Tag: Congress

Ryan Skipper: Cops’ Statements Disputed in Murder of Gay Man

Jon Ponder

As the two rural Florida men who allegedly stabbed Ryan Skipper to death two weeks ago await trial in a local jail, questions are being asked about how the events leading up to the murder were described in the press by investigators.

At one point, Matthew Shepherd’s killers tried to assert the “gay panic defense,” saying they were driven to temporary insanity by their victim’s alleged sexual advances. Later, they said they only wanted to rob him and never intended to kill him when they lashed him to a fence and bashed his head in.

The sequence of events that night as reported seemed not to add up from the start, when a Polk County Sheriff’s Dept. spokesman was quoted as saying:

Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [21-year-old Joseph] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they smoked marijuana and discussed using Skipper’s computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The problem with this statement is that it appears to come from a single source: Joseph Bearden, the alleged murderer and apparent homophobe.

However, there was at least one other witness who was apparently not consulted by investigators. Ryan had two roommates, including one, Kelly Evans, who says she was home all night on the evening in question:

Evans was home the night of the murder and disputes what has been reported in the news. “Ryan went out and never came back,” Evans said. “They keep saying he was here with those two guys, smoking marijuana and taking his computer when they left. I was here. That never happened. He wouldn’t do that.”

Did investigators interview Kelly Evans — or did they base their timeline solely on the word of a young man whom they suspected of murder? One investigator also made this odd declaration: “What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening.” How could the police “know” this? They might suspect it, especially if that’s how the young alleged murderer characterized Ryan’s motives. Similarly, investigators appear to have accepted without scrutiny the alleged murder’s claim that Skipper was conspiring with him in a forgery scheme.

The reality is, only one person could have actually “known” for certain what Skipper’s intentions were that night, or whether he conspired to forge checks with someone he’d only just met. That would be Ryan Skipper himself, and the fact that he can’t defend himself against these slurs compounds the tragedy of his death.

All of these questions lead to the conclusion that the police were ready to believe the worst about Skipper because he was gay.

Joseph Bearden and William Brown, 20, whom Kelly Evans describes as a relative of her landlord, are accused of stabbing Skipper 20 times and dumping his body on the shoulder of a road. Brown later told someone that “Ryan Skipper was messing with him, that Ryan Skipper was a homosexual, so [he] killed him.”

All of this brings to mind memories of the murder of college student Matthew Shepherd in Wyoming a decade ago. Like Ryan Skipper, who was 25 years old, Shepherd was killed violently by two young men and left to die on the side of a rural road.

As the Shepherd case advanced, the killers tried to assert the “gay panic defense,” saying they were driven to temporary insanity by their victim’s alleged sexual advances. Later, they said they only wanted to rob him and never intended to kill him when they lashed him to a fence and bashed his head in.

What remains to be seen is whether local police are so blinded by their own homophobia that they are unable to investigate this heinous crime objectively.

Nothing to Fear But the War on Terror

Jon Ponder

The timing of the Sept. 11 terror attacks couldn’t have been better for al Qaeda and worse for us. When they launched the attacks, Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen were probably not aware that a radical coalition of neo-cons and Christian nationalists had gained control of the United States government — just as most Americans were not aware of the true natures of Dick Cheney, George Bush and the cabal that surrounded them.

A normal president would have rallied the public to conquer their fears and shoulder on after such a horrendous attack.

A normal president would have rallied the public to conquer their fears and shoulder on after such a horrendous attack — as people have done in Britain, Israel and other places for decades. But this group of radicals operating out of the White House did the opposite.

Using carefully crafted rhetoric (and even a color-coded chart), they instilled a fear of terror in the public and then used it as a throttle to ratchet public paranoia up and down to suit their own politicals needs. The most dastardly bit of messagemeistering in this, however, was the way they aggrandized the attackers, raising them in stature from the ideological gang of street thugs that they are to warrior priests and adversaries worthy of the United States and its “global war on terror,” which they are not.

Here’s Zbig today in the Post:

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The Bush cabal could not have succeeded without a propaganda tool like the fear of terror. Bush could not have won reelection without his ability to terrorize voters — gay bashing would not have been enough on its own.

The attacks worked out so perfectly for them that it’s easy to see why some people believe 9/11 was an inside job. (It wasn’t.The Bushies are operationally incompetent and could never pull off such an elaborate fake.)

If our grandparents had been as easily terrified in the 1930s as Republicans are today, they would have watched in horrified silence while the Germans conquered Europe, and hidden under their beds when they came after us.

We need national leaders who call on us to be both brave and smart in combating terror. Using the military to fight terrorism, as I have said before, is like using a chainsaw to perform an appendectomy. The British army did not stop the Irish terrorists after decades of attacks, just as the Israeli army will never stop the terrorist attacks from Palestinian insurgents.

Stopping terrorism requires starts with street-level intelligence and a population on alert, but it also will require understanding the enemy in all its dimensions, not the cartoon characters presented to us now.

Blaming the Victim: Portrayal of Florida Man Killed for Being Gay Doesn’t Ring True

Trish
William Brown, left, and Joseph Bearden, after their arrests in the killing of Ryan Skipper
William Brown, left, and Joseph Bearden, after their arrests in the killing of Ryan Skipper

It sounds like the Matthew Shepard story all over again, this time in Florida.

The body of a gay man, 25-year-old Ryan Keith Skipper, was found dumped on the side of the road last week in the flyover country between Tampa and Orlando, stabbed 20 times. Two men have been charged with the killing, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

The local paper, the Lakeland Ledger, quotes Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd as being unequivocal on the victim’s intentions.

“What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening,” Judd said.

The scenario doesn’t add up, friends say

Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [21-year-old Joseph] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they smoked marijuana and discussed using Skipper’s computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The scenario from the local news being disseminated to regional and national outlets, is that the victim, himself a lowlife, was out trolling for a hook-up and made a move on the wrong hombres. But almost nothing in that story adds up, according to people who knew him.

That’s where it starts to get kind of Pulp Fiction.

They left Skipper’s house with his laptop and went to another home, at 110 First St. in Wahneta, to meet [20-year-old William] Brown.

“At this time, they decided to rip Ryan off for his car and his laptop,” Judd said…

Judd said Brown and Bearden attacked Skipper inside his own car. His body was left by the side of the road, stabbed nearly 20 times.

The two suspects then drove to another home at 2131 Cypress Gardens Road, where they discarded some papers from the car. Their next stop was at 16 28th St. S. in Haines City to try to clean up the vehicle.

“The car was full of blood because the homicide had occurred in the vehicle,” Judd said.

Eventually, the paper said, after “parading” the car around and bragging to friends, the suspects abandoned it on a dock near a lake in the town of Winter Haven.

After they were taken into custody, homophobia was introduced as the motive for the murder and robbery.

Several more witnesses also were interviewed Friday night, and it was during one of those interviews that Brown’s admission was revealed.

“William Brown told (a witness) that Ryan Skipper was messing with him, that Ryan Skipper was a homosexual, so (he) killed him,” Judd said.

So much for the official story. […]

Republicans Aren’t Buying Schwarzenegger’s ‘Post-Partisanship’

Jon Ponder

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger describes his new mode of working cooperatively with the Democrats who control the state legislature as “post-partisanship.” The way the former bodybuilder describes it, post-partisanship is bipartisanship on steroids — yes, he’s working with the Dems but, no, he is not kowtowing to them. Post-partisanship, he suggests, empowers both sides.

GOP Sen. McClintock and I are are in rare agreement. Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisanship” is a pile of hooey.

California Republicans aren’t buying it. As state Sen. Tom McClintock, a hardcore rightwinger and therefore a sad and lonely figure in these parts, said, post-partisanship “is the process by which Arnold sits down with Democratic leaders and gets them to do exactly what they wanted to do all along.”

Sen. McClintock and I are are in rare agreement. Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisanship” is a pile of hooey.

Schwarzenegger was forced to move to the left politically in order to get reelected, and now he has to govern that way to stay popular. This move fools no one on the left or the right in California, which is fine with the governor and his messagemesters. The post-partisanship message was not crafted for Democrats or Republicans, it was designed to appeal to California’s burgeoning independent voters — and they are eating it up.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or even a political scientist, to game this out. In his first term, Schwarzenegger governed to please California’s Republican minority — probably in the misguided belief that his celebrity alone would convert voters to his side. As a result, by the end of his term, the governor’s popularity was around 30 percent.

In his second term, he has done a strategic 180 to appeal to Democrats and independents, and guess what? His poll numbers have flipped, and now hovers above 60 percent.

So what’s with the post-partisanship hooey? In politics. if you don’t define yourself early in the minds of voters, your opponents will define you the way they want voters to see you. The label Schwarzenegger is terrified of is “moderate,” which for the GOP is a code word for “liberal.” To be a moderate — or let’s just say it — a liberal Republican is to be an apostate to the party’s troglodyte-Dittohead base.

In the days before Republicans re-framed the word “liberal” into an epithet, liberal Republicans were commonplace and even powerful.New York City Mayor John Lindsay, Vice Pres. Nelson Rockefeller and even Pres Gerald Ford were liberals. But liberal Republicans were unceremoniously kicked off the bus in the Reagan era because they fuzzied up the GOP’s new dumbed down marketing plan to attract unsmart voters: “Liberal” means “bad.” “Conservative” means “good.”

As elegantly streamlined as this marketing plan was, it would have never worked if the left had not capitulated. By the end of the 1980s, even liberals ran from the “liberal” label — they were “progressives.” (Contrast this with, say, gay people who neutralized the slur “fag” somewhat by wearing it proudly.)

To avoid the “liberal” stank, poltiicians with money to burn, like Gov. Schwarzenegger, pay strategists big bucks to come up with bushwa like the “post-partisanship.”

Schwarzenegger can waste his time and money on re-branding his liberalism anyway he chooses but Californians have a right to ask what he is up to. There is speculation he’s running for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat in 2010 . Fine — but why is he taking his post-partisan campaign to the New Hampshire and Iowa, of all places?

If ‘Immorality’ Is the Military Standard, Why Are Adulterers Allowed to Serve?

Jon Ponder

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Peter Pace equated gay people with adulterers in his now infamous statement in which he described homosexuality as immoral:

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Pace said in a wide-ranging discussion with Tribune editors and reporters in Chicago. “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.

“As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” Pace said.

The difference, of course, is that adulterers are not routinely prevented from serving in the military.

Adding salt in the wound, new figures out today suggest that the military is not persecuting gay service members as agressively as they have in the past:

According to preliminary Pentagon data, 612 homosexuals were discharged in fiscal 2006, fewer than half the 1,227 who were discharged in 2001. On average, more than 1,000 service members were discharged each year from 1997 to 2001, but in the past five years that average has fallen below 730.

Here is another example of the mad mix of cynicism and hypocrisy that is the hallmark of the Bush era. Enlistments are down, so the military is “allowing” its gay members to serve. When enlistments are back up — or the war ends — they’ll start the persecutions again.

GOP Base Pins Last Hopes on former Sen. Fred Thompson in ’08

Jon Ponder

It sucks to be a Republican right now. The party that foisted George W. Bush on the country twice has fielded the weakest, most problematic slate of presidential candidates in memory. The Christian nationalist wing is unhappy with the three frontrunners, who have all been labled “moderates” — the GOP code word for “liberal” — in the past. Worse, each one has a ding in his bio that the christianists find unappetizing: two of them are admitted adulterers who have been married more than once, and the other is a Mormon.

Republicans, especially the rank and file, yearn for another Ronald Reagan now the way Democrats used to hope for another JFK.

The talibangelists’ restlessness is what prompted former Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich to float a trial balloon last week, when he confessed to committing adultery while married to his second wife. (Even though Gingrich was sleeping with a much-younger congressional staffer while leading the charge to impeach Pres. Clinton over a sex lie about his affair with a former intern, Newt refused to cop to the additional sin of hypocrisy.)

As a Democrat, I hope Gingrich runs. While he is supposedly a brilliant strategist, and is what passes on the right for a big thinker, he would be abysmal as the face of the Republican Party. For starters, he is very unpopular. As House Speaker, America came to see him as a petty, tyrannical, pontificating stuffed shirt. By the time his party forced him out of office in 1998, Gingrich’s approval was at 28 percent. (Nixon’s was 25 percent when he resigned.) In a recent Fox News poll, 64 percent said they would never vote for him under any circumstances, as did 40 percent of Republicans.

Judging by calls from Republicans this morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Newt’s trial balloon has scared the bejesus out of the party’s base. One name that came up repeatedly was that of “Law & Order” star, and former Sen. Fred Thompson.

Thompson gets bonus points out the gate because he has a quality exalted beyond all others in the GOP: He’s “Reaganesque.” Like Reagan, he is an actor — a better actor than Reagan, actually. And like Reagan, he has been married twice. Unlike Reagan, Thompson is a lawyer and he made a name for himself in the political sphere before going Hollywood — he was the Republicans’ co-counsel during Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s. He has been in the news lately because of his friendship and support of Scooter Libby, the former senior presidential aide who was convicted on multiple counts of perjury last week.

Thompson appears to have less baggage than the current frontrunners. Still, his Senate resume was not stellar, and while he’s been on a few vice presidential short lists, he has never been battle-tested in a national contest. And who knows if he even has the the belly fire to enter the race, especially knowing that when he does all three frontrunners will turn their guns on him.

Newt Was Committing Adultery While Pushing Anti-Gay Marriage Act

Jon Ponder

In the fall of 1996, while the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was being debated, four politicians who were key to its becoming law were adulterers, including two who were involved in adulteries while the bill was being debated.

Gingrich dumped second wife Marianne in 1999 after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis. She should have seen it coming. Newt famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

The world has long known that Pres. Clinton, who signed the bill in September 1996, was having an affair at the time with Monica Lewinsky. But now, for the first time, then-House Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich has acknowledged that he was having an affair with his current wife, Calista Biseck, while he was married to his second wife, Marianne.

Gingrich confessed his adultery in an interview this week with James Dobson, a professional homophobe who heads Focus on the Family, one of the nation’s most virulent anti-gay organizatons.

Sources say the affair had been ongoing at least three years (and possibly for five years) prior to his divorce in 1999. In any case, it is clear that while Gingrich was cheating on his wife, in his role as Speaker he put the passage of DOMA at the top of the agenda for the House six weeks before the 1996 presidential elections.

And that was the real point. DOMA was a cynical election-year ploy devised by Republicans to drive a wedge between Pres. Clinton and his supporters in the gay community. DOMA presented Clinton with two bad options. If he vetoed it, Republicans would use it to enflame their homophobic base. If he signed it, he would risk dampening support from gays on election day. In the raw calculus of politics, Clinton chose the least risky option and signed it.

The other two adulterous politicians were recently retired Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP presidential nominee that year, and who had admitted to having an affair while married to his first wife — and then-Rep. Bob Barr, who first proposed DOMA, and who reportedly was unfaithful during at least one of his three marriages.

Gingrich apparently dumped second wife Marianne after she had received an alarming medical diagnosis in 1999. In true Newt fashion, the Speaker notified his wife that he was ending the marriage during a phone call while Marianne was with her family celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. Marianne Gingrich should have seen it coming. Gingrich famously broke up with his first wife to marry her while the first wife was in treatment for cancer.

Gingrich is considering running for president in 2008.

Haggard’s Church Lays off 44 People While Paying Him $130,000 Per Year

Jon Ponder

The True Life megachurch in Colorado Springs that was founded by Ted Haggard, the drug-addled self-hating homo evangelist, has laid off 44 people — approximately 12 percent of its employees — saying the Haggard scandal has negatively affected the church’s fundraising.

“As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.
— Former church employee

Haggard was fired last November after it was revealed that he had sex with a gay prostitute and had purchased a large quantity of crystal meth. Yet the church continues to pay Haggard’s $130,000 annual salary, at least through this year.

A former church employee said in comments to Pensito Review:

I just got laid off … from New Life Church … If we weren’t paying him all of this money, people who worked there and weren’t the ones lying and deceiving the church would have been able to keep their jobs.

But no, we are going to pay Ted the one who lied to us all, deceived us all and was the one who did somthing wrong.

As a pastor he never had to pay for his cars or his house (and he has a huge house with a pool and maids) and he got that 130k salary not to mention all the money he made from his books.

This is wrong, it’s all wrong, he has ruined many peoples lives. He has left many people jobless and hurt. I hate New Life church and I am glad that God freed me from that place.

Hersh: Cheney Has Secret Plan to Start War with Iran

Jon Ponder

Iran-Contra redux: New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh has learned that Vice Pres. Cheney has a secret plan to set up an “open confrontation” with Iran. As part of the plan, the Pentagon is now ready to start bombing within 24 hours of a signal from the White House.

The core of the problem is an unintended consequence of another failed Cheney gambit, the invasion of Iraq.

While Pres. Bush is undoutedly aware of Cheney’s plan, which is referred to internally as a “redirection,” according to Hersh, Cheney is firmly in charge:

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney…

The fact that Cheney’s activities are being kept secret from the Congress is eerily similar to the Reagan administration’s secret dealings in the Iran-Contra scandal — a fact which may have prompted the recent resignation of John Negroponte, a player in the Contra affair, as National Intelligence Director.

The core of the problem is an unintended consequence of another failed Cheney gambit, the invasion of Iraq. Under Saddam, the Sunni minority controlled Iraq, which made it a stable, if totalitarian, bastion between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. Democratic elections in Iraq turned control of Iraq over to the Shiite majority, leading to the unintended consequence of an ongoing regional power shift toward Teheran.

This power struggle is being played in the Iraq civil war, where both Shiite and Sunni insurgents are being funded by their respective co-sectarianists in Iran and Saudi Arabia, respectively. The Saudis, with their huge oil reserves, are famously risk-averse however, and they are demanding that Cheney fix what he broke.

As a result, Cheney’s team is rattling its sabers at Shiite-controlled Iran, even though the insurgents killing and wounding U.S. troops in Iraq are primarily Sunnis allied with the Saudis:

“This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”
— Flynt Leverett, former Bush administration National Security Council official

Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when — if you look at the actual casualty numbers — the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

In the Iran-Contra matter 20 years ago, Congress was kept in the dark about Reagan’s efforts to send weapons and supplies to the Contras. Secrecy was required because Congress had expressly forbidden the administration from dealing with the Contras.

In 2005, a group of Iran-Contra veterans got together in Washington to review “lessons learned.” Elliot Abrams, who was tried, convicted and then pardoned for his role in Iran-Contra, led a session that reached four conclusions about how to run secret government operations without getting caught:

“One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office” — a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

But at least one Iran-Contra figure is opting out, according to Hersh:

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”

Last Sunday, the Times of London reported that a handful of top U.S. military brass had threatened to resign if the U.S. attacked Iran. It is possible their threats were prompted by learning about Cheney’s plan — which, see number three above, is apparently not so secret anymore.

Assuming Seymour Hersh’s reporting is correct, and his track record is among the best — and based on the record of Cheney and Bush from 2002, we have to assume they will start a war in Irans sometime very soon — even though it is hard to fathom, then as now, why they are hellbent on igniting the cataclysm.

Investigation Finds Rev. Ted Haggard Hit on Men in Congregation

Jon Ponder

Earlier this month, Rev. Tim Ralph, one of the ministers charged with degayifying self-hating homo evangelist Ted Haggard announced that Haggard had been completely cured, and anyway, he only had sex with the gay prostitute and no one else:

We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships.

In investigating Haggard’s assertion that his extramarital sexual contact was limited to former male escort Mike Jones, the board talked to people close to Haggard and found no evidence contradicting him, Ralph said.

“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days, and it hasn’t happened.”

Well, Rev. Tim, it has now. The people in charge at Haggard’s former mega-church have done what they say is a “reality verification” on their former leader, and it appears Ted may need further degayification:

“[We] have done extensive fact-finding into his lifelong battle with a ‘dark side’ which he said in his confession letter has been a struggle for years,” Pastor Larry Stockstill, part of the church’s board of overseers, told the 14,000-member congregation Sunday.

“We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships. These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught,” he said.

Stockstill did not elaborate…

None needed. Ted was perving on men in his church, and even leading some of them astray. Looks like Pastor Ted has a lot more gay to pray away.