Month: June 2005

‘Happy Gay Pride’ to Paris & Kathy Hilton

Jon Ponder


In the Calendar section of today’s Los Angeles Times, we find this item:

When asked to be co-grand marshal of the Los Angeles Gay Pride celebrations this Sunday in West Hollywood, celebutante Paris Hilton answered with her trademark, “That’s hot.”

But some gay activists are offended that the 24-year-old heiress and her mother, Kathy Hilton, have been chosen as figureheads for an event themed “How Do You Wear Your Pride?”

“The first thing that pops into my mind is, are there no gay people that could possibly grand marshal our own parade?” columnist Charles Karel Bouley II wrote on Advocate.com, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender news website.

Puh-leeze.

I’ve never liked the concept of “gay pride” and a “gay pride day” or week or month or whatever. Deconstruct the phrase “Happy Gay Pride!”and you have a very silly string of words. I’m all for taking pride in who we are, especially in a society as filled with self-esteem issues as America today. But all the emphasis on “gay” and “pride” is just a reminder of a time when those two words were oxymoronic. Gaydom needs new branding – something a little less 1972.

So I never attended the annual Los Angeles area gay pride parade parade until five years ago when we bought a condo in West Hollywood about 50 feet from the route. Last year, my mother and my sister went with Page and me. This year, our friends Kim and David are motoring in from Sherman Oaks.

None of us thinks the choice of the Hiltons as grand marshals is controversial. And if I have any objections, it’s not because they are hets, it’s because they’re, well, celebutantes.

Fact is, Paris lives in West Hollywood. She may even be our most famous resident. (Sorry Sally Kirkland!) And with what she spends on fashion, hair and makeup, she’s probably done as much for gay people as anyone else.

So I say, “Happy Gay Pride, Paris & Kathy!!” See you at the parade.

Bush Nominee Said Blacks Prefer Selling Drugs, Hispanics Are Lazy

Jon Ponder

President Bush has nominated Henrietta Holsman Fore (right) to a State Dept. position in which she would head, among other things, the department’s human resources activities. But Think Progress reports that Ms. Fore got into trouble in the late 1980’s over racist comments she made in a public forum. (She even reiterated the comments in her published “apology” for the racist comments!) Here’s how the New York Times covered the incident:

A Wellesley College trustee’s remark that blacks preferred pushing drugs to working in a factory has precipitated an emotional debate on this bucolic campus already grappling with charges of racial insensitivity…

The trustee, Henrietta Holsman, a 1970 graduate of Wellesley who runs a manufacturing concern in Los Angeles, resigned from the board last weekend after apologizing for her comments, which also cast aspersions on the work ethic of Hispanic and white employees. But in a letter to the college newspaper, Ms. Holsman reiterated her statement that she had trouble keeping black assembly-line workers from going “…back to the street to earn more money … selling drugs.”

In her lecture, Ms. Holsman also said she had found Hispanic workers to be lazy, white workers resentful of having to work with machines, and Asians, while very productive, likely to move on to professional or management jobs. [NYT, 2/12/87]

Ms. Fore is currently director of the U.S. Mint.

Pissed Off Diebold Blames Elections Office for Its Failure

Trish

Diebold is puffed up and fuming about the recent successful hack by Black Box Voting on some of its Florida touch-screens. The elections supervisor in the county where the state capital is located had invited the group to see just how secure the voting machines were and now Diebold wants his head on a platter.

Tallahassee Democrat:

An attorney for the company that makes Leon County’s voting equipment told state and county officials Thursday it was “very foolish and irresponsible” for Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho to let an outside group try poking holes in vote-tabulation security systems…

In a blistering letter to Sancho, all seven county commissioners and Paul Craft, the head of voting-system certification in Hood’s elections office, [senior corporate counsel for Diebold Election Systems Inc. Michael] Lindroos said Sancho compromised the security of the system by letting Black Box Voting try to crack it. He said Sancho may have “intentionally and negligently allowed unauthorized personnel to make modifications to your system that are not discernible to you or your IT staff.

Actually, the test proved that it was already impossible to confirm that elections were being conducted reliably. That was the problem there, big boy. But Little Red (State) Glenda Hood, who presides over Florida’s elections and does whatever Jeb wants, is all about punishment – of the good guys.

An aide to Secretary of State Glenda Hood said the Division of Elections “will be contacting all appropriate parties to review this matter.”

Sancho already said he was taking the hacked machines out of commission, so whatever. Meanwhile, Diebold still hasn’t taken any responsibility and just claims the test was rigged.

“Your improper actions, Mr. Sancho, are equivalent to leaving your car unlocked, with the windows down and the keys left in the ignition, and then acting surprised when your car is stolen or the interior vandalized,” wrote Lindroos. “Other examples would be acting surprised if anomalies were discovered after you left paper ballots exposed in an unsecured area and invited individuals of questionable character to visit the room, or asked some unknown person to deliver paper ballots to a central counting location without a trusted escort.”

Well not exactly, according to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.

Harris…said similar Diebold systems are used in about 800 cities and counties across the country, with three to five employees having access in each jurisdiction, and that the system “should send up a red flare” if a dishonest employee tries to change vote totals.

Harris said Black Box evaded security systems and changed votes without setting off any alarms in its tests.

“It took us less than a minute to replace the Diebold system with something we wrote and to hijack the whole system,” she said. “I would venture to say it doesn’t happen in Leon County, but that’s like saying nobody ever embezzles. When you have 800 jurisdictions and three to five employees with access in each, that’s like saying you’ve got 3,000 to 4,000 employees and none of them will ever try something.”

Hell, if I thought it would get rid of W. & Co. and I might give it a shot myself.

Schwarzenegger to Launch ‘Phenomenon of Anger’ Campaign Next Week

Jon Ponder

As we reported last week , an advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was overheard in a phone conversation with the governor’s fat-cat donors to say that the push for a special election this fall would start with a campaign to create a “phenomenon of anger” among the state’s voters toward teachers, firemen and the state legislature. Schwarzengger’s campaign to foment hatred will begin on Monday, according to USA Today:

“I was sent by the people,” says the man who won his office in the recall election that ousted Democrat Gray Davis in 2003. “We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any longer.”

His solutions are to make it harder for teachers to get tenure, to strip legislators of the ability to draw their own districts and to give the governor vast new powers to cut spending. The results could resonate beyond California, because other states often follow its lead…

An independent public poll shows 33% of California adults support such an election. The governor himself is at 40% job approval in public polls and just above 50% in his own internal polls. Not the strongest position from which to try to upend the political processes of the nation’s largest state. But this is a celebrity with little self-doubt and even less to lose, even if the initiatives are defeated.

“What is going to happen if everything fails? Life goes on,” Schwarzenegger said during a 45-minute interview Wednesday. “What do you think, I’m worried about that? I’m only thinking of one thing: victory for the people of California. … I’ve done my trip to glorify myself, to do all my things, and to shine. I’m doing this because it gives me a chance to give something back.”

The cost to hold the special election is estimated at $80 million. California in debt for $15 billion that Schwarzenegger borrowed to resolve the budget deficit last year – a strategy he was highly critical of during his campaign to become governor.

GOP Revives Gingrich Era Efforts to ‘Kill Big Bird’

Jon Ponder

In a replay of a Gingrich era attempt to stifle open discourse and to end programs that educate poor children, the House subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education voted to de-fund public broadcasting. According to the San Franciso Chronicle:

A House subcommittee voted Thursday to sharply reduce the federal government’s financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children’s educational programs as “Sesame Street” and “Arthur.”

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which passes federal funds to public broadcasters — starting with a 25 percent reduction for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.

The move may have been pre-saged by a “Special Report” in the rightwing Unification Church-owned Washington Times last month:

Newt Gingrich famously vowed to “zero out” federal funding for public broadcasting a few weeks before becoming House speaker in 1995, but the Republicans essentially backed down when they were accused of trying to kill Big Bird…

In January, PBS declined to add to its national distribution list an episode of the children’s series “Postcards From Buster” that featured two women in a same-sex union, although some stations chose to air it anyway…

Given the advantage PBS has as a free, over-the-air service, it should do far better, according to [Tim Graham, director of analysis for the Media Research Center, a conservative group that monitors the media for examples of bias].

He cited “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” as an example. It draws about 3 million viewers a night, but it would do much better if viewers were really interested in its sober approach to news coverage, Mr. Graham said. “They see themselves as ‘spinach TV.’ We will feed you what you don’t want to watch,” he said.

Such thinking is too subjective, said Les Crystal, executive producer of “NewsHour.”

“Do we do some subjects that are spinach? Maybe. One could argue that stories we’ve done on Darfur (in Sudan) are spinach to some people but meat and potatoes to others.”

Sad to say but killing PBS and NPR is better than the other alternative – allowing the Rightwing to turn them into propaganda outlets for the government like Fox News, Clear Channel and the Washington Times.

Jesse Helms Unrepentant on Race in Upcoming Memoir

Jon Ponder

In an upcoming memoir, former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms says it was the civil rights movement – not segregationists like himself and the Ku Klux Klan- who incited violence in the 1960’s. Helms who is 83, came to fame in the 1950’s and 1960’s as a racist editorialist on a television station in Raleigh.

CNN reports that in the book Helms says he believed:

…Voluntary racial integration would [have] come about without pressure from the federal government or from civil rights protests that he said sharpened racial antagonisms.

“We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance,” according to the uncorrected proof. “We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust.”

Translation: “If the Coloreds had just stayed in their place and not been so uppity, Whites would have eventually allowed them to have better segregated schools, bathrooms and drinking fountains.”

The Charlotte Observer reports that in his book Helms deals with his long history of racial smears and playing the race card to win elections as he always done, by denying involvement:

In 1950, U.S. Sen. Frank Porter Graham faced fellow Democrat Willis Smith in a hotly contested runoff. Helms supported Smith, whose supporters were accused of using racial smears. A handbill purported to show a photo of Graham’s wife dancing with a black man. Smith won, and Helms was often accused of having a role in the tactics…

Charges of racial politics arose again in 1990 when Helms faced former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt. One Helms ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as a voice says, “You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority.”

“There were even some charges that the ad was intended as `racist,’ but that was untrue,” Helms writes. “Minority classifications were not limited to race, and we had no more interest in a race-based vote than we did in race-based jobs. The campaign was never about Mr. Gantt being black; it was always and only about him being liberal.”

Yeah, right.

Helms is an equal opportunity hater. When it became clear he and his segregationist cabal had lost the fight against equality for African Americans, he turned his sights on the gay community, frequently advocating prison sentences for gays and lesbians.

In the book, he admits that he was wrong about AIDS, however.

Helms also was an outspoken opponent of laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination and of funding for AIDS research, but he writes in the book that his views evolved during his final years in the Senate. He cited friendships he developed with North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“Until then,” Helms writes, “it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong.”

Thanks to PR contributor Judy for the tip.

Support Howard Dean – Give to the DNC

Jon Ponder

Duncan Black, aka Atrios, at Eschaton has a page up on the Democratic National Committee site where we are encouraged to show love for embattled DNC Chair Howard Dean by making a donation.

We cited a recent criticism of the Republicans by Jack Danforth, a Republican Episcopal minister and former Senator, below. Here’s Republican strategist Ed Rollins criticizing former RNC chairman Rich Bond in the National Review in 1993, for saying that only Republicans are “real” Americans and that only certain people – white Christians, presumably, are welcome in the GOP :

Rich Bond was wrong at the Republican Convention last August when he condemned the Democrats with his statement, ‘We are America; these other people are not America.” He’s wrong now when he says in effect, We are the Republican Party; these other Republicans are not.

If Republicans like Rich Bond can learn from past mistakes, it should now be apparent to them that we need to make room in our party for a broad and diverse range of ideas and lifestyles. We should not shut anyone out–including the more conservative elements of our party.

This is classic “liberal media” excess going after a Dem while giving Gops a pass on the very same “infractions” If Howard loses, we all do. To quote Atrios, quoting Bobbi Flekman in our favorite thrash-metal mockumentary, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”

Go – Give.

Admit It: You Think So Too

Trish

Borowitz does it again:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean apologized today for calling Republicans “pretty much a white, Christian party,” saying that he failed to mention that they were “fat and ugly” as well…

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) lashed out at Dr. Dean from the floor of the Senate…

But hours later, Dr. Dean continued to stoke the controversy with his response to Sen. Frist’s remarks: “I knew I was forgetting something – Republicans are really stupid, too, and Bill Frist, in my opinion, is not even a real doctor.”

In the aftermath of Dr. Dean’s latest remarks, leading Democrats were mulling what to do about their volatile party chief, exploring a range of options including driving him out to the country and ditching him along a secluded road.

GOoPer Danforth Criticized His Party as ‘Political Arm of Conservative Christians’ – Just Like Howard Dean

Jon Ponder

AmericaBlog:

Gee, John Danforth is one angry Democrat. Oh, that’s right. He’s a former GOP Senator and not a Democrat at all. But, oh my, he criticizes the Republican party as being the party of conservative Christians. But, isn’t that what Howard Dean said? I’m so confused. Why isn’t the MSM all angry at John Danforth too?

From Danforth’s excellent NYT op ed earlier this year:

” By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians…. The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement…. But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives.”

White House Caught ‘Fixing’ Data on Climate Change

Jon Ponder

In the Soviet Union and Saddam’s Baathist regime, changing the facts to conform to the message was labeled “propaganda” by the American government and our media. In the Bush White House, it’s called Standard Operating Procedure:

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, changed descriptions of climate research approved by government scientists.

The Times said that Cooney, a lawyer and former lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, made notes on drafts of reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.

Some of the changes were as subtle as adding the words “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” the Times reported. In one section, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of glaciers and snowpack, the newspaper said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a press briefing that Cooney’s editing was part of a broad review by 15 federal agencies, including policy people like Cooney as well as scientists. “Everybody who is involved in these issues should have input in these reports, and that’s all this is,” he says.

Climate change has been controversial for the Bush administration since 2001, when it withdrew support for the
Kyoto Protocol, a global pact to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The administration questioned the cost and scientific merit of planned constraints.

“Scientists are best equipped to inform the public about climate science, not White House lawyers,” says Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. “People have a right to know the truth about climate science and the scientific consensus on the seriousness of this problem,” she says.