David Horowitz takes issue with his friend Andrew Sullivan and tells us why gays shouldn’t serve [Salon.com]. The answer: because they’ll fuck all over the place and this will undermine unit cohesion. He deftly silences any attempts to point out the homophobic nature of this argument by spending the opening passage fulminating about how political correctness silences arguments through charges of homophobia, racism, etc. This, of course, is poppycock; by far the most politically correct thing to be these days is politically incorrect, and anyone, no matter how hateful and idiotic, can take up the mantle of the martyr for freethought if he (or she) wants to be immunized against criticism, or hugged on stage by Elton John.

One thing I will give Horowitz: he’s a blithering buffoon but he has an accurate vision of the military. I can’t help but think Right on! as he says Of all social institutions, the military is the most pragmatic. Its task, brutal in its simplicity, is to develop the most efficient killing machine that money can buy and intelligence can devise. and To create the perfect killing machine, the military works hard to drain recruits of their individuality and their self-interested desires in order to make them think like cogs in a machine. An essential part of the military mind is that the members of fighting units don’t think for themselves but do as they are told. But then, of course, I realize that David thinks this is a good thing. Ultimately, I actually agree with Horowitz that this is an excellent argument to show why gays shouldn’t serve in the military. But that’s only because I think it’s an excellent argument to show why no one should serve in the military, for the sake of their own humanity.

In the in a shocking development file: The Guardian Council of Iran has rejected the candidacy of all 45 women [Independent Media Center] who applied to run for the Presidency of Iran. The Iranian constitution states that all Presidential candidates must be political men, which the Guardian Council interprets to mean: No Girls Allowed. Of course, here in the US we don’t need a Guardian Council. The power structures of the Demopublican parties, and their stranglehold over electoral politics, have done a fine enough job of blocking women from running for President over the past century despite all of the progress of women’s liberation. But you can buck the system: Vote Woodhull in 2004!

Arianna Huffington continues her streak of pure awesomeness with an exposé of Washington’s use of your tax dollars on mercenary military corporations to fight the drug war in South America without inconveniences like democratic accountability or human rights protections or the informed consent of the American public. Huffington reports firefights between DynCorp agents (who are virtually all former US military troops) and FARC left-wing rebels in Colombia — while Washington maintains that Plan Colombia is not getting us involved in Colombia’s civil war. Yeah, right. We’re not, it’s just that American troops employed by an American corporation with tax money from Congress and the CIA are getting involved in Colombia’s civil war. If we keep this up, we will need to retrofit an old slogan designed for a different Latin American country: Colombia is Spanish for Vietnam.

The Number 5 Censored news story for 2000 is an particularly pernicious form of corporate welfare through the United States Export-Import Bank, which has funded numerous nuclear energy building projects in the developing world. Ex-Im is a government program which extends artificially sweet loans — guaranteed by U.S. taxpayer money — to the governments of developing countries in order to allow big U.S. contractors to build there. In a typical boondoggle,

Westinghouse built the Bataan nuclear power facility in the Philippines in 1985 at a cost of $1.2 billion, 150 percent above their projections. However, the Bataan plant was never brought on line due to the fact it was near an active volcano. Despite the fact that the plant never generated a single kilowatt of energy, the Philippines still pays about $300,000 a day in interest on the Ex-Im loan that funded the project. Should the Philippines default, U.S. taxpayers will pick up the tab.

Similar projects have netted Westinghouse alone literally billions of dollars in plants that never even operate, scamming both the people of the developing world and U.S. taxpayers. Why is this allowed to go on? Well, it just so happens that the head of President Clinton’s Export council was the CEO of Westinghouse. And since Westinghouse also owns CBS and fellow Ex-Im beneficiary and nuclear contractor General Electric owns NBC, the debacle has not received coverage on network news. Meanwhile you and I and the taxpayers of the Philippines and many other countries continue to pay billions of dollars for nuclear power plants which never even produced electricity. People often think that conspiracy theorists are a bunch of paranoid loonies, and often they are. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how the interlocking systems of economic and political power continue to allow elites to victimize you and I with the silent complicity of an elite newsmedia. Just goes to show you that what’s good for MNCs is not necessarily good for America.

History was made April 1 in Amsterdam when three couples of gay men and one couple of lesbians were married under the world’s first law allowing legal marriage between same-sex couples [Advocate.com]. I suppose this is a positive development, but given my serious reservations about the gay marriage issue, I mark it with reserved applause at best. It’s not that I think gay people should be denied the privileges that str8 couples get. It’s that I don’t think that the government has any business extending or denying benefits to people on the basis of who they’re sleeping with–whether that person is a member of the same sex, a member of the opposite sex, transgendered, intersex, or anything else. So, yay for civil liberties / equal access being extended. Boo for the continued State privileging of marriage.