Month: February 2009

Mormon Pol: Gays Are ‘Greatest Threat to America I Know’

Jon Ponder

Anti-gay Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars ramps up the homo-hating rhetoric in a new documentary about Proposition 8, according to a reporter for ABC4 in Salt Lake City who has seen the as-yet unreleased film:

“It’s the beginning of the end. Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.”

Sen. Chris Buttars: “Homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion. And you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts. But I don’t care.”

…”[Gays]’re mean. They want to talk about being nice. They’re the meanest buggers I have ever seen.”

And just seconds later, Buttars draws a comparison between some gays and radical Muslims.

“It’s just like the Muslims. Muslims are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side.”

…He also talks about gay marriage being the beginning of the end.

Buttars: “What is the morals of a gay person? You can’t answer that because anything goes.”

And finally, this is how senator Buttars refers to the “radical gay movement.”

“They’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of.”

Another source quotes Buttars as also saying, “It’s the beginning of the end. Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.”

According to ABC4, Buttars claims he’s “killed” every gay rights bill that has come up during the eight years he has been in the Utah senate.

Late last week, Republicans who control the Utah Senate stripped Buttars of two subcommittee chairmanships — the Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee and the Senate Judicial Confirmation Committee.

But he was unrepentant. “I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said, and:

“When it comes right down to it, I would rather be censured for doing what I think is right, than be honored by my colleagues for bowing to the pressure of a special-interest group that has been allowed to act with impunity.”

Reed Cowan, the filmmaker who made the documentary, “8: The Mormon Proposition,” is a former reporter for the station. He is now the Saturday morning anchor at WSVN in Miami.

Recession Watch: 14,000 Americans a Day Are Losing Health Insurance

Jon Ponder

Layoffs are causing as many as 14,000 people to lose their health insurance every day, according to projections by the Center for American Progress and based on Urban Institute research:

Private companies — the health plans — have had at least since 1993 when they killed Hillarycare to come up with a solution. It’s been 16 years. Not only have they not solved the crisis, it is getting worse by the minute.

The data [showed that] a 1 percentage point rise in the national unemployment rate causes 2.4 million people to lose employer-sponsored health coverage.

Of these, the think tank said, 1 million people turn to Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and 1.1 million end up uninsured.

Data released on Thursday showed U.S. jobless numbers rose to a record high in early February of 4.99 million people, an unemployment rate of 3.7 percent.

The percentage of these uninsured people who will be forced into bankruptcy and maybe homelessness because they can’t pay their medical bills is unknown.

The antiquated, employer-based system, which is unique to the United States, imperils the health and well-being of over 47 million of us today. And while the system collapses beneath us, the health plans remain enormously profitable, and they will spend whatever it takes to protect the status quo and thus their profits.

In 1993, the health plans spent a reported $1 billion to kill the Clinton health insurance reforms. They bought the “Harry and Louise” ads, as well as a lot of Republican influence and fear-mongering spin. Scrapping the current system for the sort of government-based insurance every other country on earth, we were told is “socialism” — a word the GOP has been scarifying since the McCarthy era.

Think about it. You were probably educated in a “socialized” school system here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Wherever you live today, you undoubtedly are served by “socialized” police and fire departments. On the other hand, if you’ve ever had to deal with health-insurance company bureaucracy, ask yourself — how much scarier could it be if Humana and Blue Cross were nationalized?

Despite ever-mounting evidence to the contrary, Republicans still like to say that the private sector is better at solving problems than the government. In this case, private companies — the health plans — have had at least since 1993 when they killed Hillarycare to come up with a solution.

It’s been 16 years. Not only have they not solved the crisis, it is getting worse by the minute. Maybe it’s time for them to get out of the way.

RIP Socks the Cat, World Famous Feline-American

Jon Ponder

Socks the cat, who lived with the Clinton family at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock and at the White House, died today after a four-month battle with cancer. He was 20, and had been living with Betty Currie, Pres. Clinton’s former White House secretary, since 2000.

He was a gregarious animal, who enjoyed the company of people and even dogs. Friends and family recalled that he was also especially fond of chicken.

In his White House years, visiting heads of state often asked to have their photographs taken with Socks. And at one of the lowest moments in their fervor to persecute the Clintons, the Republicans in Congress even investigated the cat.

Bonus Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Until the Republican Party joins the 21st century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side.

— Meghan McCain, Sen. John McCain’s daughter, writing in the Daily Beast.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

A democracy could not exist because Mohammed already made the perfect law. The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.

— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), quoted in the Daily Nebraskan, obviously not knowing the Quran is written in Arabic.

Bombshell in Skipper Murder Trial: Second Defendant Claimed He Was Raped by His Father

Jon Ponder

TruTV’s live coverage of the Ryan Skipper murder trial yesterday in Bartow, Fla., was interrupted yesterday by coverage of another case, which is unfortunate because a potentially significant new allegation was revealed in testimony given while the cameras were dark.

According to witness John Kirchoff — who was part of a cadre of meth addicts who were associates of defendants Joe Bearden and William Brown — within hours after Skipper’s murder, he had a conversation with Brown, who told him, “I killed him, man. I killed him.”

And then, according to Kirchoff, Brown claimed that his father had raped him, apparently more than once.

Here’s a rough transcript of the report by TruTV’s Jean Casarez:

What I think what is interesting here is that Bill Brown, the co-defendant, is really coming into this case even stronger in regard to the murder count, because we just had a witness before lunch — it would be John Kirchoff — who said that Bill Brown, the next morning, was knocking on the window — and I’m talking about March 14. Came in. He [Kirchoff] was alone with [Brown, who] started to cry.

And he said, “I killed him, man. I killed him.” Now here’s what I haven’t been able to tell you that I think is important from [Brown]. According to John Kirchoff, this excited untterance of “I killed him, man. I killed him” — he never talks about the defendant Bearden, but what he does talk about is his own father. How he hates his own father because his father has held a knife and a gun to him before, forcing him to engage in homosexual sex.

So, yes, the father engaged his own son in sex. That’s the co-defendant, Bill Brown. So maybe we’re seeing a clue here why the prosecution has not proceeded with the hate crime — that the motivation, especially with [Bill Brown], could be something else.

The Lakeland Ledger also described Kirchoff’s testimony:

Kirchoff … testified that Brown came back in the morning and was very upset.

He recalled Brown was sobbing and talking about how his father molested him at knife- and gunpoint.

Brown then stopped crying, stared at Kirchoff and said, “I killed him,” according to Kirchoff.

Kirchoff said he assumed Brown was confessing to killing his father because he had previously been talking about the past sexual abuse.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Kirchoff said.

He tried to describe Brown’s facial expression.

“He looked evil,” Kirchoff said.

If you are just tuning into the trial, note that Brown and Bearden are being tried separately, and the proceedings currently underway are in the case against Bearden. Bearden admits he was involved in events on the night of the murder but denies he was in Ryan Skipper’s car when Skipper was stabbed 20 times and then left to die on a gravel road in a rural area.

Bill Brown will be tried later this year.

Quote du Jour

Trish

“We need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets. Where we have fallen down in delivering a message is in having something to say, particularly to young people and moms of all shapes – soccer moms, hockey moms.”

— Michael Steele (1958 – ), Chair of the Republican National Committee and best hope yet for Democrats in the midterm elections

Republicans Rewrite the Tale of the Little Red Hen

Trish
Red Hen Republicans?

Once upon a time there lived a man in a big white house. He looked outside one day and saw many, many people suffering. “Hey everybody,” he said, “people are suffering and things are going to get worse fast. Who wants to help me write a stimulus bill?”

So Democrats and Republicans started putting together a stimulus bill but there was trouble almost immediately. “We don’t want to help everyone,” Republicans said, “we just want to give more tax breaks to our rich friends even if it wrecks the economy once and for all.”

Their leader, Michael Steele, even complained that Democrats don’t know how to create wealth. He was right that the best way to make some people rich is to let the people with the most money keep it all and borrow from others to pay for wars and private contractors and new bureaucracies that Republicans invent and give names like Homeland Security. That really does create wealth, just not for everyone.

So the Democrats pitched in to write the legislation and then the man in the big white house asked, “Who will help me pass the stimulus bill?”

Again, Republicans refused.

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) said, “…our efforts continue to keep the measure from being a spending free-for-all…Having been disappointed with both bailout measures, I believe my vote in opposition was appropriate.”

Democrats passed the package anyway, and the man in the big white house signed it and said, “Who will help me spend the money in the stimulus bill?”

Mica elbowed up to the front of the line.

“The timing couldn’t be better,” Mica said in a joint statement with [Democratic Florida Rep. Corrine] Brown, regarding $750 million in transportation funding in the bill, some of which is likely headed for the [Central Florida Commuter] Rail project.

“I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future,” Mica said in a separate statement.

And so, the man in the big white house worked very hard to get a bill to help the people, and even though the Republicans didn’t help him, he shared the money in the stimulus package with them anyway.

“He’s a socialist,” the Republicans said. “Why, he’s practically red.”

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

— Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African American to hold that office, in a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month

Will Homophobia Trump Justice in the Trial of Ryan Skipper’s Accused Killer?

Jon Ponder

TruTV legal analysts covering the trial in Bartow, Fla., of one of the men accused of killing Ryan Skipper spent considerable air time yesterday speculating about the prosecution’s decision to remove the hate-crime charge against the defendant, Joseph Bearden.

The anti-gay bigotry came to light from the first minute the story of Ryan’s murder broke, when Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd essentially told reporters that Ryan was asking to be killed because he was gay

It is true that Bearden and his co-defendant, William Brown, who will be tried later, knew that Skipper was gay. And the level of brutality in the murder — they stabbed Ryan 20 times and then dumped him, still clinging to life, on the side of rural road — suggests the two young meth addicts had motives beyond just fencing Ryan’s car for drug money.

Bearden has been in prison since he was charged with the murder two years ago. He has covered himself in tattoos, including a dagger or spike on his face that appears to pierce his skull above and blow his left eye, a large cobra in strike pose on his chest and neck and a small teardrop under his right eye. In gang and prison culture, teardrop tattoos are usually a sign that the bearer is a murderer.

The TruTV analysts speculated that hate-crime charge was dropped because prosecutors feared it would make the jury less sympathetic to the gay victim and more inclined to be lenient with the defendant — the young man sitting before them with a tacit admission of guilt tattooed on his face.

The prosecutors in Polk County expressed similar concerns to Ryan’s Skipper’s family:

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