Author: Jon Ponder

Considering the plenitudes of woes suffered by the people of North Korea, it is a downright miracle the country has never had an AIDS case. The reason for this miracle, according to a commie gubmint official, is an even bigger miracle: Turns out the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is completely homo-free. Not one homosexual in the whole country. Ever.

Rex Wockner in Windy City Media Group:

You gotta love wacky North Korea. Last month the nation reported that it has never had an AIDS case and also doesn�t have any homosexuals.

The AIDS statistics could be true. This is, after all, the most closed, isolated, secretive nation on the planet. But no gays? Poor, deluded North Korea.

The claims were reported by the Pyongyang Times in an interview it did with Han Kyong Ho, director of the wonderfully named Central Hygienic and Anti-Epizootic Center of the Democratic People�s Republic of Korea Ministry of Health.

�The DPRK is the sole country on the earth that has no AIDS-related patient so far,� Han said. �As a medical worker I feel sure that there will not occur a case in the DPRK in the future, either. The DPRK … encourages the population to have a noble viewpoint towards love, marriage and family, and observe a sound lifestyle. The country has neither licensed and private prostitutes nor homosexuals and drug addicts.�

There�s more. �The socialist system in the country has nothing to do with any socio-economic background giving rise to all descriptions of immorality and depravity,� Han said. �The sound lifestyle prevailing in the society will be upgraded more and more as the people�s standard of ideology and culture is on the rise and education on the socialist morality develops. It is crystal clear that AIDS can never penetrate into this environment.�

I suppose if police keep all foreigners under watch 24/7, North Korea could stay AIDS-free. But, Han did note that 27 foreign workers who tested HIV-positive recently were sent home at their own requests. At some point, a foreign worker who doesn�t know he�s HIV-positive and one of those non-existent North Korean homosexuals are gonna do the deed in a broom closet, beyond the eyes of prying officials, and Han�s disease-free utopia will be history.

The Guardian has new details on President Bush’s grandfather’s financial entanglements with the Nazis:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Armstong Williams, an arch-conservative African American pundit (who, incidentaly, was outed by David Brock in his book, Blinded by the Right) was paid by the Bushies to shill the No Child Left Behind Act to black people.

USA Today:

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but “I wanted to do it because it’s something I believe in.”

The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract “a very questionable use of taxpayers’ money” that is “probably illegal.” He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in requesting an investigation.

But you have to wonder how anybody – black, white or purple – would give any credence to the likes of this guy. In other words, more tax dollars wasted.

TV Newser:

An aside by Tucker Carlson on Crossfire today perked up the ears of CNN fans. “This, by the way, is the last day James and I are on television together. I want you to know that I’m enjoying every moment of it,” Carlson said. A few minutes later, Rahm Emanuel suggested Carlson invite John Kerry on the show “before you leave CNN.”

But it wasn’t necessarily an indication that Carlson is leaving CNN. Carlson’s last day on Crossfire is coming this Thursday. Today was his last day with Carville; Paula Begala will be “on the left” tomorrow and Thursday. Klein may offer Carlson a deal to stay at CNN later this week — but it won’t be on Crossfire.

> “The wait is excruciating — even worse than the show itself!,” Wonkette smirks.

Mike Taibbi in New York Press:

Carlson occupies the same role for conservatives in the media landscape that Colmes does for liberals. Colmes is a pale-faced, paint-by-numbers loser whose only job is to be a believable liberal for people who live in trailers. Carlson is CNN’s idea of a conservative. His right-wing ideas come from his changeable, expensive brains instead of his stomach. In the same way that the helpless, ineffectual Colmes is a reassuring image to hardcore conservatives, Carlson puts a soothing face on conservatism for educated East-coast progressives—because even the biggest neo-Marxist wanker from Brown takes one look at Carlson and sees the one man in America he would feel sure of being able to kick the shit out of in a back alley.

That same wanker could probably take Savage or O’Reilly, too, but those guys have supplicants and constituents by the millions who would come rushing to their aid. Not Carlson. In a bar fight, no 35-year-old man with a bow tie has friends. Especially not a smart-aleck closet case like Carlson. You would be hard-pressed to find an American who would not leap to his feet to cheer the sight of Tucker Carlson getting his teeth kicked down an alley, which I suspect is the reason CNN picked him to be their champion of conservatism. He is a patsy and a fraud—the kind of public personality totalitarian regimes used to nurture for years in order to execute for a lack of orthodoxy at some opportune historical moment much later on. That MSNBC hires him thinking they’re getting the real thing, a big ticket to red-state ratings, just shows how clueless that network really is.

For years, Hillary has been pilloried for suggesting that there was a rightwing conspiracy against Bill (even though there was – and many of the same rightwingers who excoriated her were part of it). Now let’s see if the SCLM goes after Bush for suggesting his opponents are conspiring against him. Odds are, they won’t.

AP via Yahoo:

President Bush (news – web sites)’s re-election campaign asked the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court on Monday to throw out a challenge of the election in this swing state, saying the case resembles “a poorly drafted script for a late night conspiracy-theory movie.”

The court filing was made as the Rev. Jesse Jackson (news – web sites) held a rally before hundreds of people in Columbus to support the challenge and urge the U.S. Senate to debate Ohio’s results on Thursday when Congress is in joint session for the official tally of the electoral votes.

Thirty-seven Ohio voters who filed the challenge are asking Chief Justice Thomas Moyer to set aside the election results. Some of the voters are suspicious of Bush’s victory over Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites), while others say hours-long waits in heavily black neighborhoods caused voters to leave in frustration without casting a ballot.

“In 2000, if Al Gore (news – web sites) had just held on and fought to the bitter end, he would have been president,” said Mark Lomax, a black Columbus musician challenging the vote. “I kind of have the same feeling now — whether or not you like John Kerry, that’s not the issue. It’s just that your vote counts.”

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said there’s no reason to prolong the election.

Planet Out News:

Jeff Cotter, a San Francisco psychiatric social worker, says he started Rainbow World Fund (RWF) four years ago because none of the traditional relief organizations were developing philanthropy and consciousness in the LGBT community. It is that dual mission — direct relief hand in hand with changing opinions and beliefs — that moves RWF. Cotter calls it a solidarity model, rather than a charity model.

“As with our community’s response to HIV, we can’t wait for the rest of the world to take leadership,” Cotter said. “And as a gay man, I thought, if I want to change the world, I should start where I’m at, in the community I live in. And the gay and lesbian community was a huge untapped market.”

In the past year, RWF has teamed up with relief organizations to increase access to safe drinking water in Central America, eradicate land mines in Cambodia, provide food for victims of hurricane Jeanne in Haiti and save the next generation of Africans from HIV/AIDS. The group works closely with larger charity organizations (such as CARE) to give aid immediately, where it’s needed.

Cotter balances his time between Rainbow and his “day job”: counseling rape victims and gunshot wound survivors for the city of San Francisco. He has spent the past three years building the infrastructure for RWF, and has begun helping victims around the world this year.

Because administrative costs are covered by the board of directors and grants from various organizations (including the Catholic Church), RWF can ensure that 100 percent of every charitable dollar goes directly to field service work overseas. In the case of Sunday’s quake and tsunami survivors, aid will go to food, water, vitamins and medical supplies for many months, and possibly years, to come.

But why doesn’t an LGBT relief organization give to LGBT causes? Why enlist gays and lesbians to help victims they know nothing about? The question, Cotter says, should really be: why not?

“Suffering is universal, and the LGBT community knows more than a little bit about that,” Cotter says. “When we took the aid trip to Guatemala earlier this year, it was clear that we (the LGBT community) had a shared history of oppression with the Mayan population there. There was a systematic genocide there, and the government invalidated their marriage relationships, among other atrocities.”

The excursion to Guatemala had another benefit as well. In the primarily Catholic and socially conservative country, Rainbow’s outreach was the first contact most citizens had with gays or lesbians. Promoting tolerance and understanding of differences among people and cultures, and at the same time providing much-needed assistance to impoverished and developing areas, is a win-win, according to Cotter.

“We’re about changing attitudes toward gays and lesbians,” Cotter said. “Many of the places we visit and help have very little LGBT presence. Everyone we’ve worked with has been surprised by our commitment, and very open and accepting to our presence.”

Gov. Schwarzenegger may have painted himself into a corner. He made statements over the break that angered the Republicans and now, apropos of nothing, he wants to re-jigger the state’s legislative boundaries so that fewer Dems will be elected to the Legislature. Today’s Los Angeles Times (free subscription) describes the mood in Sacramento as the Legislature returns to business:

More confident after weathering their first year with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Democrats who control California’s Legislature return to the Capitol today, eager to reclaim the loyalties of centrist voters even at the risk of greater confrontation with the popular Republican governor.

With an estimated $8.1-billion budget gap, the fiscal challenges are as severe as in Schwarzenegger’s first year. But easy solutions seem fewer, with last year’s gigantic borrowing package difficult to replicate. That makes extensive disputes more likely between Republicans, who oppose new taxes, and Democrats bracing to stop Schwarzenegger from cutting health and social services programs.

Fifty years ago, racist politicians like Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox and George Wallace used their white constituency’s hatred of blacks to launch and sustain their politcal careers. Now a new class of bigots is coming out of the wordwork – but this time they’re using hompobia to grab the spotlight.

Rev. Keith Butler out of Detroit is one of these new Talibanis. The wrinkle is he’s black. Pam’s House Blend has background on the story:

I came across this article and couldn’t place this guy’s name for a moment. Then I recalled why it is familiar. Keith Butler was one of the black folks trotted out by the GOP at the NY convention in 2004 to add a dash of color.

He and fellow token, the infamous professional “ex-gay” Donnie McClurkin are also world-class homophobes that subscribe to the belief that being gay is a sin and that any comparison of any kindbetween the struggle for gay rights and the black civil rights movement is an insult. [The above McClurkin link goes to an excellent essay by Keith Boykin on McClurkin and the church’s ignorance on homosexuality.]

This “man of God” should be recognized as a fledgling member of the American Taliban, ready to impose his limited worldview on everyone.

There’s a footnote to the story about the three racist politicians mentioned at the top. Thurmond, Maddox and Wallace all recanted and apologized for their part in encouraging fear and hatred. And of course Strom kept secret for 60 years the fact that he’d fathered a child with a black woman.

No doubt we’ll hear recantations and apologies from the new Republican Talibanis one day – when it’s too late to undo the damage they are about to cause. And no doubt we’ll learn that among the newly prominent black gay-haters are a few who are playing around on the down low.