Finding God in a Dog

• Are you shocked that Verizon gave the Federal Government complete phone records for millions of Americans? If you are, just keep in mind that I warned you about this crap back in 2005! Of course, Slashdot has a discussion. Wasn't President Obama elected, in part, to, you know, put an end to these practices?


• The fight for marriage equality in Oregon starts here. I hope every Oregonian Thelemite who is able to read this passes on the message and gets active. (inchworm?)


• Are gun owners, you know, compensating for something? olegvolk explores that stupid meme here. My thought on the matter is that, if a person actually says out loud that gun owners are compensating for small or missing penises, then everything else that person has to say on the matter can be safely dismissed as equally moronic. They're as much as admitting it, in fact.


• That said, Gun Owners of America really shot themselves in the foot with this racist email they sent out to their members. They could, you know, reach out to hispanics instead, but no....


• Finally, it looks like universal background checks still have a fighting chance in Oregon, now that two pro-gun Democrats in the State Senate have decided to compromise. I'm 100% okay with UBCs. It's how we're getting there that makes me nervous, as there are rumors that Oregon legislators are staring down the barrel of the unlimited checkbook of a certain authoritarian billionaire who has a history of buying elections.

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

I will name the time and the place, per your offer, as soon as possible. Looking forward to it, NOMnuts.