Month: June 2007

Report: Bush and Cheney Not Invited to ’08 GOP Convention

Jon Ponder

This sounds a little strange because Pres. George Bush is the head of the Republican Party, but it is amusing if true:

Republican National committee chairman Ed Gillespie confirmed rumors that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would not be appearing at the September 2008 convention. According to Gillespie, “The Presidents’ screw-ups will be fresh in the minds of the American public, we are hoping a Republican event without George W. Bush can focus viewers’ attention on the future of the party, not its grand failures…

“If the Presidents’ polling numbers don’t climb above 51 percent, he really is no use to the party,” stated Gillespie.

Committee chairman Gillespie did leave the door open for the President, “I believe a wait and see attitude is called for. If the situation on the ground in Iraq improves we may invite the President to make an appearance, possibly a video message.”

Ed Gillipsie is one of the most reliable GOP apologists on the planet so these statements are extremely out of character for him. In fact, if the RNC really intended to exclude the president and vice president, it would be more in character for Gillespie to lie about it by floating non-denial denials at this early stage.

Update: Yes, this is a hoax. Gillespie stepped down as RNC chair in 2005, and is currently chair of the GOP in Virginia.

Canadian Caregivers: ‘Keep Yer Kidney, Christian Cultist’

Buck Banks

So this guy wakes up in a bathtub full of ice in Tijuana: No, that’s the other kidney story. This one is about a Canadian hospital that is refusing to let a guy from Australia donate his kidney to a woman he does not personally know as a way to prove his religious faith. Whatever happened to the simple acts of faith, like tithing and giving food and clothing to the poor at Christmas and Easter?

‘I decided to do it [donate a kidney] because I like positive things that can be done to help people.’

Sydney man Ash Falkingham is a member of the Jesus Christians, a group led by guru David Mckay, who believe kidney donation is the “ultimate” expression of faith.

Nineteen of the group’s 30 members living in Kenya, Britain, the United States and Australia have donated a kidney as part of their desire to “live selflessly”, ABC Television’s Australian Story reports tonight.

Mr. Falkingham believes the group, led by guru David McKay, is simply following the true teachings of Christ.

Those teachings must have been from one of the lost books of the New Testament — the Book of Ectomies. Of course, the 20-year-old’s parents think he’s been brainwashed by the surgery-happy Jesus freaks:

Mr. Falkingham was in Canada for the operation because “non-directed” kidney donations are banned in Australia.

He said that under Australian law he would be required to have a long-term friendship with a recipient before donating.

He barely knows the Canadian woman, Sandi Sabloff, who was to have received his kidney, having met her online through the website Living Donors.

“The Jesus Christians believe that what Jesus said, he meant,” Mr. Falkingham said.

“I decided to do it [donate a kidney] because I like positive things that can be done to help people.”

Come on, clean your neighbor’s gutters, collect donations for Haiti, mentor a kid (on second thought, maybe not) or something. There are plenty of positive things that can be done without giving a kidney to a stranger.

Oh, and if I were the recipient, I might be concerned about the effect having a “Jesus Christian” organ inside me might have. Ever since “Frankenstein” we’ve had a whole slew of films that explore what happens when transplanted organs from crazy people “go bad.” Next thing you know, the recipient might be handing out corneas, ear drums or skin grafts, who knows?

Celebrating Anita Bryant: The Mother of Gay Rights

Trish

You’d have to call Anita Bryant, the former beauty queen gone anti-gay zealot gone born again Christian gone divorced gone bankrupt orange juice spokesperson, a reluctant hero. But a new exhibit in South Florida does just that, commemorating the 30-year anniversary of her crusade and its monumental unintended affects.

Anita Bryant in 1977: “I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children”

In 1977, singer Anita Bryant successfully campaigned to repeal a Dade County ordinance banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians. [The recently called home Rev. Jerry] Falwell came to South Florida in support and two years later created the Moral Majority. Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly quickly joined Falwell in becoming outspoken opponents of gay rights.

“This is where they all had their stage debut,” said Jack Rutland, executive director of the Stonewall Library & Archives and organizer of the exhibit “Days Without Sunshine: Anita Bryant’s Anti-Gay Crusade…”

“In a completely unintended way, Anita Bryant was about the best thing to happen to the gay rights movement,” said John Coppola, exhibit curator and former head of exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “She and her cohorts were so over the top that it just completely galvanized the gay rights movement.”

Rutland goes so far as to call Bryant the mother of the gay rights movement…

Bryant, now 67, declined to comment when contacted at her Anita Bryant Ministries International Inc. in Oklahoma City.

That’s probably because Anita herself hasn’t fared so well.

Singing from the age of two, Bryant became Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was a second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America beauty pageant. She had three big pop hits: “‘Til There Was You” (1959); “Paper Roses” (1960); and “In My Little Corner of the World” (1960). In 1960, she married Bob Green, a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children. She became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission in 1969, and nationally televised commercials featured her singing “Come to the Florida Sunshine tree”, and opining that “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine”.

…concerns over homosexual recruitment of children inspired the name of Bryant’s political organization, Save Our Children. Among Bryant’s assertions during the campaign were “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children” and “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nailbiters.”

Bryant was also a pioneer on the receiving side of getting “pied,” as the YouTube video above shows. Before she took that pie in the face during an anti-gay press junket, such tactics were rare. So anyone who enjoyed seeing Ann Coulter pied should really thank Anita for leading the way.

But Anita’s fortunes took a dive after she spoke out.

Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission also was allowed to lapse because of the negative publicity generated by her political campaigns, the resulting boycott of Florida orange juice, and, at least reportedly, because of her divorce.

Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time and in 1980 she divorced him. She married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990, and they have tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues. Commercial success has been elusive, and they have left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas (1997) and in Tennessee (2001).

Who knows? Without Anita’s St. Bernard analogies and parental paranoia, gay people might still be in the closet. At the very least, she was fun to make fun of. Actually, she still is.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

And the only way to avoid playing the game is never belong to a club, class, set or trade union. As soon as you do, you’re accepting someone else’s rules, and as soon as you do that, you start looking down on the other chap with different rules.

— Charlotte Bingham (1942- ), English author of more than 30 historical novels

Former White House Communications Deputy Tim Griffin Resigns after Evidence Ties Him to Alleged Voter Suppression

Jon Ponder
The White House installed Griffin as U.S. Attorney without Senate approval using a provision they’d slipped into the Patriot Act.

Big media is ignoring the story that former White House Deputy Communications Director — and former RNC Research Director — Tim Griffin resigned as the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas last week after evidence revealed he was directly involved in alleged voter suppression in the 2004 elections.

This may be the first time you’ve heard of the illegal tactic of “caging” voters, but if BBC investigator Greg Palast is correct, it will not be the last.

Caging is a form of voter suppression involving registered mail. Typically, campaigns send registered letters to voters who are are unlikely to respond — soldiers serving overseas, for example. A list is compiled of the voters whose mail is returned marked undeliverable, or “caged.” On election day, when people on the caging list arrive to vote, campaign operatives are on hand to float challenges to their residency in the precinct. Palast says caging is a felony.

Palast recently obtained hundreds of emails sent by White House officials to Bush-Cheney operatives during the 2004 campaign. Among these were emails containing caging lists sent by Griffin, apparently in his role as communications deputy. Late last week, Palast agreed to show Griffin’s emails to Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. On Thursday, Griffin abruptly announced his resignation in Little Rock, citing an urgent need to work in the private sector. (Some sources say Griffin is in negotiations to join Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign; while one wag suggests Griffin resigned “to spend more time in jail.“)

Griffin’s name first surfaced nationally in the investigation into the Bush administration’s unprecedented firing of eight U.S. attorneys last December. He has been depicted as a protege of Karl Rove with no real prosecutorial experience who was chosen to replace Bud Cummins as federal prosecutor in the Little Rock office. His appointment created a controversy in Arkansas — and in the U.S. Senate — when it was revealed that the White House installed him without Senate approval using a provision on “interim” appointments they’d slipped into the Patriot Act.

Why would the U.S. Dept. of Justice replace a seasoned, successful prosecutor with a political operative whose last job was working for the White House communications department? Here’s how David Iglesias, the New Mexico U.S. attorney who was also fired in December, described why the Bushies wanted him out of the way:

“They wanted a political operative who happened to be a US attorney … and when they got somebody who actually took his oath to the Constitution seriously, they were appalled and they wanted me out of there. The two strikes against me was, I was not political, I didn’t help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.”

None of this is new, by the way. In 2004, Palast, working then as now for the BBC, accused Griffin and the GOP of caging the votes of African-American service personnel who lived in Florida but were serving in Iraq — but this, too went unnoticed by America’s corporate media.

VIDEO
See Greg Palast’s BBC report on vote fraud, including caging, from Oct. 2004.

Update: The story is even older than I indicated previously. Palast first reported it in 2004, not 2006, as I’d stated earlier. Thanks to Brad Friedman for the correct date.

Update 2: Here is a link to additional posts on voter fraud by Greg Palast at Bradblog.

Is Bush’s Base Softening on Impeachment?

Jon Ponder

Over the past week or so, conservatives who oppose Pres. Bush’s immigration bill have been on the receiving end of insulting and denigrating attacks in the media from the president and his flying monkeys. They are apoplectic over being framed as unpatriotic and bigoted, and they seem genuinely shocked to find that, like any old-school messianic cult leader, Dear Leader treats all opposition as heresy.

“Message To The Left: I’m not saying you should impeach him, I’m just sayin’, you know, go with your hearts.”
— Conservative blogger

Peggy Noonan, who has been as Bush cult-y as anyone, described the angst among Bush’s base in a column dramatically subtitled, “President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder”:

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

And then she asks, beseeachingly, “Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens?”

Welcome to our world, Peggy. Bush and company have been directing insults and hostility toward us “concerned citizens” on the left for seven years.

At the top of her piece, Noonan asserts that Bush’s base hasn’t broken with him on immigration, it’s the other way around:

What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition.

How bad is it among Bush’s base? The National Journal’s Blogometer posits that if congressional Dems were to move toward impeachment over Bush’s violations of the FISA laws, they would find conservatives in no mood to object:

Let’s pretend the House Judiciary Cmte. tires of Monica Goodling and Co., and returns their attention to the NSA surveillance program. Article II powers aside, has anyone really made the case Pres. Bush didn’t violate FISA? Wouldn’t monitoring Americans phone records contra to federal law constitute a high crime or misdemeanor? And if articles of impeachment were drawn up, after the immigration debacle, who exactly would come to Bush’s defense? Laura Ingraham? National Review? Conservative stalwart Ace of Spades sums up conservative sentiment: “Message To The Left: I’m not saying you should impeach him, I’m just sayin’, you know, go with your hearts.”

Blogometer also put together a round up of angry posts about Bush from conservatives, many of whom discuss the possibility of impeachment:

[…]

Romney Would Likely Donate Presidential Salary to Mormon Church

Trish

If Mitt Romney is elected president, the Mormon Church can expect quite a windfall.

Romney says if he wins, he will donate his presidential salary to charity. If he stays true to past form, that means most of the money will go directly to the Church of Jesus of Latter Day Saints.

Romney explains his largess with that ol’ golly-gee Republican bootstraps rags-to-riches fairy tale.

Go ahead, vote for Romney. The Mormons need your money.

“When I got started, I went to school and I never anticipated that I’d be as financially successful as I was, and then my business went far better than I expected it would,” Romney said at a question-and-answer session…

Mitt’s business was probably really boosted by the fact that his father was the governor of Michigan and former chair of American Motors. At any rate, Romney is rich. Way rich. So rich he doesn’t need to collect the paltry salary we taxpayers are willing to pay a president.

Aides have said Romney’s net worth reaches into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but a clearer snapshot of his finances will emerge when he files financial disclosure documents with the federal government in the coming weeks. Romney, who has given millions to charity in the past, is believed to be the wealthiest candidate in the 2008 race.

Which is why he can well afford to be generous with those less skilled at picking parents. As recently as 2005, he gave to the Mormons in a big way. Like a $2.2 million way.

Governor Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, have donated nearly $2.9 million to more than 40 healthcare groups, schools, and other charitable organizations since 1999, including $2.2 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Globe review of Internal Revenue Service documents shows.

The couple’s private charitable foundation donated primarily to groups in Massachusetts and Utah, where they lived while Romney ran the 2002 Winter Olympics. The foundation stepped up giving to groups based in Massachusetts after Romney was elected governor in 2002.

His contributions to the Mormon church, where he has long been active, are by far the largest. The foundation gave $1.9 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2003, the first year Romney was governor, and $311,000 more in 2000 and 2001. The foundation donated $250,000 to the Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University of Provo, Utah, including $50,000 in 2004.

Go ahead, vote for Romney. The Mormons need your money.