Hello all. It’s been a while and I wanted to let you know about the fresh hell I went through these past few months figuring out what was going on with the site.

Suddenly, one day, Donklephant started to redirect to mywebpost.com. Why? I didn’t know. And I couldn’t log in to the WordPress back end to look at the code. I was locked out. Essentially, I was helpless.

Was I hacked? I thought so. It certainly appeared that way. So I reached out to my hosting service and asked what was going on. They told me that somebody had gotten in to the site, put in some redirect code and that’s why this was happening. Considered me depressed.

But then a friend I hadn’t thought of to help me, John from Conscious Images, saved the day. He checked it all out and figured out

So here’s what happened…

An ad link I had put up a LONG time ago had been changed so it made the site redirect to that nonsense site. It was a clever bit of code hacking, but it worked and I was completely befuddled. And so was everybody else.

Long story short, the site is back and you can check out anything you want without worrying about redirects.

Thanks for visiting and we may resume our normally schedule posting in the future. But no promises. Politics is exhausting.

Best,
Justin

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After almost 10,000 posts and 50,000 comments, I’m announcing that the site is going offline for a while. This is for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I haven’t been actively posting for a long time, and I’ve talked about the reasons why a few times. After 8 years, I’m not as engaged in politics right now and I don’t feel the need to comment on the news of the week.

Second, I’m very busy with personal projects. I shared my short film We Will Make You Whole Again in 2010, and I’ve been very busy since then building the film community in Kansas City, MO. I’m a board member of CinemaKC, a local KC organization dedicated to promoting local filmmaking through their programs and TV show on PBS, as well as being the Treasurer of the Film Commission of Greater Kansas City…and founder of The Robert Altman Emerging Filmmakers Fund. This is like having a second job on top of a second job, and I love it. The friends I’ve made in the KC film community are invaluable, and I’m proud to call myself a KC filmmaker. Still, it takes a lot of time and effort, and politics have fallen by the wayside.

Third, you deserve more. I don’t post a lot, and you need a centrist/moderate perspective. Like the Centrist Review and The Moderate Voice. And I’m sure you’ve been checking them out for a while now. They’re awesome. Go read them on a daily basis.

So yes, we’re going offline. That doesn’t mean it’ll be forever, but maybe it will. I don’t know when I’ll want to turn the site back on. But if I do, it’ll be because I want to talk shop. Shop meaning politics. You know the drill.

Regardless of what this all means, I want to thank you so much for all of your thoughts, opinions and attention. It has been a pleasure to talk/discuss/debate with all of you these past 8 years, even if we disagree. Because that’s the most important part. Being able to disagree without being disagreeable.

All my best,
Justin

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This list comes from a blog that seems suspicious, but all of the facts have links out…so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

Here are some depressing examples on the list…

Did it really need to come to this for Detroit? The decline in manufacturing was at the heart of this downfall…but nobody could attract any other businesses? Other big cities were able to survive drops in manufacturing, but obviously this city was hit harder than others given the industry that was at the heart of it all.

Ultimately, the city didn’t have the right leadership at the helm to look to the future and see what could be next. And now we have this…a failed city. A major failed city. Ugh. Makes me sad.

So what do you think they could have done to avert this…or at least partially avert this?

Read all 25 at The Economic Collapse Blog.

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It always seemed destined to be overturned, but by such a narrow margin? 5 to 4? Really?

More from NPR:

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages for purposes such as Social Security survivors’ benefits, insurance benefits, immigration and tax filing.

Section 3 of the law defines marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and a spouse as “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” That provision had been struck down by eight lower courts before the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in United States v. Windsor.

This decision means that legally married same-sex couples are now entitled to the same federal benefits as married opposite sex couples.

Scalia’s logical twister is worth noting…

“This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today’s opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseases root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.”

So the court has no power to decide that federally created legislation is unconstitutional?

Kennedy wrote the majority opinion and it’s pretty straight forward…

“DOMA writes inequality into the entire United States Code. The particular case at hand concerns the estate tax, but DOMA is more than a simple determination of what should or should not be allowed as an estate tax refund. Among the over 1,000 statutes and numerous federal regulations that DOMA controls are laws pertaining to Social Security, housing, taxes, criminal sanctions, copyright, and veterans’ benefits. DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency.

The court side-stepped Prop 8, saying it didn’t have the authority to rule on it. So I wouldn’t expect the court to make any sort of Loving v. Virginia decision any time in the near future. They clearly want to leave the same-sex marriage decisions to the states, so it’ll be a long slog for at least a couple decades before this is the law of the land. And even then, I’m sure some states could still be gay-marriage free.

Regardless, it’s a great day for equal rights!

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