MsGuy

I just don't think of CL as a very small business. Granted it only has 28 (wiki update) employees but its revenue potential is unreal. As an experiment I checked the apartment listings for Sacramento. There were more than 1,350 for May 21st alone. At $10.00 per listing, the nominal sum CL charges for New York apt. ads, that's $13,500/day in untapped revenue from one midsized city. Not much chance that Newmark, Buckmaster and Co. will have to take out any 2nd mortgages to pay their legal costs. This is what I was thinking about when I guestimated CL as having a market value in the billions of dollars. I'm aware that Newmark doesn't want to commercialize CL, but that doesn't mean he lacks the means to defend the site from publicity hungry politicians. The same can't necessarily be said for smaller sites, so you two be careful. There is an upside to police attention though. Remind me to tell you the saga of Dirty Dewey's Capitol News and Novelty sometime. P.S. I agree that biting back is often the best way to handle this sort of thing.

Ty, no surprise but your take on the CL situation turned out to be a lot more accurate than mine. Buckmaster just bitch slapped McMaster and back talked Andrew Cuomo. Wow! Since you were right before, do you read the lawsuit against McMaster as notice to the AGs that CL has gone as far as it intends to go and that they'll have to earn any further air time the hard way?

Oz: Thanks for the Nixon quote. The "it's not about you" passage gave me a much clearer insight into the question of gay marriage. Never would have seen this if you hadn't taken the trouble to post it. Conway: Some of the guys who post here are more conservative (less liberal? ) than you might think. At any rate, I find it makes for a better conversation if I'm not too quick to slap a label on folks.

Just a bump to say that I too would appreciate suggestions or even warnings about titles to avoid.

I haven't watched since the 2nd season. AI is just another iteration on the old Arthur Godfrey Show theme.

The Clintons sucessfully covered a total defeat by hanging a clever tag line on the law, "Don't ask, don't tell." I thought the services had made a gentleman's agreement to allow gays to serve as long as they didn't come out to their units and kept their private life off base, that CID would cease to be used to extract confessions from and dig up evidence on closeted gays. Instead Congress replaced an executive policy with a statute explicitly based on its Art. 1, Sec. 8 power to "raise, support...and regulate" the military forces of the U.S. Congress could not have erected a stronger barrier to modifying the anti-gay bias of the services. It bound the hands of not only Clinton but of any future president inclined to relax this policy. Short of amending the Constitution itself, Congress could not have made it any more difficult for the courts to find actionable discrimination on the basis of substantive due process or equal protection. I disregarded the gay activists who red flagged this law. Like AdamSmith, I thought it was about as good as we were likely to get at the time and a step on the way to open service by gays. I should have read the damn law. We were hornswoggled by the simple device of attaching a meaningless title to vicious piece of legislation. Orwell was prescient.

Good speech. I didn't realize how much coming out cost her in terms of her career.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I never read the actual text of the DADT law until today. I thought the services had at least been discouraged from taking the initiative to ferret out homosexuals. The only "don't ask" part of the statute is a conditional removal of the "are you queer?" question from the preinduction questionaire. The preamble to the statute is loaded with rank homophobic shit. The rest is a flat out prohibition of service in the military by gay citizens regardless of how closeted they may be. The services are free to interrogate servicemen as much and as often as they like and to conduct deep background investigations to uncover evidence of homo inclinations &/or activity. The only thing beneficial about this is that separated servicemen now usually receive an honorable discharge (& that's not in the statute.) I keep telling myself not to believe anything the media says and I keep falling for its spin. Damn Clinton for a liar and damn me for a fool for ever listening to him. Geez, I'm so exacerbated with myself.

Well, I would have but the S.O.B. out ran me. Thirty years ago I could have run his ass down. Either I'm slower now or back then they weren't trying so hard to get away. Back on topic: The 9th Court of Appeals just remanded the Maj. Margaret Whitt case for further proceedings in District Court. Basically the court over-ruled its prior case law and applied a "heightened scrutiny" test to DADT. It held that the Air Force would have to demonstrate that her presence was in fact (not just in theory) disruptive to her reserve unit and that no other reasonable remedy other than discharge was available. Not a home run for our side but certainly a solid single. The opinion can be found at Policylibrary.com/U.S./Human_rights.

Guys my age (I turned 61 last week) remember when there were almost no jobs that offered a safe haven for gays. If you wanted to be anything other than a hair dresser or a florist, you just had to suck it up and tough it out (pun intended.) I guess that's why I can sympathize with gays in the military.

Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philedelphia (CHOP) may have made a breakthrough in the search for an effective AIDS vaccine. As near as I can translate the medical/scientific jargon, what follows is what they've done: Using SIV (the simian version of HIV) as a model, they gene modified an adeno virus to code for known SIV specific antibodies. The researchers then utilized the modified virus as a gene transfer agent by injecting it into the muscle tissue of monkeys. Muscle cells took up the modified virus and began expressing (manufacturing) the antibodies. The circulatory system picked up the antibodies and passively carried them throughout the body. The presence of the antibodies conferred a complete immunity in the monkeys even against the injection of virulent SIV. This approach essentially bypassed the monkeys' natural immune system. See Nature.com (medical section) for a summary of the publication. Maybe I'm just desperate for good news, but this strikes me as an extremely promising new approach with implications beyond the AIDS virus. I hope some of our M.D./science types will correct anything I've misinterpeted.

Yeah, I knew that E-Bay and CL had gotten into a fuss last year. I didn't really understand what it was about until I followed your links. Thanks for the research. I don't even pretend to understand Web economics, but I'm told CL is one of the top 10 sites world wide in terms of page views (& growing fast). It's so simple to run that 25 guys handle the whole thing and so efficient that they can pay all the operating expenses with a modest fee on a few job and apt. ads. That Newmark hasn't (yet) made the decision to commercialize the site doesn't mean that CL isn't worth billions. Jeez, can you imagine what Murdock would pay for a controlling interest in a want ad site that charges for 1/100th of 1% of its listings and still makes a profit?! As the kids say, "OMG!!!" Hell, he paid 100's of millions for that money drain Facebook. I'll bet every V.C. outfit and investment banker in Silicon Valley keeps a contingency plan up to date against the day CL decides to go public. However good hearted and well intentioned Newmark and Buckmaster are that's got to weigh on their decisions. By the way, I'm told that Atty. Gen. McMaster is God's own evil asshole. Let us hope that he's just positioning himself to take credit for something that CL is in the process of doing anyway.

Warren Buffet, who has never been called an alarmist, recently stated that last fall we were "staring into the abyss." His take is that, however many costly mistakes were made in the process, it was critical that both the Fed. and Treasury acted immediately and forcefully to prevent the finantial system from going into a death spiral. According to Buffet, it was a close run thing. So T.Y. appears to be in good company. Just shows that great minds think alike.

T.Y., thanks for the heads up. If my memory doesn't betray me again, I'll be watching.

Lucky, in my experience gays join the armed services for pretty much the same array of reasons as straights. Gay servicemen may be more or less in the closet, but I only know of one guy who "gave up his sexuality" and I would attribute that case more to personal conflicts than to life in the military. That "killer for the military" business spoils an otherwise thoughtful post. Knowing your odd sense of humor, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and read it as a failed attempt at levity. P.S. Did he really wink at Anderson Cooper?

Thanks for the link; I was looking for a video of that performance. The kid looks just like a Swedish exchange student I met in 1969. [and no I didn't get any. The guy was straight. ] Off topic: Several hours before the event, the Moscow riot police broke up a demonstration aimed at using the Eurovision Song Contest to publicize state discrimination against gays in Russia. According to the Associated Press, the police waded into the demonstration all of one minute after it started and arrested about 40 gay rights activists.

As long as the major content providers see metered fast lane proposals as being aimed squarely at their pocket books, the small sites should be able to fly in their political slip stream. BIG MEDIA owns enough Congressmen to protect itself from the telecom/cable lobby. If Disney, Murdock and the like ever find it in their best interest to cut a separate deal, then I agree, the ISPs will be freed to squeeze every cent they can out of the little guys. I shouldn't have poo pooed your hope that CL would stand up to the AGs. I initially had hoped that the founder (name?) would fight this one out. He did blow off that Chicago police chief who started this mess. After I googled CL and realized what a hugh business it had become (and found out that E-Bay owned a 25% interest), I gave up it up as a lost cause. How could the guy react any other way than as he did? His investment bankers had to have been telling him that his stock in CL could lose hundreds of millions in value if the public shit storm kept snowballing.

Exactly, RA1. "I've become accustomed to her face. She almost makes the day begin."

LOL I originally posted "when the Calvinists are in a mood to cook some new martyrs," and edited it to read "for an auto de fe" after an image of that very painting popped into my head. That is waaay too spooky for me.

My gaze went from the photo - down to the text - back up to your avatar eyeing Chekhov - and I broke out laughing. Thanks for a great post!

Jeez, T.Y., did a falling piece of sky conk you on the head? You had to know weeks ago how all this would end. No major corporation is going to defend its right to act as an "internet brothel." The legal issues were subsumed by the reputation problem. The only surprise here is that CL managed to salvage the fig leaf of a monitored adult services section. ( It's still not clear to me how they plan to handle the hook-up section.) On the issue of content transmission, the telecoms would be a tougher nut for the bluestockings to crack. In the past the ISPs have proved willing to commit their considerable legal and political resources to protect their status as common carriers. If they are starting to change their position on that, it's news to me (I admit I don't keep current anymore.) As to taxation, the only reason the internet has gotten off lightly is that some farsighted folks in Congress decided to wait and let the new heifer mature a bit before strapping the automated milk pumps onto its udder. I wouldn't premise any business plans on a long term immunity from taxes. The milkman cometh. So far the content providers seem to have assembled a broad enough political coalition to block metered access and fast lane tolls. To the extent I can understand the various claims, the ISPs appear to be advancing sham arguments to cover a major money grab. That TV ad campaign they launched 3 years ago came across as pure B.S. to me. Don't give up yet. You have powerful allies on this one and as long as even internet innocents like me react to the ISP's propaganda with suspicion, you've got a fighting chance to win. I hope the CL dust up hasn't occasioned any personal difficulties for you and Oz. Flying as low and silent as possible strikes me as the only sane strategy when the Calvinists are in the mood for an auto de fe. And I'm really looking forward to reading your posts from Havana.

As AdamSmith told me in a different context, "Why choose?" The image your post put in my head was of the critic bot in the cartoon show Futurerama.

I'm planning on seeing it this week. Chekhov was a cute enough twink in the original. How did they fit him into the prequel w/o putting him into short pants?

T.Y., your take on Havana's climate is ass backwards. Just take a window air conditioner for your apartment with you and you'll have hunks and twinks lined up half way down the block. It's all a matter of making that humidity work for you. Practice saying: "Soy un Americano rico. Mi casa esta muy fria. Los hombres hermoso me gustan."

Looks like Oz, T.Y. and Greg should dig their white linen suits out of storage and start shopping for some new Panama hats. This fall Congress will take up a bill to lift travel restrictions to Cuba for all Americans. The bill already has 134 co-sponsors in the House. In 2003 both houses passed a similar bill that was killed in conference committee by the Republican congressional leadership, so I expect the Dems. won't have any great trouble passing it this time. Do they still serve Cuba Libre's in Havana? For more details, and a brief dicussion of under the radar type diplomatic initiatives toward Cuba by Obama, see The Economist, May 9, "Gently does it," p.32. I couldn't resist another plug for my favorite news magazine. Most of the current issue is available free online.