July 16, 2008
Libby Dole, wife of a Viagra spokesman and drooling Britney Spears stooge (who, thank God, lost the presidential race to Bill Clinton), keeper of the Hair-Don’t pictured in the over-airbrushed photo at left, and U.S. Senator (Repug-NC), wants to rename the “Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008″ — the AIDS bill — after Jesse Helms.
Jake Tapper explains:
In the July 14, 2008 Congressional Record:
SA 5074. Mrs. DOLE submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by her to the bill S. 2731, to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows: On page 1, line 5, strike ‘‘and Henry J. Hyde’’ and insert ‘‘, Henry J. Hyde, and Jesse Helms’’.
Helms, you may recall, opposed funding for AIDS research — even the Ryan White AIDS Act.
He was not a big fan of the gays, Mr. Helms. Gays were “weak, morally sick wretches,” he said, and in 1988, opposing an AIDS research bill championed by, among others, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Helms said, “there is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”
In 1995, Helms told the New York Times that the government should spend less on trying to combat AIDS because those suffering from the disease got sick as a result of “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct…We’ve got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts.”
At the time AIDS was, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the leading cause of death for men and women from ages 24 to 44.
Helms also championed legislation that still exists to bar almost every foreign person with HIV from entering the United States for any reason.
Helms later became a supporter of efforts to combat AIDS worldwide going beyond lunches with Bono to support major funding efforts. But he made sure to point out that his epiphany did not apply to the U.S. because of homosexuality. …
It’s bad enough that Henry Hyde’s name — Henry Hyde, homewrecking, adulterous Clinton impeacher who had the audacity to co-sponsor the Federal Marriage Amendment — is there (and so close to that of a real American hero, Tom Lantos), but… Jesse Helsm? Jesse Freaking Helms?!
Senator Dole, is this some sort of sick joke, or what?
H/T to Joe. My. God.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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May 1, 2008
Well, that sucks. Not that I was any great “fan” of hers — although I must admit I was hoping she’d prove to be a lifelong thorn in the sides of such shamelessly hypocritical Repugnazoids as David Vitter and Randall Tobias — it’s simply that suicide (apart from “death with dignity”) is never an option in my book.
You can ague all you like about the “morality” of taking your own life, and I’ll stay pretty mum on the subject, because suicide is one of those things — like abortion — about which I personally take a very dim view, but refuse to condemn because it’s not my place to make any judgment whatsoever about what a person does with his or her own body. (Now ya see why euthanasia, choice, and same-sex marriage are inextricably tied together? They’re all about having eminent domain over oneself.)
What really sucks about suicide is what it does to the people left behind. They’re the ones who have to live with it, not the suicidee (suicider?). What sucks even more is when the suicidee doesn’t have so much as the courtesy to do the deed in a place where s/he won’t be discovered by a loved one. Sadly, Ms. Palfrey hanged herself in an outbuilding on her 76-year-old mother’s property — so guess who found her body?
That really sucks. (Of course, I don’t know what Palfrey’s relationship with her mother was like; maybe she hated her and wanted to leave that gruesome tableau etched in her mother’s mind forever. I dunno.)
You can find the story over at Conservative Babylon, where I’m directing you for the related background on Palfrey’s trial, and on her most (in)famous clients, Vitter and Tobias.
You might also want to read our past coverage here:
Vitter Slated for Hustler Spread (So to Speak)
September 12, 2007
D.C. Madam’s Most Famous John Porks Bill with Creationist… Well, Pork.
October 8, 2007
How we missed Bill Maher’s spot-on picks…
January 12, 2008
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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March 11, 2008
We’re royally pissed off at Elliot Spitzer — not because he was patronizing a prostitute (or ten, or a hundred), but because by letting his little head do his thinking, he’s really screwed over gay and lesbian Americans.
Elliot Spitzer was one of the best friends American LGBTs could ask for. He’s been a longtime advocate for marriage equality, and last April introduced a same-sex marriage bill in the New York legislature — the first governor in the country to do so. Although the GOP-dominated state senate killed the bill, we were hopeful that New York would be one of the next states (competing with Rhode Island and California) to offer full, equal marriage, à la Massachusetts.
Spitzer had also promised to sign the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA).
Now it looks like we’re going to lose our best friend in the Empire State. And even if Spitzer doesn’t resign (and, really, he has to; he violated the Mann Act), his power is effectively neutered.
We don’t care a whit if Elliot Spitzer wants to pay for sex, and whatever damage he’s done to his marriage (and his relationship with his children) is his own concern. What a person does sexually, in private, is nobody’s business — unless his behavior puts a crimp in somebody else’s freedom. That includes conservatives trying to force the rest of us to live by their “moral values,” or, in Spitzer’s case, a single individual setting back the march toward LGBT equality by way of a really stupid choice he made for his own selfish pleasure. In short, Elliot Spitzer traded our freedom for the promise of a lousy orgasm.
A lousy, expensive orgasm. It’s difficult to imagine what you get for $4,300 — the price Spitzer was going to pay for a call girl named “Kristen” — but we imagine it wasn’t seven minutes in the missionary position.
Whatever Spitzer was going to get for his money, he didn’t get it. We were the ones who got screwed — without, as my dear departed father used to say, so much as a kiss.
Then, of course, there is the damage Spitzer has done to the Democratic Party, the extent of which remains to be seen. We already have a hint about the extent of the damage he’s done to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; within minutes of the story breaking on the newswires, Barack Obama supporters on the Message Forum That Shall Remain Nameless were using the Spitzer scandal to smear Clinton. First, they somehow rationalized (if you can call this line of thought “rational”) that Clinton was tainted merely by her association with Spitzer, one of her most high-profile supporters; furthermore, they decided that this association by default cancels out Obama’s relationships with Donnie McClurkin, Kirbyjon Caldwell, and the rest of the homophobic bigots from whom Obama refuses to distance himself.
As if.
Second — and this is very real damage — the widely-circulated image of Spitzer’s wife, the silent, suffering Silda, standing by her man…
…brought the image of Hillary standing by Bill during the Monica Lewinsky scandal back into razor-sharp focus.
Literally. This is the image ABC decide to run to illustrate a piece called “Why Women Stand by Their Men“:
Counter-clockwise from upper left: Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Spitzer, Mr. and Mrs. Larry Craig, Mr. and (now ex-) Mrs. Jim McGreevey, and Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton.
What’s wrong with this picture? For starters, three of the four disgraced politicians are Democrats. Having researched political pecadilloes for years, I can tell you that Republicans far outnumber Democrats in the cheating department. Granted, represented are four of the most infamous sex scandals in recent memory (although it’s a stretch to call the Lewinsky scandal “recent”), but if ABC had asked for my input, I could have given them dozens of examples of humiliated wives standing by their men — from the other side of the aisle.
In any case, Clinton (Hillary, not Bill) is screwed no matter whether Spitzer resigns or not. As Peter Baker wrote in WaPo:
Spitzer has been a bad-luck charm for Hillary Clinton to this point. His illegal immigrant driver’s license proposal arguably became the first time she was thrown off her stride in this campaign. … That led to a bad patch for her that lasted all the way through the Iowa caucuses. …
Now Spitzer may throw her off stride again at a moment she needs to keep her momentum going. And on top of that, even if he does spare her by resigning soon, that has a cost too — one fewer superdelegate for her at the convention.
It’s not lost on us, by the way, that this scandal comes at the most inopportune time for Democrats — and at a very convenient time indeed for Republicans. (You’ve already forgotten all about Vicki Iseman, haven’t you?)
And it’s not lost on us that Spitzer was nailed by a federal wiretap — you know, that part of the USA Patriot Act that allows the feds to listen in on your phone calls for any half-assed reason they want (or no reason at all). It was the Bush Machine that turned the U.S. into “one nation, under surveillance” — and we knew Big Brother wasn’t going to confine wiretapping to terrorism suspects.
OK, OK, so the Spitzer hooker bust was a by-product of a “routine tax inquiry” by the IRS, and prostitution was said to be “the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators” looking into the suspicious movement of funds through Spitzer’s hands. But the timing of the emergence of a “confidential informant, a young woman who had worked previously as a prostitute for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., the escort service that Mr. Spitzer was believed to be using” who enabled the investigators “to get a judge to approve wiretaps on the cellphones of some of those suspected of involvement in the escort service” seems awfully convenient. To the Republican Party, that is.
But, all speculation aside, what’s done is done — and what’s been done is irreversible.
As for how badly Spitzer has hurt the Democratic Party, hurt Hillary Clinton, and hurt us LGBTs — who saw in Elliot Spitzer the closest thing we had to a savior — only time will tell.
But it’s gonna hurt every last one of us.
And all because Elliot Spitzer couldn’t keep his penis in his pants.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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January 18, 2008
Hypocrisy in the Republican party? Say it isn’t so!
(Houston, Texas) The district attorney who defended the Texas law criminalizing homosexuality before the US Supreme Court is desperately trying to keep his job following the discovery of e-mails containing sexually explicit videos, racist jokes and what is described as torrid love notes to his executive secretary.
Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal (R) is facing a state investigation into the emails which were discovered on his office computer.
…..
But in 2002 it was “family values” Rosenthal who argued before the US Supreme Court that the Texas law against sodomy was upholding the moral values of the state and was in place to protect families. The case was Lawrence v Texas.
In his arguments he condemned adultery and homosexual acts.
“I think that this Court having determined that there are certain kinds of conduct that it will accept and certain kinds of conduct it will not accept may draw the line at the bedroom door of the heterosexual married couple because of the interest that this Court has that this Nation has and certainly that the State of Texas has for the preservation of marriage, families and the procreation of children,” Rosenthal told the justices.
Apparently adultery is bad, except when Republicans are engaging in it. And gay sex is always bad of course–except when Republicans are doing it in public restrooms with the full forgiveness of God.
I hereby nominate Rosenthal for his very own page on Conservative Babylon.
Posted by: Buffy
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January 17, 2008
Ted Klaudt, 600-pound rapist of clueless teenage girls (specifically, his two foster daughters), was sentenced today to 44 years in prison (and could be looking at more time when he’s sentenced next week on witness-tampering charges).
We’ve been following the Klaudt case closely over at Conservative Babylon, where you can read all about the way Klaudt conned the girls into thinking he was giving them “examinations” in order to help them qualify for a nonexistent egg-donor program.
Read all about this disgusting pig — who, of course, is a true God-fearin’, “moral values” Republican, and whose lame-ass defense is essentially: “The Internet made me do it!” — here, and get the news on today’s sentencing here.
Sometimes, justice is served.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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January 12, 2008
…for Dickheads of the Year (Maher’s “picks for the biggest assholes of 2007″), we’ll never know. But Maher is so spot-on, and entertaining, it’s a must-see (and a must-pass-along). A few of our favorite lines:
Blackwater despot Erik Prince: “…a super-Christy Jesus freak who looks on the Crusades the way rednecks pine for the Confederacy.”
Crandall Canyon Mine owner Bob Murray: “The fat-ass, lying embodiment of the Bush administration’s regulatory policies.”
Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig: “Don’t people like Larry Craig and Ted Haggard and Mark Foley prove that being gay really is a hard-wired thing — not, as the conservatives always claim, a ‘lifestyle choice‘? If anyone could choose not to have gay sex, it would be these guys, since their whole careers are built on not having gay sex.”
Senator David Vitter, diaper-wearing hooker’s john: “Caught dead to rights as a customer of the D.C. Madam, and explained it away by saying, ‘Several years ago I received forgiveness from God in confession.’ Oh, well, all righty then, it’s all good, then you’re obviously not a disgusting, horrible hypocrite who runs on family values and then fucks whores at home and in Washington.”
College Republicans: “…cutthroat, amoral putzes like Karl Rove… Doughy losers who, at age twenty, care more about tax cuts than girls.”
Bush’s Attorney General du jour, Michael Mukasey: “Kind of makes you miss those innocent days when Gonzales just couldn’t recall.”
Rudy Giuliani: “Rudy says if a Democrat is elected in 2008, we’ll be at risk of another 9/11, because… he was mayor of New York when they attacked the World Trade Center the first time? His slogan should be ‘Not on my watch… again.’”
Much, much more at the link, and well worth the click.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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September 11
January 10, 2008
…it’s a surprise to us. So we were quite surprised (and pleased) to hear that the South Dakota legislature passed a “code of conduct” (in record time) “aimed at reminding lawmakers they are expected to follow high standards of behavior.”
How’d this come about? It was provoked primarily by the revolting behavior of former state senator Ted Klaudt (a Republican, of course), who tricked his gullible foster daughters into letting the disgusting pig rape them, repeatedly. (You can read all about Klaudt here.)
Here’s some more about the state’s new conduct code:
The Senate voted 32-to-2 to pass the code, while the House voted 59-to-11 to approve it.
The push to adopt a code of conduct came after incidents involving two lawmakers and teenage pages — who are high school students who run errands for member of the House and Senate during annual legislative sessions. One of those — former House member Ted Klaudt of Walker — has been convicted of four counts of second-degree rape involving two foster daughters. One of the girls was a legislative page. …
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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October 8, 2007
Sen. Larry Craig chosen for Idaho Hall of Fame
Sen. Larry Craig has been chosen for induction into the Idaho Hall of Fame, despite his well-publicized arrest and guilty plea in an airport sex sting, officials said.
The nonprofit Idaho Hall of Fame Association picked Craig in March, months before he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after a Minneapolis airport police officer accused him of soliciting sex in the men’s restroom, the organization’s board chairman said.
“Larry Craig has made a great contribution to Idaho over the period of 20-some years. At the time it was considered, this other matter had not come up,” Harry Magnuson told The Spokesman-Review newspaper Saturday.
But some Republicans said the honor is inappropriate now. Kootenai County Republican precinct committeeman Phil Thompson said Idaho Hall of Fame officials should consider at least postponing the induction.
“Maybe in 10 or 15 years we can think of this hall of fame stuff. Now is not the time,” he said. “It’s a sad day to be a Republican.”
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September 26, 2007
Like you didn’t see this coming. From SFGate:
Sen. Larry Craig said he hopes that his guilty plea in an airport sex sting will be rescinded by a court in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
The first step in the process of wiping away that plea, however, has nothing to do with whether an undercover policeman misunderstood Craig’s actions in a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis airport. Instead, it’s all about whether Craig’s attorneys can convince Judge Charles Porter that the Idaho senator’s plea was a mistake.
“He’s already gotten lots of justice and fairness,” said Mary Jane Morrison, a professor in criminal law at Hamline University. “A court will view this as taking not just a second bite at the apple, but a fourth and fifth bite. Because he had the right to refuse to plead in the first place, and put the state to its proof. He had the right to have an attorney help him figure out what was in his best interest.”
Craig won’t be attending the hearing, according to Judy Smith, a spokeswoman for Craig attorney Billy Martin. Stopping briefly to speak to reporters as he left his home in the Washington area early Wednesday, Craig said he hoped the judge would “allow me to prove my innocence.”
. . .Craig announced that he intends to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30, but a spokesman has said there is a slight chance he may keep his seat if he can withdraw his plea.
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September 17, 2007
Reports 365Gay.com:
The American Civil Liberties Union says that Sen. Larry Craig should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea because “the secret sting operation used to arrest him was likely unconstitutional.”
The ACLU submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to a Minnesota District Court on Monday urging it to allow Craig to withdraw the guilty plea.
. . .
When free speech rights come into play, police enforcement actions must be “carefully crafted” so that they don’t unnecessarily ensnare people who are engaging in constitutionally protected speech, the brief states.
The secret sting operation used by the police to arrest Senator Craig was not “carefully crafted” to avoid ensnaring innocent speech, said the ACLU.
. . .
“Senator Craig has not always been a great friend of civil liberties, but you shouldn’t have to endorse the civil liberties of others to keep your own…
“Government should make public restrooms safe for all, but it should do so in a manner that is really designed to stop inappropriate behavior, rather than destroying the lives of people who might have no intention of doing anything illegal.”
Stings suck (can you say “entrapment?”), but we’re more concerned about airport cops focusing on dirty old (water-)closet cases, when they should be looking for — what are they called again? — oh, yeah… terrorists. We also have no love for Larry, that right-wing, gay-bashing hypocrite, but we’re having a very difficult time understanding how a stupid old putz in a men’s room warrants more attention than looking for people who might present a real threat to airport security.
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