Gay and lesbian artists called Monday for an artistic and audience boycott of California Musical Theatre after learning that its artistic director donated $1,000 to a campaign that backed banning gay marriage in California.

Scott Eckern was not available for comment Monday as the revelation has gained stunning momentum on the blogosphere. The California Musical Theatre produces the Music Circus, presents Broadway Sacramento, and recently opened “Forever Plaid” at the capital’s newest performing venue, the Cosmopolitan Cabaret.

Richard Lewis, the organization’s executive producer, said the board of directors will conduct an emergency meeting on the matter this afternoon. He said it was too early to tell how this would affect Eckern’s 25-year employment with California Musical Theatre.

This is interesting to me, because I always understood that the conventional wisdom on the Hollywood blacklist of the 50s was that it was supposed to be a bad thing, where people were denied work due to their political beliefs. How is this different? Yes, the government isn’t involved, but the situations have a lot of similarity. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

My favorite bit:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched.

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

Read the whole thing.

I congratulate him and his supporters, and I’m glad we have elected the first black President, even if I think he’s a socialist.

He’s OUR President. Not just you who voted for him and support him, but the President of those of us who respectfully disagree. I hope he remembers that.

From here on, I criticize Barack Obama for what he does as President. I think I’ll have plenty of ammunition, but what the fuck do I know, I thought McCain was going to win the election.

UPDATE:
Bright Spots:

• John McCain will never be President.
• The next time Jesse Jackson goes to a company and says “You never had a black CEO, give me money!” they can say “Fuck you, black President!”
• Sarah Palin won’t be tainted by McCain’s inevitably failed administration.
• I’m drunk as hell and don’t care.

- Idiot white guy comes along when times are good…
- Idiot white guy ruins everything….
- Idiot black guy is hired to fix things - promising change…
- Idiot black guy makes change after change after change….
- Idiot black guy makes things worse…
- 4 years later - smart innovative new guy comes in to an impossible situation and realizes that if the idiot black guy would have just left things alone then all of the mistakes that the previous idiot white guy made would be fixable.

No… the idiot white guy isn’t George Bush.. and the idiot black guy isn’t Barack Obama… I am talking about Scott Layden and Isiah Thomas- the previous 2 GM’s of the New York Knicks…

While I don’t think it is necessarily fair to compare the leaders of our country to the front office of the New York Knicks - I do think that this does make a very valid point..

Sometimes change - without a REALISTIC plan of how to go about those changes - actually makes things worse…

I voted this morning for Bob Barr, AKA “None of the Above, With a Mustache”. Living in a solidly blue state, I have the freedom of voting my conscience, because McCain has no chance in New Jersey, and if he did he would be winning everywhere else and so not need my vote anyway.

My final prediction is going to be… McCain. I’m pretty sure he’s going to win, for a lot of reasons, most of which are summed up in this terrific blog post. It’s very long, and that site may drop from the traffic today. This is another good article explaining why the polls and Obama’s strategy to demoralize his opposition will backfire.

I have publicly predicted this on Facebook, which is causing no end of consternation among my Obama loving friends. I’m either going to be eating crow or wildly triumphant tomorrow.

Keep an eye on Pennsylvania, it will tell the tale. The exit polls will be as wrong as the pre-election polling though, so don’t believe anything until we see a real result.

UPDATE: Compare and contrast.

In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists. (Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size — limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist — but just because it wouldn’t fly with Gallup doesn’t mean there ain’t a kernel of truth in there.) This is just one of many surprising views that emerged after we talked to extremists about this historic electoral showdown between a 46-year-old black man and a 71-year-old white man.

One white supremacist considers Obama to be a black racist and therefore a kindred spirit who would also favor segregation of the races. More evidence in the “People see in Obama what they want to see” file, I guess. Also interesting is the black supremacist who considers Obama half-white and therefore not “what real black people consider a black man”.