Laws governing LGBT marriage leave divorce difficult.

On election day last year, voters approved gay marriage in Maine, Maryland, and Washington states. Before that year, gay marriage had always lost when put to a popular vote. The popular vote victory indicated a shift in public support for LGBT rights and same-sex marriage. Then, this year Minnesota, Delaware, and Rhode Island joined the club.

However, the headache of gay divorce remains unchanged. While anyone, no matter where they live, can travel to one of the now 12 states that allow gay marriage and get married, gay divorce is only available to actual residents of those states.

I’m a Florida tax attorney and helping same-sex couples is a large part of my practice. Time after time I people come to me wanting to know how they can get divorced when they married in a different state. While there may be some risky legal procedures they can do, the simple answer is: they can’t. They got married, but there is literally nowhere they can get divorced. It is sad that our laws offer them no way out of the relationship.

Let’s say you live in Florida and take a trip to New York to get married. Statistically, you have a 50/50 chance that you will one day want a divorce. Yet for same-sex couples, you won’t ever be able to get divorced unless you or your partner moves to a gay marriage state for 6 months first. Since gay marriage in Florida isn’t recognized, they can’t get divorced in Florida, and they can’t get divorced in Washington state because they aren’t residents.

Most people can’t get up and move to a different state for 6 months just to get divorced, so they end up saying, “let’s just pretend the marriage never happened.” But that has its own risks, not to mention a continued personal burden of knowing that you’re still married to your ex-partner.

Not even the DOMA case currently being considered by the Supreme Court will make a difference. The provision in DOMA that allows states to ignore marriages from other states is not under review–instead, the Supreme Court is only looking at the federal government’s nonrecognition of state same-sex marriages.

Until legislatures follow the path of Washington D.C., which lets out-of-state same-sex couples get divorced even when they aren’t residents, gay couples from states without gay marriage will continue to take on an enormous risk when they travel out of state to get married. At least one state–Vermont—has done so. It’s time for other states to do so as well.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

A grim look into the United States' austerity-driven future.

Three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress passed a joint resolution called an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). You might remember it. In layman’s terms, it was a carte blanche for the Bush administration to go to war wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted, however it wanted, under the guise of fighting anyone who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11th attackers, or “harbored” any terrorists or terror organizations connected to the attacks. That document, more than any other, launched the Global War on Terror or GWOT. President Obama long ago ditched the name and acronym, but he kept the global war.

And don’t expect that to change. On Thursday, Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Sheehan went before Congress and insisted that the Defense Department couldn’t be more “comfortable” with AUMF, as it was written, and that not a word should be altered or amended for changed circumstances. The Pentagon was so comfortable, in fact, that its officials foresee using that resolution to continue its drone-powered “dirty wars” in the Greater Middle East and Africa for years to come. “In my judgment,” Sheehan said, “this is going to go on for quite a while, yes, beyond the second term of the president… I think it’s at least 10 to 20 years.”

So there you have it. The military got its blank check for overseas wars, for sending out the drones and the special operations forces, and has no plans to change that before 2023, if not 2033. In other words, for at least the next decade, the GWOT, whatever label it’s given, will continue to be the central fixture of American foreign policy.  It’s not going anywhere. Today, TomDispatch regulars Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford of the invaluable National Priorities Project look at the “homeland” a decade into the future, as the effects of Congress’s austerity policies sink in. Put the two together and what a grim scene you have: a country investing in war in distant lands as it crumbles here at home. Andy Kroll

How America Became a Third World Country 
2013-2023 
By Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 — at the moment the sequester cuts began — no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested — and won — special relief.  Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

There’s a contradiction built into every campaign promise about transparent government beyond the failure to keep the promises.  Our government is, in significant portion, made up of secret operations, operations that include warmaking, kidnapping, torture, assassination, and infiltrating and overthrowing governments.  A growing movement is ready to see that end.

The Central Intelligence Agency is central to our foreign policy, but there is nothing intelligent about it, and there is no good news to be found regarding it.  Its drone wars are humanitarian and strategic disasters.  The piles of cash it keeps delivering to Hamid Karzai fuel corruption, not democracy.  Whose idea was it that secret piles of cash could create democracy? (Nobody’s, of course, democracy being the furthest thing from U.S. goals.)  Lavishing money on potential Russian spies and getting caught helps no one, and not getting caught would have helped no one.  Even scandals that avoid mentioning the CIA, like Benghazigate, are CIA blowback and worse than we’re being told.

We’ve moved from the war on Iraq, about which the CIA lied, and its accompanying atrocities serving as the primary recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists, to the drone wars filling that role.  We’ve moved from kidnapping and torture to kidnapping and torture under a president who, we like to fantasize, doesn’t really mean it.  But the slave-owners who founded this country knew very well what virtually anyone would do if you gave them power, and framed the Constitution so as not to give presidents powers like these.

There are shelves full in your local bookstore of books pointing out the CIA’s outrageous incompetence.  The brilliant idea to give Iran plans for a nuclear bomb in order to prevent Iran from ever developing a nuclear bomb is one of my favorites.

But books that examine the illegality, immorality, and anti-democratic nature of even what the CIA so ham-handedly intends to do are rarer.  A new book called Dirty Wars, also coming out as a film in June, does a superb job.  I wrote a review a while back.  Another book, decades old now, might be re-titled “Dirty Wars The Prequel.”  I’m thinking of Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program.

It you read The Phoenix Program about our (the CIA’s and “special” forces’) secret crimes in Eastern Asia and Dirty Wars about our secret crimes in Western Asia, and remember that similar efforts were focused on making life hell for millions of people in Latin America in between these twin catastrophes, and that some of those running Phoenix were brought away from similar sadistic pursuits in the Philippines, it becomes hard to play along with the continual pretense that each uncovered outrage is an aberration, that the ongoing focus of our government’s foreign policy “isn’t who we are.”

Targeted murders with knives in Vietnam were justified with the same rhetoric that now justifies drone murders.  The similarities include the failure of primary goals, the counterproductive blowback results, the breeding of corruption abroad and at home, the moral and political degradation, the erosion of democratic ways of thinking, and — of course — the racist arrogance and cultural ignorance that shape the programs and blind their participants to what they are engaged in.  The primary difference between Phoenix and drone kills is that the drones don’t suffer PTSD.  The same, however, cannot be said for the drone pilots.

“The problem,” wrote Valentine, “was one of using means which were antithetical to the desired end, of denying due process in order to create a democracy, of using terror and repression to foster freedom.  When put into practice by soldiers taught to think in conventional military and moral terms, Contre Coup engendered transgressions on a massive scale.  However, for those pressing the attack on VCI, the bloodbath was constructive, for indiscriminate air raids and artillery barrages obscured the shadow war being fought in urban back alleys and anonymous rural hamlets.  The military shield allowed a CIA officer to sit behind a steel door in a room in the U.S. Embassy, insulated from human concern, skimming the Phoenix blacklist, selecting targets for assassination, distilling power from tragedy.”

At some point, enough of us will recognize that government conducted behind a steel door can lead only to ever greater tragedy.

In an email that Valentine wrote for RootsAction.org on Monday, he wrote: “Through its bottomless black bag of unaccounted-for money, much of it generated by off-the-books proprietary companies and illegal activities like drug smuggling, the CIA spreads corruption around the world.  This corruption undermines our own government and public officials.  And the drone killings of innocent men, women, and children generate fierce resentment.. . .Tell your representative and senators right now that the CIA is the antithesis of democracy and needs to be abolished.“

Zombie Barker - Martin Whitmore, flickr creative commons

For a long time being a business major in college was considered to be a low rent degree. It was a major of the snot nosed upper middle class kid who could do nothing else. Too stupid for any of the sciences and to lacking in talent for the arts and too illiterate for english.

Even those who went into the trades were held in higher regard by most. In the last couple of decades this has all changed, as Sam Smith points on in his current essay.

By 2005 these schools graduated 142,000 MBAs in one year.

There are plenty of worthy arguments to be made correlating the rise of business school culture with the decline of our economy and our country. A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product has become wasted energy. And not just the physical sort Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout and the rise of the killer hedge fund.

Hi, y’all.

What do you do with outer space cabbages (a.k.a. kohlrabi)?

“Talk Show Subway Car” is the latest sketch by New York City prank collective Improv Everywhere:

For our latest mission, we converted a New York City subway car into a late night talk show set. Host Pat Cassels (CollegeHumor) interviewed random commuters from his desk as bandleader Evan Gregory (The Gregory Brothers) kept the car rocking.

Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos below.

The full report is worth a look to see just how far this crew went in creating a TV show set in a moving subway car.

Of course, my favorite ever Improv Everywhere sketch is “No Shirts,” where over a hundred men of all ages and body shapes invaded an Abercrombie & Fitch with their shirts off.

Our garden is growing beautifully, with handfuls of tomatoes and herbs for harvest every day. Pumpkin sprouts just came up over the last 24 hours. We’ve added 3-4 new garden beds just since the season started, slowly converting more of the yard into productive space.

But we’re also customers of Texas Farmhouse, a community-supported agriculture business which sends us produce from several local farms every other week. We sometimes get vegetables I’d never buy like fennel and kohlrabi. I’m still working on using both, but today made progress on the latter with this recipe for apple and kohlrabi slaw from A Veggie Venture. I substituted lime juice for lemon, and soy milk (since we only buy milk or cream for specific recipes), and added some fresh dill. Yum.

Since I was cooking all the things, I also finished off the last of the garden carrots in a decadent carrot gratin recipe from Fine Cooking, which used up some smoked sharp cheddar I had in the fridge.

Moving away from food, if you’re anything like me you would love to attend this stage production of Princess Mononoke using puppets made from recycled parts. From Crunchyroll:

In cooperation with Studio Ghibli, the Whole Hog Theatre presented the world’s first theatrical staging of Hayao Miyazaki’s renowned animated film Princess Mononoke at London’s New Diorama in sold out shows April 2-6th. Today, they shared a series of photos of the production, which retold the ecological fable using giant puppets made from recycled material.

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Tell me about your favorite weird looking foods and how you cook them. You can talk about anything in the comments.

Here is a link to the Live report from KFOR.  And one from KOCO TV.

UPDATE:  37 fatalities so far confirmed by the medical examiner.  AP – http://bigstory.ap.org/article/tornadoes-slam-plains-midwest-1-dead-okla

MyFDL Editor’s Note: Community activists, as well as members of Occupy, Anonymous and Tar Sands Blockade are creating community-driven relief efforts. Please check the hashtag #OpOK for info.

John Lennon . . .

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Current reality is a reflection of us all, it’s a reflection of the choices we’ve made on this death march we keep making between administrations of evil and administrations of lesser evil. While we’ve been busy just trying to survive, the masters of Earth Incorporated have been busy too. Very busy. The bridge to Peace is burning, the bridge to Justice is burning, the bridge to the Future is burning, the corporate masters are burning them all.

Michael Ruppert . . .

The US economy, the privately-owned Federal Reserve system, and the government which they operate like a franchise are the greatest enemies of the entire human race and especially the rapidly-deteriorating and fragile ecosystem which supports all life.

The corporate masters aren’t the only ones with the torches, they’re getting plenty of help from conservative arsonists determined to burn everything they don’t like or believe in, which pretty much includes everything except guns and the Book of Genesis.

Chris Hedges . . .

I think we have powerful proto-fascist movements in this country, and I look at the Tea Party, the militia, the Christian right, where they celebrate the language of violence, they celebrate the gun culture. They have a long list of people they don’t like. And I think that is a very – remains a very frightening and powerful undercurrent within American society.

All of us know on some level that it’s a kind of suicidal trajectory, and I think that it’s clear that the formal mechanisms of power are not going to save us, either from the rise of the security and surveillance state, the degradation of the ecosystem and the kind of fraying and destruction of what is left of our democracy.

I don’t know why so many progressives still believe it matters which corporate party controls the formal mechanisms of power. But I know what the consequences of their illusions have been. These illusion peddlers tell us they’re serious people, they tell us they’re realists, they expect us to believe that taking a brief death march break every two years to elect new guards is the best that we can do.

I’m not a preacher, I’m not a leader, I’m not here to tell anyone how to feel, but the harsh reality of what is happening can be seen along every agonizing mile of this endless march, it can be seen in the firelight of all those burning bridges, it can be heard in the roaring of the flames, a searing message is being written in fire for all the world to see . . .

The formal mechanisms of power are not the solution, they’re the problem.

The false world of the corporate masters gets all the attention while the real world we all live in is ignored. They tell each other that my world, your world, our world is theirs for the taking, that we’re powerless, but our world is beyond their reach, it is within us and cannot be corrupted, the moral courage of Gandhi lives on in us, the moral vision of Dr. King endures on our websites, the moral wisdom of the ages is reflected in everything we stand for and defend.

The corporate masters can burn all the bridges they want, there are other ways to cross the River of Life. We can find our way, limitless undying love is shining all around us like a million suns, calling us on and on, showing us the way. They can never change our world, they can never own it, they can never rule it, a higher consciousness is emerging, humanity is finally awakening from this long night of deceit and destruction, millions are seeking and finding the empowerment that comes from within, that has no limit, that liberates as it enlightens, that unifies at it expands.

We are many, they are few.

Our world will not fall. Their world will.

Jai Guru Deva Om . . .