The Christian Civic League of Maine's Mike Hein calls Pam's House Blend: "a leading source of radical homosexual propaganda, anti-Christian bigotry, and radical transgender advocacy."
He is "praying that Pam Spaulding will "turn away from her wicked and sinful promotion of homosexual behavior."
(CCLM's web site, 10/15/07)
Ex-gay "Christian" activist James Hartline on Pam:
"I have been mocked over and over again by ungodly and unprincipled anti-christian lesbians."
(from "Six Years In Sodom: From The Journal Of James Hartline," 9/4/2006, written from the "homosexual stronghold" of Hillcrest in San Diego).
"Pam is a 'twisted lesbian sister' and an 'embittered lesbian' of the 'self-imposed gutteral experiences of the gay ghetto.'" -- 9/5/2008
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality heartily endorses the Blend, calling Pam:
A "vicious anti-Christian lesbian activist." (Concerned Women for America's radio show [9:15], 1/25/07)
"A nutty lesbian blogger." (MassResistance radio show [16:25], 2/3/07)
Pam's House Blend always seems to find these sick f*cks. The area of the country she is in? The home state of her wife? I know, they are everywhere. Pam just does such a great job of bringing them out into the light.
--Impeach Bush
who monitors yours Bevis ?? Just thought I would drop you a line,so the rest of your life is not wasted.
Man, how is it possible that Rudy Giuliani couldn't find any peeps of color to work for him? Hmmm? Look at this chart outlining the diversity of the staffs of some of the presidential campaigns.
Quote of the day on this goes to Matt Yglesias, who said:
only Giuliani among the major contenders has child molesting priests and mobbed-up former police commissioners in his retinue. It's only diversity in the racial and gender senses that he's lacking.
It's not surprising though, as the GOP clown car occupants have gone out of their way to avoid attending debates focused on minority issues before minority audiences, stiffing both Univision and the Tavis Smiley forums. No need for any minority outreach tokens -- I guess the GOP-black-wingnut-talking-heads-for-pay at Project 21 need not apply.
As far as gender diversity, well, Rudy isn't much better, as the man's man likes to surround himself with testosterone.
The campaign of Republican Mike Huckabee achieves the closest gender balance at a near 50% division between men and women on all measures (it is also the smallest of all the major campaigns). The campaigns of Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson, and Republican Mitt Romney are also fairly balanced, with Clinton's somewhat favoring women and Richardson's and Romney's somewhat favoring men. The most gender-skewed campaign, in contrast, is that of Rudy Giuliani.
In the campaign of the former New York mayor Giuliani, there is only one senior female staffer, who holds the title of Communications Director. Fewer than one-third of Giuliani's staff who earned $9000 or more in the last quarter are women, and just a quarter of his top twenty paid staff are women.
The Democrats' campaigns are more gender-balanced than Republicans'. Just over thirty percent of Republican senior staffers are women, compared to just under 33% of Democratic senior staffers. And there are ten more top salaried women in Democratic campaigns: 32 of 80 (40%) compared to 21 of 74 (28%) in Republican campaigns.
Ouch. Rudy's family values bit him in the *ss again.
There's one vote that Rudy Giuliani definitely can't count on in his 2008 presidential bid: his own daughter's. According to the 17-year-old Caroline Giuliani's Facebook profile, she's supporting Barack Obama.
On her profile, she designates her political views as "liberal" and -- until this morning -- proclaimed her membership in the Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)." According to her profile, she withdrew from the Obama group at 6 a.m. Monday, after Slate sent her an inquiry about it.
...It's not news that Rudy and his two children, Caroline and her 21-year-old brother Andrew, have a rocky relationship. Caroline and Andrew are the children of Donna Hanover, Rudy's second wife. In March, Andrew, who is a junior at Duke, told the New York Times that he and his father had been estranged for some time, and he has spoken candidly about his objections to Giuliani's marriage to Judith Nathan. And after the wedding, the Times reported, Giuliani also stopped attending Caroline's high-school events. Though he went to her high-school graduation, he left without speaking to her and did not join in the post-graduation family celebration, according to the New York Daily News.
Salon's Joe Conason has a fun piece up today, Rudy and Romney: Artful dodgers, on the Yellow Elephant credentials of Rudy and Mitt, who went through great pains not to serve in Vietnam, but today are stay-the-course war hawks.
In Rudy's case, for instance, he was quite eligible to serve, but he didn't sign up. He received a student deferment while at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, but when that status was changed after graduation and he was up for the draft. That clearly wouldn't do, so after he obtained a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York he tried to parlay that into another deferment. The Selective Service System denied his claim, so he feverishly found another way out of serving his country.
Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor's first campaign for mayor: "Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam."
Of course now, Rudy he would have serve had he been called, but if you were constantly dodging the ability to be called, that doesn't exactly sound like stepping up to the plate to serve.
Giuliani has enough problems dealing with the accused pedophile priest consultant in his firm and the busted-with-coke SC campaign chair (whose father, a former U.S. Congressman, referred to the NAACP as the "National Association for Retarded People"), but he steps in it himself with this utterly ridiculous brown-nosing at Pat Robertson's Regent University.
I am very, very impressed with Regent University, when I consider that it was founded just a short while ago. The number of graduates that you have and the amount of influence that you have is really, really terrific.
And of all the many things that you've done - and there have been many, and many contributions?
That statement is pretty breathtaking, considering the kind of "influence" Regent graduates have had in the Justice Department...(Think Progress):
Regent is ranked a "tier four" school by US News & World Report, "the lowest score and essentially a tie for 136th place." Yet approximately one in six Regent graduates are employed in government work, and 150 serve in the Bush administration.
Monica Goodling, the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who graduated from Regent's law school, perhaps best exemplifies the "terrific" influence Regent is exerting on the nation. Last month, Goodling admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had "taken inappropriate political considerations into account" while hiring career employees at the Justice Department. At one point she even pressured Michael Battle, head of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, to replace two long-standing Justice officials with "a fellow Regent law school graduate." Graphic: Mike Tidmus.
The International Association of Firefighters is distributing an anti-Rudy video to its members which depicts Rudy refusing to properly equip firefighters prior to Sept. 11th and not being supportive of the firefighters (and the families of the dead firefighters) after Sept. 11th.
"I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008. It is an irrevocable decision. If given a Hobson's - Dobson's? - choice between him and Sens. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, I will either cast my ballot for an also-ran - or if worse comes to worst - not vote for the first time in my adult life."
Boo-f*cking-hoo. The clown car still doesn't have the right bozo in the driver's seat for James Dobson of Focus On the Anus. He's beside himself over the fact that two of the top GOP presidential candidates are simply not adhering closely enough to the fundie line.
The jig is up. Rudy Giuliani finally admitted in a speech at Houston Baptist University last week that he is an unapologetic supporter of abortion on demand. That revelation came as no great shock to those of us in the pro-life movement. His public pronouncements as mayor of New York, together with his more recent tap dances on the campaign trail, have told a very clear story.
How could Giuliani say with a straight face that he "hates" abortion," while also seeking public funding for it? How can he hate abortion and contribute to Planned Parenthood in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 1999? And how was he able for many years to defend the horrible procedure by which the brains are sucked from the heads of viable, late-term, un-anesthetized babies? Those beliefs are philosophically and morally incompatible. What kind of man would even try to reconcile them?
Of course this very public whining is Dobson's call to action to his sheeple, which is supposed to scare Giuliani and McCain, since those fundies may decide to stay home on primary day and/or election day.
Dobson draws out his morality trump card on marriage and adultery. Hahahahahahahaha. The clown car is sadly, carrying a lot of those characters.
This self-styled defender of marriage says he is "proud" of having submitted, as New York's mayor, a bill creating "domestic partnerships" for homosexual couples. Admittedly, many liberal Americans will agree with the social positions espoused by Giuliani. However, I don't believe conservative voters whose support he seeks will be impressed. Presidential elections are won or lost by slim margins. Rudy has an uphill slog ahead of him, even though he is the darling of the media.
There are other moral concerns about Giuliani's candidacy that conservatives should find troubling. He has been married three times, and his second wife was forced to go to court to keep his mistress out of the mayoral mansion while the Giuliani family still lived there. Talk about tap dancing. Also during that time, the mayor used public funds to provide security services for his girlfriend. The second Mrs. Giuliani finally had enough of his philandering and, as the story goes, forced him to move out. He lived with friends for a while and then married his mistress. Unlike some other Republican presidential candidates, Giuliani appears not to have remorse for cheating on his wife.
And the final straw -- Rudy in drag. I love it:
One more question: Shouldn't the American people be able to expect a certain decorum and dignity from the man who occupies the White House? On this measure, as well, Giuliani fails miserably. Much has been written in the blogosphere about his three public appearances in drag. In each instance, he tried to be funny by dressing like a woman. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan, who loved a good joke, doing something so ignoble in pursuit of a cheap guffaw? Not on your life.
Daddy D's already said no to the Tool McCain back in January, when he declared "Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances."
I guess his less-than-credible flip flopping on choice and civil unions/domestic partnerships didn't fly, so Rudy Giuliani is ready to risk the wrath of the fundies and just came out of the political closet, and flipped back again during a speech at Houston Baptist College.
Rudolph W. Giuliani directly challenged Republican Party orthodoxy on Friday, asserting that his support for abortion rights, gun control and gay rights should not disqualify him from winning the party's presidential nomination and that Republicans need to be tolerant of dissenting views on those issues if they want to hold the White House.
..."Where people of good faith, people who are equally decent, equally moral and equally religious, when they come to different conclusions about this, about something so very very personal, I believe you have to respect their viewpoint," he said. "You give them a level of choice here." Mr. Giuliani asserted that his differences with his audience on gun control and gay rights were probably less sharp. He defended his advocacy for tough gun control measures while he was mayor of New York, but said that was central to his strategy to reduce crime in the city. He described himself as an advocate of a view of the 2nd Amendment which holds that it permits citizens to bear arms. Mr. Giuliani said that he supported allowing gay and lesbians to enter into domestic partnerships, but opposed allowing them to marry.
I can't figure out why the man has been trying to finesse this one because, even though you have to win over The Base in the primaries, Giuliani has a long track record of being pro-choice and pro-gay -- why not simply take the bull by the horns and tell these fundies that they don't own the Republican party from the outset? After all, this is what they think of him anyway:
"The mayor's position on abortion couldn't be more repugnant to pro-lifers" said ,. "It shows a moral obtuseness that is stunning." -- Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention)
"When people hear Rudy Giuliani speak about taxpayer funded abortions, gay `rights' and gun control, they don't hear a choice, they hear an echo of Hillary Clinton. -- Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
Someone in Rudy's campaign obviously had a light bulb come on. If your man is leading in the polls, it's clear a whole lot of Republicans are going to overlook his views on social issues in order to win the White House, and he may gain swing votes in the process. With such a weak GOP field, why not stake a claim and stop parroting the fundie zombie line.
As a strategy it may or may not work -- what it will be is a clear test of the power left in the religious right to deep-six any candidate that doesn't meet their religious bigot test.
Michelangelo Signorile invited then-NYC Mayor and current fawning prez wannabe suck-up to the Right, Rudy Giuliani, on his Sirius OutQ radio show back in 2003 to talk about LGBT issues, and he bragged about his support for for domestic partnerships and civil unions -- and he didn't make any distinctions between them back then.
Mike, the pesky rascal, unearthed his digital file of the interview and you can listen to it at his pad.
"Marriage should be a man and a woman...I think that the domestic partnership legislation in NY has worked very, very well. I think that's a good way to deal with it, and I think that would be a good model for other states to have. Some places call them domestic partnerships, some states call it civil unions, and I think that would be the best way to deal with it.
[UPDATE: Oh, it's wonderful...I have an update post that links to audio from 2003 of Rudy bragging about his support of civil unions. Busted. ]
Anything to get elected. I wonder how his gay friends (Howard Koeppel and his partner Mark Hsiao) who put him up in their pad while he was going through his messy divorce with Donna Hanover, feel about being sh*t on by Rudy. That leaves zero Republicans for any semblance of equality. (Raw Story):
In a major reversal from an earlier position, the political website of the New York Sun will report tomorrow that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani now opposes civil unions between same sex partners.
An advanced copy of an article sent to RAW STORY shows that the New York Republican has backed off his earlier support for civil unions, prompted by the passage of a law in New Hampshire's State Senate.
"In this specific case the law states same sex civil unions are the equivalent of marriage and recognizes same sex unions from outside states. This goes too far and Mayor Giuliani does not support it," the Giuliani campaign said in a written response sent to the Sun's Ryan Sager.
Asked by Mr. O'Reilly in the interview how he would respond to gay Americans who said being denied access to the institution of marriage violated their rights, Mr. Giuliani said: "That's why you have civil partnerships. So now you have a civil partnership, domestic partnership, civil union, whatever you want to call it, and that takes care of the imbalance, the discrimination, which we shouldn't have."
Wingnut Rudy's position now:
"Mayor Giuliani believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Domestic partnerships are the appropriate way to ensure that people are treated fairly," the Giuliani campaign said in a written response to a question from the Sun. "In this specific case the law states same sex civil unions are the equivalent of marriage and recognizes same sex unions from outside states. This goes too far and Mayor Giuliani does not support it."
I'm sure this will appease the bible beating right wing that he's courting as well. He can't hide his pro-gay past, but the fever of presidential wannabes in the GOP has rendered them delusional on core issues. They really believe the primary sheeple are stupid.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to introduce a gay marriage bill in New York state is favored by almost two-thirds of the 1,022 respondents to a recent Crain's online poll.
About 63% of voters said they support a gay marriage law. If New York adopted the new legislation, it would become only the second state behind Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriage.
Ding..ding..ding...and the winner is...Rudy Giuliani.
"If any Republican is elected president - - and I think obviously I would be the best at this - - we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it," Giuliani said.
..."But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?" Giuliani said. "If we are on defense (with a Democratic president,) we will have more losses and it will go on longer."
Rudy, yucking it up with defeated homophobic Senator (and current "Islamofascism" fighter) Little Ricky Santorum.
"I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense."
He added: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."
Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention makes an ass out of himself in this AP piece. Since this crop of GOP candidates is swimming in divorces, he has to lower the bar for an acceptable candidate, and poor Rudy doesn't make the cut.
Richard Land, head of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, told The Associated Press that evangelicals believe the former New York City mayor showed a lack of character during his divorce from his second wife, television personality Donna Hanover.
"I mean, this is divorce on steroids," Land said. "To publicly humiliate your wife in that way, and your children. That's rough. I think that's going to be an awfully hard sell, even if he weren't pro-choice and pro-gun control."
...Land noted that Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been married twice, but said the Arizona senator has acknowledged his part in the failure of his first marriage.
"It's a molehill compared to Giuliani's mountain," Land said. "When you're a war hero [like McCain], you have less to prove on the character front."
And what does war hero status have to do with divorce status? How does that generate a pass? And tell me that Land had no problem with the divorced Ronald Reagan? Boy, this is reaching.
Life is tough for the fundies this time around; look at the prospects they can support...after the jump.
This is the result of the straw poll at this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference (a.k.a. Ann Says Homophobia is Cool! conference):
The attendees were asked "Who would be your first choice to be the Republican nominee for president?" This is what tallied up:
Mitt Romney 21%
Rudy Giuliani 17%
Sam Brownback 15%
Newt Gingrich 14%
John McCain 12%
Others were below 5%.
Why did Multiple Choice Mitt win? The New York Sun reports that Romney had a lot of paid help on the convention floor.
Mr. Romney ran an intensive ground operation at CPAC, flooding the convention with college-aged campaign workers - paying many of their registration fees and even busing some of them in and paying for their hotel rooms, according to a report in The New York Times - wearing blue Romney shirts, carrying posters for their candidate, and voting in the straw poll.
With all that, a better question might be did Mitt Romney win? Folks were also asked about their second choice preference. Look at these numbers:
Take a look at what happens when you add the first and second choice ballots together. The more comprehensive and telling results you aren't going to see in most of today's headlines, but they can be found at the American Conservative Union's web site, in a Powerpoint document.
The most pro-gay rights of the GOP lot, Rudy Giuliani wins the overall nod in a group of conservatives.
The favorites of The Base and the religious zealots, Baptist minister and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, fear of the brown menace proponents Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter are all in single digits. Only forced birth advocate Sam Brownback makes a decent showing.
Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, the only candidate even remotely leaning left of all the GOP candidates, has moved past the exploratory phase, filing a "statement of candidacy" with the Federal Election Commission. (AP):
The steps Monday, including eliminating the phrase "testing the waters," put Giuliani on the same level legally as McCain and Romney, the other top-tier GOP candidates who have formed regular exploratory committees and filed statements of candidacy.
Despite being immensely popular in national polls, Giuliani faces hurdles to securing the Republican nomination state by state. His moderate stances on issues such as gun control, abortion and gay rights do not sit well with hard-core social conservatives who are a crucial voting group in the nominating contests. His two divorces could be obstacles as well.
But conservatives also aren't entirely sold on McCain, an Arizona senator, and Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and that could even the playing field for Giuliani. He hopes primary and caucus voters look past his liabilities and consider his record of leadership in difficult times.
***
And in what can only be described as a nightmare scenario, the vote-snatcher better known as legendary consumer advocate Ralph Nader, is threatening to run again -- because of sHillary. Yet another reason she doesn't need to be the nominee, huh? (Reuters):
Asked on CNN's Late Edition news program if he would run in 2008, the lawyer and consumer activist said, "It's really too early to say. ... I'll consider it later in the year."
Nader, 72, said he did not plan to vote for Clinton, a Democratic senator from New York and former first lady.
"I don't think she has the fortitude. Actually she's really a panderer and a flatterer. As she goes around the country, you'll see more of that," Nader said.
On whether he would be encouraged to run if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, Nader said, "It would make it more important that that be the case."
You can understand and even agree with his views, but I can't forgive the man from siphoning off votes from Kerry when Nader ran as an independent in 2004 -- and when he was the Green Party candidate in 2000, he took enough votes away to deep-six a certain Gore win. We ended up with The Chimperor, and it has cost us dearly. Over and over.
Salon's Joe Conason has a fun piece up today, 
That statement is pretty breathtaking, considering the kind of "influence" Regent graduates have had in the Justice Department...(
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