Month: February 2010

This is more than likely a publicity ploy, but, okay, we’ll bite. Lauren Ashley, the reigning Miss Beverly Hills, has made news by taking a position on gay marriage that is well to the right of views expressed by former Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean:

“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white,” Ashley told Pop Tarts.

“I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life.”

At least Ashley is consistent. Most Christians view withholding gays’ civil rights as sufficient penalty for their abominable sins, but, as Ashley points out, God loves gay people but hates their sin so much that he says they must be put to death.

Instead of spouting off about the motes in the eyes of others, Lauren Ashley may want to consider the beam in her own eye. If she has ever eaten ham, lobster or shrimp, she, too, has committed an abomination equally as heinous as being gay. Ditto if she has ever worn pants, read her horoscope, burned incense, behaved haughtily, made trouble, lied or cheated — if she has ever done any of these things, she is just as hellbound as the poofiest poufter.

(And we’d need to see a citation for the verses in the Bible that describe marriage as being “between a man and a woman.” If that’s true, Father Abraham, the polygamist progenitor of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is baking in hell right now, as are other polygamist figures in the Bible, including Moses and Jacob and the kings David, Saul and Solomon. among others.)

What makes this all the more interesting, of course, is that Lauren Ashley is not Miss Topeka, home city of the “God Hates Fag” church. She represents Beverly Hills, the hometown of Hollywood’s liberal elite — a town of 35,000 that shares its eastern border with the city of West Hollywood, one of the gayest precincts in the world.

Not surprisingly then, Ashley says she knows tons of gay people. “I have a lot of friends that are gay,” she says, “and … I have a lot of friends who have different views, and we share our views together.” Then, despite having just pointed out that the Bible says gays should be killed, she adds, “There’s no hate between me and anyone.”

Yup, sorry gay friends of Lauren Ashley, nothing personal but the Bible says you’re going to have to be executed, after which your blood will be drained and poured all over your corpse.

Love ya — mean it! (Oh, and when they kill you, can I have all your stuff?)

Ashley will compete in the Miss California USA pageant in November, assuming she keeps her title until then. She is vying for the crown currently held by Nicole Johnson, who was elevated from runner-up last June after Prejean was fired for breach of contract related to the multiple sex tapes she’d made in two years earlier, when she was 20.

No worries about sex tapes starring Lauren Ashley popping up anytime soon, however. She says she plans to remain celibate until she is married.

You gotta admit the timeline is compelling.

On Saturday, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported that a Department of Justice investigation revealed that, contrary to Dick Cheney’s assertions otherwise, CIA documents proved that Cheney lied about the intelligence produced by the CIA’s torture of a terror suspect:

[A] just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

Seems to have been patently false, Spikey? Keith Olbermann put it this way on “Countdown” last night:

The memo cited by Mr. Cheney stated that the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah led to the arrest of suspected dirty bomb plotter Jose Padilla in May 2003, but as Isikoff also reports the [DOJ] review also points out that the memo was wrong.

Padilla was arrested, not in May 2003, but May 2002. The administration did not authorize “enhanced interrogation techniques” until August 2002. Zubaydah was not interrogated until August of 2002. Therefore he could not have led them to the capture of a man who had been arrested three months earlier.

On Monday, Cheney experienced chest pains and was admitted to the hospital, and, as of Wednesday morning Pacific time, was still hospitalized awaiting further tests. Cheney has a long history of heart disease, of course. He has suffered four heart attacks since 1978 and undergone a quadruple bypass. (There were even rumors of a cardiectomy in 2006.)

During the eight years of his vice presidency, Cheney showed himself to be fundamentally inept — he ignored warnings about the 9/11 attacks, promoted the false notion that Iraq had WMD, predicted that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops with flowers, lied about the purported connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, stayed on vacation during the Katrina disaster, failed to see the economic collapse coming and on and on. Yet he has never admitted to any mistakes or, certainly, apologized for his failings. (When he accidentally shot a friend in the face with birdshot, it was the friend who apologized.)

Over the 14 months since he left office, Cheney and his daughter Liz hav made themselves Pres. Obama’s chief political adversaries and harshest critics — a gambit that is clearly intended to lay the groundwork for framing any future Obama administration investigations into Cheney’s role in greenlighting torture as political payback for the criticism.

The DOJ report that put the lie to Cheney’s claim about torture intel put this gambit at risk and had to have been very bad news over the weekend. And since stress can be a factor in heart disease, it is fair game to speculate that Cheney’s heart attack on Monday may have been a “tell” that Old Poker Face may have finally drawn a bad hand.

The “truthiest” of the Bush-Cheney administration’s false pretexts for invading Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein funded terrorism by making donations of $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The assertion was true — Saddam even bragged about it — but the Cheneyites and neocons twisted this fact into circumstantial evidence that bolstered their entirely specious claim that Saddam was behind the attacks on 9/11 in the eyes of their low-info base who were unable to distinguish between Hamas, al Qaeda and any other group from the Middle East. (Read: Fox viewers.)

Not surprisingly, Fox News spinners were instrumental in helping the Bush administration square the circle in order to blur Saddam’s donations to Hamas into donations to terrorists writ large (read: the 9/11 bombers).

But that was then. Now, according to Joseph Trento at the DC Bureau website, Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, has struck a deal with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal that will make the prince News Corps’ fourth largest investor:

The notorious Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, nephew to the Saudi king, met with Rupert Murdoch in Hong Kong on Jan. 14. The prince issued a press release after the meeting stating that the prince’s Kingdom Holding Company had discussions that “touched upon future potential alliances with News Corp.”

…Prince Alwaleed was about to become News Corp’s fourth largest voting shareholder (behind the Murdoch family, Liberty Media, and Fidelity Management & Research Co, a mutual fund). The prince has repeatedly defended his homeland as a problem-free place. What he has failed to mention is that he has personally donated huge amounts of money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Alwaleed is the same Saudi prince who made headlines right after 9/11 when he personally went to Ground Zero and offered then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check for the relief efforts. But Alwaleed could not keep his mouth shut. He released a bizarre statement that blamed the attacks — not on the 15 airline hijackers from Saudi Arabia — but on the United States’ support of Israel. Giuliani, “America’s mayor” [and a nearly constant presence of Fox today,] saw a political opportunity and, confident that his reaction was appropriate, immediately refused the prince’s donation. He said: “There is no moral equivalent for this attack.”

In the weeks since the Murdoch-Alwaleed deal was struck, Trento says he’s detected a noticeable softening in Fox News’ coverage of Saudi Arabia. It’s also a safe bet Fox will impose a blackout on coverage of the Saudi prince — and because its viewers only get their news from Fox, talk radio and other right-wing propaganda outlets, its audience — the same folks who were outraged over Saddam’s donations to the bombers — will never know that a latter day terror funder is keeping the network afloat.