in line, please.
