windswept grass
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J - Composure
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swoop
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Million Dollar Baby

I think that Clint Eastwood, even though he's rocky and unpredictable from movie to movie, is my favorite director, so my excitement mounts...

Scott McClellan: The king of non-answerers

Question: "What is 2+2?"
Scott McClellan: "Mathematically, we find that numbers are necessary for arithmetic methods. Next question, please."

Press Briefing by Scott McClellan:
"Q How can the President have an economic conference without having any labor representation? How is that possible?

MR. McCLELLAN: There was a broad cross section of people at this conference from various --

Q Are there any labor leaders there?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- from various sectors of the economy. We have worked closely with some groups who are committed to building upon the progress we've made to strengthening our economy, and to creating jobs. And the President --

Q Why weren't any labor leaders invited to this conference?

MR. McCLELLAN: Okay, let me move on because you're not letting me respond.

Q Do you have an answer for that?

Q It's a good question.

MR. McCLELLAN: If you want to ask, I'll respond, because she's not letting me respond. But I'll come back to you if you want to let me respond later.

Go ahead.

Q Okay, respond right now.

MR. McCLELLAN: The conference represents a broad cross section of individuals from various sectors of the economy. These individuals put forward a number of good ideas. We welcome those ideas for moving forward on strengthening our economy and creating jobs. As I pointed out earlier this week, these are people that, as a general sense, share our philosophy for a pro-growth, pro-jobs approach to our economy. And they have different ideas about how we move forward on some of the initiatives that the President proposed. And we will continue reaching out to all people from across the economic sector who want to build upon the great progress we've made.

We've created 2.4 million jobs -- more than 2.4 million jobs over the last 15 months. The unemployment rate is below the average of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. It's now at 5.4 percent. But there's more to do. There are certain parts of the country that are still struggling, and that's why the President is committed to getting this done. And that's why this conference helps highlight some of the long-term challenges that our economy faces, and it helps highlight the need to train our workers to fill the high paying, high growth jobs of the 21st century.

Q Do you realize what you've said, and that you have not --

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm going to keep moving. I'll come back to you if I can.

Q You have not touched a major sector of this society in terms of the economy.

MR. McCLELLAN: I'll come back to you if I have more time."

Sneaky military recruiters

Interesting piece of information from Lying Media Bastards.

Optional Harassment
I just learned of a sneaky provision in the No Child Left Behind Act (.pdf). Paragraph 1, Subsection A of Section 9528 of the bill reads:

"each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings."

Modest Needs

The beauty of this stands alone and deserves to be disseminated.

Cool Tool's description of Modest Needs:
Modest Needs, a minuscule non-profit, grants modest (under $200) one-time cash gifts to those who require just a little help to get them through a tough time. A need, if honored, is granted within 72 hours, with no strings attached. Modest Needs does this with commendable efficiency via the web (it's not hard to be broke and still get online), heart-warming sympathy (every request is read by a volunteer), and impressive reach (220 requests granted this year, or 7% of the million dollars sought for). Modest Needs' entire finances are completely transparent on their website. Since their inception they have spent $0 on fundraising and $0 on advertising. They are astoundingly thrifty (total annual cost to run this charitable operation: $24,000). The rest of the small change they collect goes to those to whom small change can make a big difference. They accept contributions from folks like you. It runs fast all year, not just at Christmas.

Cold Reading

More info on cold reading, which I find fascinating.

Denis Dutton on Cold Reading
Modern interest in the Barnum Effect among psychologists dates from Forer’s classic experiment in which a group of 39 undergraduate psychology students were given the Diagnostic Interest Blank. A week later every student was provided with the same personality description, but was led to believe that each description was uniquely different, having been derived from the test results. The students were then asked to rate the accuracy of their “individual” personality descriptions on a scale of 0 (poor) to 5 (perfect). Of the 39 students, only 5 rated it below 4, and no one rated it below 2 (average). The average rating was 4.3.
...
Forer’s original personality description is perfectly servicable even today....

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others” statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
...
Snyder and Larson found that subjects were more inclined to accept Barnum descriptions of themselves if such descriptions are presented as derived uniquely for them, rather than just given as a general description said to be true for most people.9 This crucial function played by the illusion of uniqueness in the acceptance of Barnum descriptions was decisively demonstrated in a later experiment conducted by Snyder and Shenkel.27,28

Snyder and Shenkel had bogus student “astrologers” prepare horoscopes, which were actually uniform Barnum descriptions, for a group of subjects. The horoscopes were to be rated by the subjects on a 5 point scale: 1, very poor; 2, poor; 3, average; 4, good; 5, excellent. Some of the subjects gave the “astrologer” no birth information at all, members of a second group were required to provide their month of birth, while a third group gave the exact year, month, and day of birth. When asked how closely the horoscope resembled their own personalities, the three groups of students differed significantly. Those who had given no birth information averaged an approval rating of 3.24. Those who had given only the month of birth found the Barnum description on average to rate 3.76, while for those who had revealed their exact date of birth, the approval average shot up to 4.38.
...

Psychic for a Day: How I Learned Tarot Cards, Palm Reading, Astrology, and Mediumship in 24 Hours

This is a great article for overbelievers in any of the following. The "Bill" referred to is Bill Nye, The Science Guy. With one day of preparation this person convinced five people he read them correctly. How can people who are skeptical about mainstream psychology and medicine not be skeptical about these things as well? Or at least treat them as the self-introspection tool they might be?

Psychic for a Day: How I Learned Tarot Cards, Palm Reading, Astrology, and Mediumship in 24 Hours: Bill and I thought it would be a good test of the effectiveness of the technique and the receptivity of people to it to see how well I could do it armed with just a little knowledge. Although the day of the taping was set weeks in advance, I did absolutely nothing to prepare until the day before. This made me especially nervous because psychic readings are a form of acting, and good acting takes talent and practice. And I made matters even harder on myself by convincing Bill and the producers that if we were going to do this we should use a number of different psychic modalities, including Tarot cards, palm reading, astrology, and psychic mediumship, under the theory that these are all "props" used to stage a psychodrama called cold reading...

I am not a psychic and do not believe that ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or any of the other forms of psi power have any basis whatsoever in fact. There is not a shred of evidence that any of this is real, and the fact that I could do it reasonably well with only one day of preparation shows just how vulnerable people are to these very effective nostrums. I can only imagine what I could do with more experience. Give me six hours a day of practice for a couple of months and I have no doubt that I could easily host a successful syndicated television series and increase by orders of magnitude my current bank balance. There -- if not for the grace of evolved moral sentiments and guilt-laden scruples -- go I. I cannot do this for one simple reason -- it is wrong. I have lost both of my parents -- my father suddenly of a heart attack in 1986, my mother slowly from brain cancer in 2000 -- and I cannot imagine anything more insulting to the dead, and more insidious to the living, than constructing a fantasy that they are hovering nearby in the psychic aether, awaiting some self-proclaimed psychic conduit to reveal to me breathtaking insights about scars on my knees, broken appliances, and unfulfilled desires. This is worse than wrong. It is wanton depravity.

Anti-consumerism reinforces consumerism

I'm still weighing this, but it feels right... it feels like what I've been thinking for a while. Of course, one of his final solutions, taking the tax deduction away from advertising is something I've been advocating in a more extreme form for years. In my opinion, commercial speech such as advertising should just be made illegal.

This Magazine: The Rebel Sell
..books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters, and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it.

This isn’t because the authors, directors or editors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.
...
What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs.
...
Brands don’t bring us together, they set us apart. Of course, most sophisticated people claim that they don’t care about brands—a transparent falsehood. Most people who consider themselves “anti-consumerist” are extremely brand-conscious. They are able to fool themselves into believing that they don’t care because their preferences are primarily negative.
...
As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is first and foremost distaste—disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others. This makes it easy to see how the critique of mass society could help drive consumerism.
...
it is rebellion, not conformity, that generates the competitive structure that drives the wedge between consumption and happiness. As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society.
...
In many cases, competition is an intrinsic feature of the goods that we consume. Economists call these “positional goods”—goods that one person can have only if many others do not. Examples include not only penthouse apartments, but also wilderness hikes and underground music.
...
When it comes to consumerism, intentions are irrelevant. It is only consequences that count.

This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago). Advertising is already a separately itemized expense category, so the change wouldn’t even generate any additional paperwork. But this little tweak to the tax code would have a greater impact than all of the culture jamming in the world.
...
What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop. Rather than just posturing, we should start thinking a bit more carefully about how we’re going to provide those incentives.

BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System

John Barlow writes about his arrest after a Burning Man event. His case is important both because of the ever-broadening search procedures at airports that are including drugs and contraband and not just explosives (and are abhorrent to the 4th amendment). It's also interesting in its details about the change cell phones have made in being imprisoned. With jail phones only allowing local calls and collect calls, anyone arrested outside of their local stomping grounds is incommunicado if their friends and family have transitioned from land lines to cell phones.

BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System
Finding rescue was tricky. The "phone" in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn't know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won't accept collect calls. Furthermore, they'd taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head.
...
Eventually, I was able to get through to my daughter Leah, who called John Gilmore on my behalf. John is one of the co-founders of EFF and is, in addition, the peskiest and most obdurate defender of the Constitution I know. Accompanied by journalist Ann Harrison, John came down and went my bail in cash, though that transaction very nearly turned south when he would not produce a government-issued ID for the deputy at the desk. As a matter of characteristically flinty principle, he doesn't carry one. In fact, there is no legal requirement that someone posting bail identify himself. Eventually, the deputy grudgingly accepted John's cash while letting him keep his official anonymity, noting in his log that the bail was posted by an unknown person and therefore constituted suspicious activity. Weird is bad.
...
We then set about to mount what appears to be the first serious contest of TSA's routinely over-broad searches of checked bags. ...
Fortunately, precedent appears to be on my side. The controlling Ninth Circuit case in such matters is US v. Davis (482 F.2d 893) which authorizes warrantless airport searches only for the purpose of detecting weapons and explosives.

There is a lot at stake here. Although, as I say, the 4th Amendment is in rough shape, it remains quite clear in its prohibition of "general warrants," which are searches of unspecified members of the public for evidence of random illegal activity. But, whether by design or "mission drift," this is what TSA's checked baggage searches increasingly resemble. They're not just looking for explosives, folks.
...
In general, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have been extremely unresponsive and have instructed Covenant Security to stonewall us as well. We have asked them whether they knew who I was when they searched my bag and whether my identity had any bearing on the exquisite granularity of their search methods. They've refused to answer on grounds of national security. We have asked them for the training manuals and search guidelines under which Covenant Security was operating. No dice. We asked whether their x-ray machines were tuned to identify drugs as well as explosives, a technical capacity some of these units possess. Sorry. That would be SSI (or Sensitive Security Information.) We have inquired whether Covenant Security had any incentive program which rewarded its employees for discovering evidence of illegal activity. Again, preserving the safety of all Americans prohibits a response. At one point, they were even insisting that it would be threat to national security if the Covenant Security employee who allegedly discovered the purported contraband were called upon to testify, thereby abrogating my constitutional right to confront my accuser, but they seem to have relented on this point.
...

A list of lists

Here's another time-waster for my friends, all of whom are infatuated to some degree with lists.

Lists of Bests : Home

Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp)

Gabrielle, do you know about this? If not, you should.
Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp)

Christ is coming, so fuck the environment

This is by Bill Moyers, the current host of NOW With Bill Moyers on PBS. I so much want to believe that he's not right.

The whole text should be read, but at least read the excerpts below. My sincere thanks (I think) to Mousemusings for pointing me to this scary piece.

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Battlefield Earth
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Reagan's first secretary of the Interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the bible is literally true – one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate.
...
A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed – an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 – just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of god will return, the righteous will enter heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist, Glenn Scherer – "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed – even hastened – as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
...
There's a constituency for it. A 2002 TIME/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations or in the motel turn some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the bible?
...
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the lord will provide.
...



Reference is made in this piece to the Rapture Index. I dare you to click on that link and not be more scared than before you clicked on it.

Here's the 8000 page Google search results for "Rapture Index."

Here's what religioustolerance.org says:

"Rapture Ready" is the second most popular Web sites on the Internet, as listed by Web side Story. 4 They receive almost 1,000 visitors a day. 5,6 They feature a "Nearing Midnight" section which lists news items that point as signs to the immanence of the second coming. It is updated many times a week. Their "Rapture Index" is a number which attempts to predict the closeness of the date. It has varied from 50 in 1993-DEC to an all-time high of 168 in 1997-OCT. The Millennium Watch Institute attempts to track all social and religious developments associated with the year 2000. 7 Their web site had a countdown clock that showed the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the end of the Millennium, which occured at midnight on the evening of 2000-DEC-31.

Of course, my favorite thing that religoustolerance.org says about rapture theory is, "Each of these theories has significant problems and can only be accepted if one ignores certain Biblical passages or twists them totally out of shape."

Looking for a new apartment

The lease on our apartment is going up by $100 per month. My wife and I can afford it, but we don't like the corporate, cookie-cutter apartment complex we're in anyway, so we're probably leaving. Now I just need to find an apartment. If anyone out there knows of one in Ann Arbor, let me know. We would like a balcony, deck, or backyard (you know, some way to go outside). Both of us have wonderful rental histories. We also have two cats.

Thanks.
s o l o m o n j [at] g m a i l . c o m

Howard Becker on Photography

I stumbled on this in my photographic web jaunts. It's an exploration of where I am in my photographic pursuits at the moment, where my interests lie. Even though I may be trying to solve photographic problems with "word magic," I'm becoming more and more involved with documentary photography, and of course my focus of interest right now is food, slow food, and corporate responsibility/irresponsibility.

"Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It's (Almost) All a Matter of Context" by Howard S. Becker
Documentary photography was tied, historically, to both exploration and social reform. Some early documentarians worked, literally, "documenting" features of the natural landscape, as did Timothy O'Sullivan, who accompanied the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel in 1867-69 and the surveys of the southwestern United States led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, during which he made his now famous images of the Canyon de Chelle (Horan 1966, 151-214 and 237-312). Others documented unfamiliar ways of life, as in John Thompson's photographs of street life in London (Newhall 1964, 139), Eugène Atget's massive survey of Parisian people and places (Atget 1992), or August Sander's monumental study (finally published in English in 1986) of German social types. The latter two projects were, in fact, massive and monumental and in some deep sense impractical, that is, not tied to any immediate practical use.

Others worked, like Lewis Hine (Gutman 1967), for the great social surveys of the early part of the century or, like Jacob Riis 1971 [1901], for muckraking newspapers. Their work was used to expose evil and promote change. Their images were, perhaps, something like those journalists made but, less tied to illustrating a newspaper story, they had more space to breathe in. A classic example is Hine's image of "Leo, 48 inches high, 8 years old, picks up bobbins at fifteen cents a day," in which a young boy stands next to the machines which have, we almost surely conclude, stunted his growth.

What is documentary "supposed to do"? In the reformist version, it's supposed to dig deep, get at what Robert E. Park (a sociologist who had worked as a journalist for daily papers in Minneapolis, Denver, Detroit, Chicago and New York) called the Big News, be "concerned" about society, play an active role in social change, be socially responsible, worry about its effects on the society in which its work is distributed. Photographers like Hine saw their work, and it has often been seen since, as having an immediate effect on citizens and legislators. A photographically chauvinistic view of history often explains the passage of laws banning child labor as the direct result of Hines' work.

In its alternative version, documentary was not supposed to be anything in particular, since the work was not made for anyone in particular who could have enforced such requirements. Sander, who hoped to sell his work by subscription, described it variously as depicting the "existing social order" and "a physiognomical time exposure of German man" (Sander 1986, 23-4). Atget, rather more like an archetypal naive artist, did not describe his work at all, simply made it and sold the prints to whoever would buy them. Today, we see this work as having an exploratory, investigative character, something more like social science. Contemporary documentary photographers, whose work converges more consciously with social science, have become aware, as anthropologists have, that they have to worry about, and justify, their relations to the people they photograph.

chelsea below
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manchester
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White House Press Briefing: The Heavens Open

Oh, the bewildering wildness of post-election press conferences...

Press Briefing by Scott McClellan:
Q Scott, on the Middle East, many evangelical Christians are supporting right-wing Jews in Israel who want to rebuild the temple on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They believe this is a prerequisite for Christ's return to Earth. They believe when Christ returns to Earth -- they call this 'the Rapture' -- he will take back with Him the true believers, and the rest, the non--believers, Jews and Muslims, will be left behind to face a violent death here on Earth. My question is, as a born-again Christian, does the President support efforts to rebuild a temple on the Temple Mount?

MR. McCLELLAN: Russ, we can sit here and talk about religious issues, but I'm not -- I will be glad to take your question and if there's more, I will get back to you on it.

Q Is he a born-again Christian?

MR. McCLELLAN: Thank you.

red crown
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Tautological findings

To me, finding that abstinence programs mislead is like the report that said drivers who fall asleep at the wheel are more dangerous than those who don't. But the level of sexist programming astonishes me.

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says (washingtonpost.com): Some course materials cited in Waxman's report present as scientific fact notions about a man's need for 'admiration' and 'sexual fulfillment' compared with a woman's need for 'financial support.' One book in the 'Choosing Best' series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. 'Moral of the story,' notes the popular text: 'Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess.'

More abstinence education information:
• “If premarital sex came in a bottle, it
would probably have to carry a
Surgeon General’s warning, something
like the one on a package of
cigarettes. There’s no way to have
premarital sex without hurting
someone.”
27
-- from Sex Respect®
• “For condoms to be used properly,
over 10 specific steps must be
followed every time which tends to
minimize the romance and spontaneity
of the sex act.”
28
-- from Choosing the Best®
• “’What if I want to have sex before I
get married? . . . Well I guess you just
have to be prepared to die. And you’ll
probably take with you your spouse
and one or more of your children with
you.’”
29
-- from No Second Chance video

My family - Dec 2004 (social picture)
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earth and sky
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earthworks1
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plateaus
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snow cave - yeah, I'm playing with snow
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dunes
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snow bumps
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Defense Department criticizes administration

So, I wonder who'll get fired from the Defense Department because of criticizing Bush.

From The Christian Science Monitor:
Late on the Wednesday afternoon before the Thanksgiving holiday, the US Defense Department confirmed the contents of a report by the Defense Science Board that is highly critical of the administration's efforts in the war on terror and in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report had been originally placed on the DSB's website in early November.

'Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies [the report says]. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.'
The Pentagon confirmed the study after The New York Times ran a story about the report in its Wednesday editions.

CBS refuses church's ad including homosexuals

Lifted from Talking Points Memo:

The United Church of Christ (UCC) plans to run a major ad campaign in December to raise public awareness of the denomination. One of the ads is meant, in the words of a UCC press release, to convey the message "that -- like Jesus -- the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation."

You can see the ad here -- it features two burly bouncers turning various people away from a church service. And if you watch it you'll see that the broad message of inclusion over intolerance places a prominent emphasis on acceptance of homosexuals in the life of the church.

Yet, according to a press release out this evening from the UCC, both CBS and NBC have refused to air the ad because the subject matter is "too controversial."

Again, look at the ad because the spot raises the topic in about as innocuous and uncontroversial a way as is imaginable. Homosexuality is never even broached explicitly.

(This case is similar to this instance last September when CNN refused to air an ad by the Log Cabin Republicans because it too was deemed "too controversial". In that case, at least the ad was hard-hitting. But even that feeble excuse doesn't apply in this case.)

According to the UCC press release, CBS explained its decision, in part, as follows ...

"Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations," reads an explanation from CBS, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks."
...