Category: Camera

If You Don’t Know About ALEC, You Don’t Know What’s Really Going On

Trish

Whether you live where “Koch brothers schemes get turned into the bat-$#*@ crazy legislation that just happens to pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, in virtually identical form, in 15 states at once,” you’ll want to know about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. This corporate-funded shadow group is transforming our country, and not in a good way. Watch the video for just one example: privatizing prisons. And remember, although it’s not pointed out in the video, private prisons only want the low-risk, high-profit population. As with health care and Social Security, they want to skim the profitable folks off the top and leave the sickest, the oldest, and, in case of private prisons, the baddest-assed to the government.

During DOMA Hearing, Sen. Franken Catches Anti-Gay ‘Expert’ Citing False Data

Jon Ponder

TPM Muckraker:

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) took on a representative of the conservative group Focus on the Family for mischaracterizing a study on “nuclear families” at a hearing on a bill which would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Franken noted that the group’s testimony listed the benefits of children “living with their biological and/or adopted mothers and fathers” as surpassing those of children “living in any other family form.” He observed they listed a Department of Health and Human Services study as backing that up.

“I actually checked it out,” Franken said in reference to the study FOF’s Thomas Minnery has cited. He then observed it uses the term “nuclear families” without specifically mentioning “opposite sex married families.”

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Minnery, that a married same-sex couple that has had or adopted kids would fall under the definition of a nuclear family in the study that you cite?” Franken asked.

“I think that the study, when it cites nuclear families would mean a family headed by a husband and wife,” Minnery said.
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“It doesn’t,” Franken said, getting laughs from the audience.

Video Surfaces of Bachmann’s Out Gay Step Sister at Obama Inauguration

Jon Ponder

Helen LaFave and Nia Wronski at the Inauguration Jan. 20, 2009 from julie phillips on Vimeo.

Michele Bachmann is rapidly becoming a latter days Anita Bryant. In 2004, during a lecture at a conference, she referred to her gay step-sister, Helen LaFave, who is shown in the video above, saying “Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle — we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan.”

From Towleroad:

MICHELE BACHMANN: I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgendered. We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It’s not funny, it’s sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle—we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It’s anything but gay.

Countdown: Newt’s Hypocrisy on the Defense of Marriage Act Wins Him a ‘Worst Person’ Nod

Jon Ponder

It was gratifying to see that Newt Gingrich made the “bronze” in the Worst Person segment on “Countdown” earlier this week because he’d touted his support for Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Gingrich made the cut because — as we reported here first — he was cheating on his second wife at the time:

Most people know by now that, in the mid-1990s, then-Speaker Gingrich was cheating on his second wife, Marianne, with a staffer, his current wife Callista, at the same time he led the drive to impeach Pres. Clinton over a lie about his affair with a staffer, Monica Lewinsky.

It is not as widely known, however, that two years before the impeachment Speaker Gingrich was also cheating on Marianne with Callista when he led the passage of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.