Year: 2009

No one reported on the divorce until it had already been granted, which indicates the court file must have been sealed for some reason. I’ve seen no indication that anyone in the press has even seen the divorce complaint. It isn’t even clear who filed for divorce — Rove or his wife, Darby?

But why would Rove be so desperate to deflect coverage of his divorce?

Gawker suggests that with Darby out of the way, Rove “can finally gay marry Jeff Gannon, in Argentina.”

Gannon was the fake reporter who was mysteriously given a pass to sit in on White House press briefings and ask right-wing softball questions for two years. He was eventually unmasked as a Republican plant — which would have been filed away as business as usual for the Bushies, except that this plant had a second career as a male prostitute whose nom de ho was Bulldog.

Folks in the know point to this bit of history from 2005:

[When] Jeff Gannon, White House “reporter” for Talon “News,” was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career.

But Rove’s dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon’s aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn’t at least implicitly sanctioned by the “boy genius.” Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.

It happens that this is Rove’s second divorce. Plus, Rove’s father was gay. And the timing is interesting. Washington, D.C., has legalized gay marriage, pending approval of the Democrats in Congress.

In right-wing circles, where rumors harden into facts at their first exposure to air — where, to cite just one example, Pres. Obama is a socialist-fascist Muslim who was born in Kenya and/or Indonesia — there is enough here to qualify as a “solid rumor” that Rove is secretly gay and has left his wife for a famous erstwhile male escort.

It is also apt that Rove specialized in creating whispering campaigns, the most famous being the rumor that spread like wildfire among racist Republicans (redundant, sorry) in South Carolina just before the 2000 primary vote that John McCain, George Bush’s Republican opponent, was the father of a black child.

Where there is smoke there is fire, or so they say, and with all these stories floating around, Rove needs to step up and come clean about his relationship with this former prostitute. He should avoid the mistake of letting the story fester on the Internet as Glenn Beck has done by refusing to discuss his role in the rape and murder of a young girl in 1990.

Update March 1, 2010 The original site presenting the iron-clad rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 is gone. Try this one instead.

Martin is one of five candidates in the Republican primary to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Roland Burris, the laughingstock seat-warmer appointed by disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevitch to fill Pres. Barack Obama’s seat last year.

The GOP front-runner is Rep. Mark Kirk, who has a long legislative record and who serves as a Naval intelligence officer. On Monday, Martin successfully changed the dynamics of the race when he released a radio ad in which he claimed that Kirk is gay. You can listen to the ad here, and here is the transcript:

ANDY MARTIN: I’m Andy Martin, Republican candidate for United States Senator. I approve this message because Illinois Republicans deserve the truth about their candidates.

I have over 40 years of experience and integrity fighting corruption and fighting for the truth in politics. I helped expose many of Barack Obama’s lies in 2008.

Today I am fighting for the facts about Mark Kirk. Illinois Republican leader Jack Roeser says there is a solid rumor that Kirk is a homosexual. Roeser suggests that Kirk is part of a Republican Party homosexual club. Lake County Illinois Republican leader Ray True says Kirk has surrounded himself with homosexuals.

Mark Kirk should tell Republican voters the truth.

I’m Andy Martin, a Republican you can trust, for United States Senator. Please vote for Andy Martin.

ANNOUNCER: Paid for by Illinois Republicans for Andy Martin.

When a reporter called Rep. Kirk’s office to get a response, Kirk’s spokesman said the congressman would not be able to comment because Kirk was on active duty with the Naval Reserves over the holidays. Speaking on Kirk’s behalf, the spokesman said, “The ad is not true and is degrading to the political process. The people of Illinois deserve better.”

On a purely political level, if Kirk is gay, or even if questions about his sexuality become a dominant issue in the GOP primary, he will lose to an arguably weaker Republican candidate. That candidate will not be his accuser, Andy Martin, however. This guy’s credibility is less than zero. Here’s some background on Martin from his Wikipedia page:

His 1996 run for the Florida State Senate came undone when it was revealed that he had named his campaign committee for his 1986 congressional run “The Anthony R. Martin-Trigona Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America.” The revelation led the state Republican Party to renounce him. Just before the election, he assaulted two cameramen from WPTV, the NBC affiliate in West Palm Beach. He was convicted of criminal mischief and sentenced to a year in jail. He was freed pending appeal, but made personal attacks on the judge while on the way out of the courtroom. The judge held Martin in criminal contempt of court and sentenced him to seven months in jail. However, he was mistakenly let out of jail after only a month. Martin never returned, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The warrant was still outstanding at least as of the time of Martin’s 2008 Senate run, but he said the issue is being “resolved.”

During his 2000 run for president, he ran a television advertisement in Connecticut accusing George W. Bush of using cocaine. In 2003, after several visits to Iraq he claimed he was 90 percent certain he knew where Saddam Hussein was hiding and put in a claim for the $25 million reward on offer for the former Iraqi dictator’s capture.

According to Martin’s Wikipedia page, prior to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Martin issued a press release claiming that keynote speaker Barack Obama was lying about his religion. Obama was really a Muslim, Martin said, a fact he was hiding “to endanger Israel.” (The lie that Obama was a Muslim was picked up by Swiftboater Jerome Corsi, who repeated it in his 2008 book, “Obama Nation.”)

In October 2008, in an interview on CNN, Martin dropped the charge that Obama was a Muslim, says Wikipedia, alleging instead that Obama was really the son of Frank Marshall Davis, a journalist who worked in Hawaii in the 1940s and 1950s, and who was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a commie.

Martin had come up with this wild idea while on a visit to Honolulu. In an effort to confirm that Davis was really Obama’s father, he requested a copy of Obama’s birth certificate.

On October 17, 2008, Martin filed a lawsuit in a state circuit court of Hawaii against Gov. Linda Lingle and health department director Dr. Chiyome Fukino, seeking to verify the state’s official birth certificate of Barack Obama. Martin was quoted as saying, “I want to see a certified copy issued by the state of Hawaii, not one issued by the state of Obama.”

On November 19, the court denied Martin’s “emergency motion” and dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds of Martin’s lack of legal standing to obtain another person’s birth document.

Earlier this month, Martin filed suit against Wikipedia claiming it is “protosocialist” (whatever that is) and a tax-exempt wing of Pres. Obama’s political operations. According to Martin’s Wikipedia page, he filed the suit while he was in New York for the “Second National Conference on Barack Obama’s Missing Birth Certificate and College Records.”

Mark Kirk was elected to the House in 2001. Before that, he practiced law and once worked on the staff of the House member whose district he now represents. He also served as a counsel on the House International Relations Committee. He has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

It happens that his marriage of eight years ended in divorce earlier this year. However, his ex-wife has wholeheartedly endorsed his run for the Senate.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly notes that Kirk has been taking fire from the right over his moderate record, including support for gay rights — with one glaring exception:

His decision to vote for a cap-and-trade bill in June, for example, led to widespread outrage in conservative circles. (Kirk has since changed his mind and now opposes the bill he voted for.)

The Illinois Republican is also known for moderation on social issues, most notably gay rights. Kirk, for example, was the lead GOP co-sponsor on an expanded hate-crimes bill, and is on record supporting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This, of course, is also anathema to the Republican Party’s base.

Kirk also supports rescinding the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and he was endorsed in 2008 by the Log Cabin Republicans, the GOP’s gay Stockholm Syndrome victims’ group.

But Kirk has apparently been reading the tea leaves, so to speak, and sees that his party is moving to the extreme right, which brings us to the glaring exception in his support for gay equality:

Considering the fine line he’s walking, it’s no wonder Kirk hasn’t been outspoken regarding his views on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Last month, a spokesman for the congressman commented briefly on the subject, saying that Kirk “agrees with President Clinton’s policy.” He did not note that the former president has since argued that “this policy should be changed.”

[Later] Kirk offered slightly more on his position:

He supports continuing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays serving in the military.

“I think it’s worked out well,” he said. “Keeping that all out of the workplace makes common sense.”

But there’s not much evidence that DADT has “worked out well.” To the contrary, the facts indicate the policy is hurting the military:

Since 1994, the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy has resulted in the discharge of more than 13,000 military personnel across the services including approximately 800 with skills deemed ‘mission critical,’ such as pilots, combat engineers and linguists. These are the very specialties for which the military has faced personnel shortfalls in recent years.

In the Democratic primary, one of the candidates, attorney Jacob Meister, is openly gay. Meister reacted to Martin’s ad and, particularly, Kirk’s stand on DADT:

“I listened to the radio commercial and I am shocked that in 2009, anyone could spew that kind of hatred on the airwaves,” Meister said. “The voters have to call him out on it and the other candidates have to call him out on it.”

…Meister also noted that Kirk is an officer in the Navy Reserves. If it turns out he is gay, he will have to be discharged from the military under the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that Kirk supports and which Meister opposes. Meister says the military has investigated the sexual orientation of service members based on information as seemingly unreliable as the Martin claim.

But in the military, all it takes a rumor to trigger a DADT investigation. As one gay blogger put it:

Meister is right. Rumors have served as the basis for investigations into the private lives of members of the military — and ruined many careers. It’s going to be hard for the military to avoid such a high-profile outing of a military official. Perhaps this is one way for Mark Kirk to find out for sure if DADT has, in fact, “worked out well.”

Now the question is, will the military look into gay rumors about a sitting Republican House member who’s running for the U.S. Senate?

Oh — and one item in Mark Kirk’s bio seems to have escaped the notice of Andy Martin and Kirk’s tea bagger critics. According to his Wikipedia page, he’s a member of the United Church of Christ, which is the denomination of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, the former church of the Obamas and the controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

At their annual meeting on Dec. 25 in San Francisco, leaders of the Democrat Socialist National Committee (DSNC) — formerly known as the Democratic National Committee — unanimously approved a resolution that would unilaterally rename the Republican Party the “New Dixiecrat Party.”

The action by the nation’s top liberals is seen as a response to a resolution floated by the Republican National Committee earlier this year to rebrand the 250-year-old Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

In remarks before the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her party had taken note of discussions after the 2008 elections about the damage done to the Republican “brand” during the Bush presidency. Political observers believe that by rubberstamping Bush’s initiatives, especially the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and anti-regulatory economic policies that caused the Bush Recession, the GOP leadership had befouled its image with the public.

Party officials cite polling and demographic data indicating that not only has the GOP’s power base retracted to the boundaries of the old Confederacy, its self-identified members are almost exclusively old white people. They note that only 2 percent of Republicans are Latinos and just 1 percent are African Americans — and just 15 percent of GOP registrants are under 35 years old.

Pres. Barack Obama addressed the meeting by video link from his vacation overseas in the nation of Hawaii. He stressed that by rebranding the conservative party, the DSNC was helping him fulfill his campaign promise to “put the urgent need for bipartisanship ahead of everything on the national agenda.” He said he saw his party’s “unflinching drive for comity with its enemies at home” as the first step toward his ultimate goal of “world peace.”

In calling for the vote, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chair of the steering committee that wrote the rebranding resolution, said his committee had settled on New Dixiecrat Party after studying the 1948 campaign platform of the old Dixiecrat Party, which was officially known as the “States Rights Democratic Party.”

“We found that the 1948 platform was still remarkably well-suited to stand as our opponents’ manifesto in 2010 and beyond,” Frank said. “Except for the names of the party leaders back then, Republicans today wouldn’t need to tweak a word.”

Dixiecrat 1948 platform:

1. We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man.

2. We oppose all efforts to invade or destroy the rights guaranteed by it to every citizen of this republic.

3. We stand for social and economic justice, which, we believe can be guaranteed to all citizens only by a strict adherence to our Constitution and the avoidance of any invasion or destruction of the constitutional rights of the states and individuals. We oppose the totallitaran, centralized bureaucratic government and the police nation called for by the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions.

4. We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to learn one’s living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.

5. We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.

6. We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.

7. We stand for the check and balances provided by the three departments of our government. We oppose the usurpation of legislative functions by the executive and judicial departments. We unreservedly condemn the effort to establish in the United States a police nation that would destroy the last vestige of liberty enjoyed by a citizen.

8. We demand that there be returned to the people to whom of right they belong, those powers needed for the preservation of human rights and the discharge of our responsibility as democrats for human welfare. We oppose a denial of those by political parties, a barter or sale of those rights by a political convention, as well as any invasion or violation of those rights by the Federal Government. We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.

9. We, therefore, urge that this Convention endorse the candidacies of J. Strom Thurmond and Fielding H. Wright for the President and Vice-president, respectively, of the United States of America.

After the committee voted in favor of the rebranding resolution, members also voted to support the construction of FEMA camps for the interment of people who hold “dangerous political views” and to fund health-care reform by raising revenue with a tax on right-wing millionaires and reducing waste by the creation of death panels for elderly conservatives.

Before the official business got underway, a a non-sectarian holiday meal was served that included vegan steak tartar with arugula salad, white wine and non-fat, decaf lattes by transvestite waitpersons.

The DSNC annual committee meeting is traditionally scheduled for Dec. 25 as part of the left’s ongoing efforts to stamp out Christmas.

Six years ago, when the Republicans controlled the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of government, they rammed through Congress a Medicare prescription drug bill that they paid for by borrowing billions of dollars, presumably from Communist China.

This month, when Democrats in the Senate proposed a health-care overhaul that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office adjudged would pay for itself and require no borrowing, all the Republicans voted against it, including 24 senators — over half the caucus — who voted for the budget-busting Medicare expansion in 2003.

These same Republicans were also onboard for George W. Bush’s tax cut for the wealthy and deficit funding of Bush’s two wars. They also advocated underfunding the regulatory agencies that provided oversight for financial institutions and even the nation’s food supply.

So how do they justify this gigantic — and nonsensical — flip-flop on fiscal responsibility?

Here’s what Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said — in a classic Kinseyan gaffe*:

[When Bush and the GOP controlled the government six years ago] “it was standard practice not to pay for things…We were concerned about it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no question.”

*Michael Kinsey once said that, in Washington, a “gaffe” is when someone inadvertently tells the truth.