Year: 2006
Welcome Back, Alice
Our friend Alice at 10,000 Monkeys & a Camera missed the election because of a family tragedy. Our thoughts have been with her, and we’re glad to see she’s back and moving again.
Our thoughts have also been with Mike Ostroy at the Ostroy Report, whose wife, the actress Adrienne Shelley, was murdered in her home office in the West Village on Nov. 1. The Ostroy Report has been dark since the tragedy occurred, but we’re hoping Mike will return to fight the good fight as soon as he feels able.
Finally, I have to acknowledge the passing of Richard Nagle, an old pal of mine and Page’s, and husband of our old pal, Nancy Rhyne. Richard died suddenly Friday night in Charlotte of a heart attack at the ripe young age of 51. He was as funny and smart as they come, and his passing is a huge loss to everyone but the fish along the shore of the Outer Banks.
Wave of New Populists Could Return the South to the Dems
What the Old Media seems reluctant to point out is that the return of liberal populist politicians to the government suggests a pendulum swing back from the corporatist governments of the last four presidents in favor of the liberal populism advocated by Pres. Jimmy Carter.
The hallmark of the conservative agenda over the past quarter century has been the ceding of power and resources from the government to corporations. The election last week may signal a reverse course away from corporatism toward a brand of liberal populism that has been out of favor since the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Populist themes that resonated with voters this year included raising the minimum wage, slowing the transfer of manufacturing jobs overseas, making healthcare affordable, ending corruption of elected officials by lobbyists for corporate interests and the stopping the rise of undocumented immigration and its perceived strain on local economies and social services.
Even the conduct of the Iraq war, with the unprecedented outsourcing of war operations to Halliburton and its subsidiaries, has played into the idea that Republicans are hellbent on handing the government over to Big Business.
GOP Hypocrisy Blows the Top Off the Bottle with Martinez Appointment
The Republican attack on Florida governor candidate U.S. Rep. Jim Davis consisted of slamming him for campaigning. A TV ad was played nonstop for weeks, depicting an empty chair whizzing around Washington, while a Florida tourist family (with vaguely Ohioan accents) trails behind. “Do you think we’ll see him next time, Dad?” the son asks. “I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.”
Martinez was chosen in large part because he’s Cuban, and the Republicans did almost as badly with Latino voters this time as they did with African-Americans
Davis missed votes, we were told. He was too busy with politics to do the work we sent him to Washington to do. Wonder if the GOP will be trotting those ads out in 2008, when Florida Sen. Mel Martinez is running the Republican National Committee?
Doubt it. Predictably, Martinez’s split shift workday is being hailed not as a callous ditching of responsibility, as was Davis’s campaigning, but a big ol’ plus for Florida.
“It’s awesome for Florida. It says a great deal about this state and its strength,” said Republican Party of Florida chairwoman Carole Jean Jordan.
…Martinez, who will keep his Senate seat, will bring that much more attention to a state that is already considered to be a top prize in presidential politics.
Oh come on. Martinez was chosen in large part because he’s Cuban, and the Republicans did almost as badly with Latino voters this time as they did with African-Americans. While 8 percent of all voters were Latino, only 26 percent to 42 percent (it’s an estimate) of them voted Repug.
…Florida Democrats noted that their party won the Hispanic vote in last week’s election for the first time in three decades.
“This reflects the renewed emphasis by Democrats in using multimedia communications to win support from the fastest growing community in the United States, as well as Hispanic support for finding real solutions to raising the minimum wage, affordable health care and the war in Iraq,” said Florida Democratic Party executive director Luis Navarro in a statement.
It also shows Republicans are doing something wrong.
Mel was one of the chairs of the Bush campaign in 2000, helping Katherine Harris in her strategy to keep the votes from being accurately counted. He has been consistently rewarded for his nefarious deeds while Harris has been treated like the embarrassment she is.
But at least one analyst noticed Mel already had a job when he took on his new one.
…the duel role will be difficult, said [Poltical Scientist Matthew] Corrigan.
“Being a senator is a full-time job, so is taking on the RNC. I think it is a serious challenge,” he said. “How he balances those roles is an important question.”
It’s also a question not nearly enough people are asking.
Quote du Jour
The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.
— Deng Xiaoping, Chinese Premier
Oklahoma’s Draconian Anti-Gay Adoption Law Is Under Review
This is a window into the American Taliban mindset: Punishing gay people is worth the effort at any cost, even if it means taking children away from their parents and returning them to orphanages.
A federal appeals court in Colorado is reviewing a two-year-old Oklahoma law that not only prohibits gays from adopting children in the state but invalidates adoptions by gays in other states if the families were to move to Oklahoma:
In May a lower court struck down the law in a 31 page ruling that was highly critical of the state legislature for passing the measure.
The Adoption Invalidation Law, hastily passed at the end of the 2004 Oklahoma legislative session, had said that Oklahoma “shall not recognize an adoption by more than one individual of the same sex from any other state or foreign jurisdiction.”
Lambda Legal, representing same-sex couples took the state to court, calling the law so extreme it had the potential to make children adopted by same-sex couples in other states legal orphans when the families are in Oklahoma.
“The very fact that the adoptions have occurred is evidence that a court of law has found the adoptions to be in the best interests of the children,” wrote U. S. District Judge Robin Cauthron.
“To now attempt to strip a child of one of his or her parents seems far removed from the statute’s purpose and therefore from [the state’s] asserted important government objective.”
This is a window into the American Taliban mindset: Punishing gay people is worth the effort at any cost, even if it means taking children away from their parents and returning them to orphanages.
Genius Blossom
Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.
When Boy Geniuses go bad:
{Karl] Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls.
Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority.
Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.
2006 Terry Dolan Award Seeks to Name Biggest Gay Republican Hypocrite
History will remember 2006 as the Year of the Gay Republican.From Mark Foley to Ken Mehlman, from Pastor Ted Haggard to over 200 gay Capitol Hill staffers on “The List,” the sheer volume of queers in Republican corridors of power has surprised even the most cynical observers of the Gay Old Party.
Of course, self-hating gays are not new to Republican politics. During the McCarthy era, homo-miscreant Roy Cohn helped persecute gays working for the government. Even the eponymous Sen. Joe McCarthy was allegedly gay.
But the most extravagant example of a Republican self-hating homo may well have been the Reagan era “New Republican” operative, Terry Dolan. A rabid homophobe by day, at night, Mr. Dolan allegedly prowled D.C. leather bars for what was then known as “rough trade.” (See bio in sidebar.)
In the craven spirit of the late Mr. Dolan, we propose the awarding of the 2006 Terry Dolan Award to (dis)honor the gay Republican who has done the most to harm to the cause of gay civil rights in the past few years.
To wit, a partial list of nominees:
Rosie O’Donnell on Radical Christianity and Islam: Irreverent Yet Irrelevant
Rosie’s thorny: On Sept. 12, on the TV show “The View” that she co-hosts with Barbara Walters and a couple other female talking heads, Rosie O’Donnell, blathering on about religion, dropped this little off-the-cuffer: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like the United States.”
‘Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like the United States.’
— Rosie O’Donnell
— Rosie O’Donnell
Somehow I missed the ensuing ruckus raised by the Christian Right, the calls for ABC to fire O’Donnell, etc. Maybe that’s because “The View” is just not on my radar — or apparently many other folks’ radar, either.
So why bring this up two months later? Well, to fill the post-election vacuum, of course. But more importantly because our old pal George Barna has just released the results of another one of his Jesus surveys that sought to measure the depth of cultural penetration and height of dudgeon achieved by O’Donnell’s comment (which I agree wholeheartedly with, by the way). Here’s some of the results from the Barna Group survey:
Despite the media hailstorm stirred by her controversial remark, only one out of every six American adults (17 percent) was aware of her words. The group most likely to know of her verbal assault was evangelical Christians, who were twice as likely as other Americans (36 percent) to have heard about her statement. Even within the Christian community, other segments remained largely ignorant of the slur. For instance, only 17 percent of all other adults who consider themselves to be Christian but are not evangelicals knew of her words, similar to the statistics among Catholics (18 percent) and Protestants (20 percent). The episode failed to generate much buzz among non-Christian adults: only 10 percent of those who associate with a non-Christian faith, and 14 percent of atheists and agnostics were aware of her remarks. The outburst was no better known within the gay and lesbian community, of which Ms. O’Donnell is an outspoken champion: only 14 percent of adults who associate with that lifestyle were aware of her comments.
Most Americans disagreed with Ms. O’Donnell’s point of view. In total, just 10 percent strongly agreed with her statement and 18 percent agreed somewhat, while 15 percent disagreed somewhat and 48 percent disagreed strongly. In total, then, about one out of every four Americans (28 percent) agreed to some extent, while more than twice as many — two out of every three (63 percent) — disagreed.
Levels of disagreement varied substantially across faith groups. For instance, eight out of 10 evangelicals strongly disagreed compared to only one out of three non-Christians. Strong disagreement was measured among half of all Catholics (47 percent), nearly six out of 10 Protestants (57 percent), and eight out of 10 Revolutionary Christians (79 percent).
The question is, however, not whether one agrees with Rosie, but whether her assessment was correct. Of course evangelicals and “Revolutionary Christians” (whatever those are) came out 8-to-1 against, but that’s to be expected — because they are the problem. There are indeed parallels between what the Imams and the Christian Right are each trying to accomplish:
1) Creation of a theocracy where there is no distinction between church and state — a basic tenet of Islam and a goal of the Bible-thumpers.
2) Creation of a homogenous congregation that shares a monolithic belief system — for example, today Muslims who convert to Christianity can be jailed and executed in Afghanistan, and Lord only knows what Revolutionary Christians would do if they took over the government, but I give you the Protestant Reformation, for starters.
3) Conquest and conversion — both the radical Islamists and the radical Christists want to convert the whole world to their peculiar tenets, indeed, they believe that it is an essential facet of their faith to do so.
4) Eradication of homosexuality (except for preachers and pashas).
So, in a way, Rosie actually was right. Like some kind of idiot savant she managed to piece together a coherent sentence that made a very large point in a very small soundbite. Problem is, nobody much heard it or cared beyond the few heads of Christian groups who saw an opportunity to get their names in the media by condemning O’Donnell’s statement and calling for her to be fired (at the stake, perhaps?).
It’s clear that not that many people watch “The View,” and virtually nobody really cares about what Rosie O’Donnell thinks as a culture commentator. Unfortunately, the truth behind her words received as little consideration as their source, and that might turn out to be a very dangerous thing down the road, when the Christian equivalent of the Taliban takes over the United States.
Then we can hail Rosie as a prophet, a martyred lesbian prophet no doubt, but a true seer nonetheless.
