If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.
Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.
Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.
Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…
Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”
Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.
Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”
Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.
They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets. Watch his face.
As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.
The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.
This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."
Now…walk away. Go find a friend and make them smile. Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful. Go. Leave this place. Later, you can remember what you saw…
I thought he was clear. He does not believe in trial by jury, or the presumption of innocence, or the right to counsel, or an independent judiciary, or the right to liberty. He believes that the government should be disappear people from their homes and send them to prison camps where brutal guards will beat them up at their leisure. He thinks we need more Gitmos and bigger Gitmos. He wants to recreate the gulag. You saw how excited the audience was. They understood it. Why don’t you?
Apparently the only thing Milt isn’t willing to sell out on his quest for the presidency, is his religion. He’s certainly willing to sell out his country.
You Might Sample “The Death Cookie” Too, While You’re At It…
Andrew Sullivan discovers Jack Chick…
A 1984 evangelical Christian cartoon pamphlet, helpfully put online here. Don’t tell Hewitt. It could upset the Popular Front. (I think the racial stuff is out of date.)
They say, like a bunch of Johnny One Notes, that the "Gay Agenda" is an assault on families. They say it with the utmost sincerity, while driving their knives into the hearts of families of gay children.
On a recent road trip with my dad I asked him what it was like when he and my mom came to Memphis for the Family and Friends Weekend at LIA, a concentrated family encounter. Here is some of what he said.
We went to the meeting and had no idea of what we were going into. We met a lot of parents in the same category. Lots of kids had no parents there.
Everything seemed to be on the up and up at first. Yeah, but we found out these things aren’t so. I said to them, "You can’t change a zebra’s stripes." They didn’t go along with me, and they were very aggravated with me for saying so. Some people go through two colleges and they don’t have common sense. I hate when people keep things locked up.
They made me feel that I failed you. That’s how I felt after they got through with me. That’s how they made all the parents feel.
Years after I left LIA and I began to write my play, I interviewed my younger sister, Maria, about that time. What she told me broke my heart. She said that when our parents returned home from the Family and Friends Weekend, they were devastated. They didn’t eat right or look right. They acted sad and depressed. This went on for weeks. My sister felt so concerned that she actually called Love in Action and asked, "What did you do to my parents?!" She felt frustrated by the lack of concern or comprehension she encountered from the staff.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Of course John Smid was nowhere to be seen while all this was going on in Lance’s family. It isn’t just the kids John is heart-wounding. He puts his little mark on the hearts of vulnerable parents too, and other family members, and leaves a wreckage strewn landscape behind he doesn’t even bother looking back on as he walks away from it. Perhaps he’s afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.
As presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush’s triumphant ”Top Gun” visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the ”co-pilot” of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship’s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.
The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country….
-Editorial, May 2, 2003, The New York Times.
The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like ”Lizzie McGuire.”
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
–Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, May 4, 2003
And many others, either equally fawning or equally passive in their complete willingness to simply jot down all of President Junior’s talking points and pass them along as news, without so much as letting a peep be heard from the dissenters. Oh no. To read the New York Times back then you’d have thought there was no dissent anywhere regarding the threat Iraq posed to the world, or that it had weapons of mass destruction, much beyond a few dirty radical hippy leftists who nobody needed to pay any attention to. It was "You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war…" all over again. except this time it wasn’t the William Randolph Hearst of our era doing it, but the Gray Lady herself.
Ah well… The Times has yet to admit its culpability as a willing participant in the Whitewater smear campaign either…
It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that. One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…
So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks. I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon. I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed. I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness. I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…). I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it. It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery.
I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here. Let me say it: he was crazy. It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human. I’ve seen human rage. I’ve seen human hate. What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things. There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy. Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls. Maybe older still. And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it. I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video. But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did. The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.
I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment. A trigger, perhaps. Perhaps not. This is a clinical case. He was crazy. I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him. In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing. One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough. I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest. And…something I saw first hand…
I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital. I was a stock clerk. My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks. But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through. I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week. One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them. She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly. She couldn’t have been more then 20. Young, strikingly beautiful. Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling. Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away. She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone. Something like this…
remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast
Like that. I’ll never forget it. I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us. What is a soul?
You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about. But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing. That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto. It was a brain dump.
Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy. Not crazy angry. Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever. Just crazy. In the literal sense. We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose. But there it is. The Abyss. The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person. That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him. Cho was certainly human. He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead. He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be. But a very sick one. He was mad.
As NRO’s designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
The other was a nine millimeter Glock. Yes, in fact you Can hose down a place with a semi automatic handgun. Ask me how I know. And according to news accounts, he had a lot of ammo with him.
At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him.
You’re a kid sitting peacefully in class and then someone bursts in and starts shooting. Never mind you have not clue one at that point what kind of gun it is, let alone how many rounds it can hold. Never mind the blast of even a small caliber handgun inside a closed space can be positively disorienting. Never mind that with practice you can drop the clip on that Glock and have another in it and a round chambered faster then someone could probably rush you unless you were practically standing right over them. Just fucking for once in your life try to put yourself in someone else’s place you drooling soulless right wing babbling moron. You’re a kid…you are in class peacefully going on about your school day and then suddenly you and your classmates are being shot at. By the time the first few shots are fired your thoughts are a frightened scrambled mess. Count? Count? Grow a fucking brain Derbyshire, you pathetic warrior male wannabe.
Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat.
Why is that not surprising. I shoot mine all the time too John, and I figure I’m not all that exceptional at hitting what I’m shooting at, because most of the other folks at the range there with me usually do too. But you probably think the gun adds several inches to your dick and that’s why you’re not really working it. You think just holding it in your hand makes you something. No. It doesn’t. It’s just a damn gun and you’re still the sorry brain dead soulless asshole you were before you picked it up.
Yes, yes, I know it’s easy to say these things: but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?
Moron! Asswipe! The people on Flight 93 were grown Adults dealing with a situation that allowed them the means to find out what was happening to them (via their cell phones) and time to get themselves organized and together. And their attackers didn’t have guns, only crude knifes. The passengers of flight 93 had a chance the kids at VA Tech never did.
Point of fact, I read of at least one adult, a professor, who seems to have actually tried to save as many of his kids as he could, by staying behind and trying to block the doorway as his kids jumped out the classroom windows. Apparently the killer managed to get in anyway because that professor was one of the dead. But he stayed behind to try and save some of his kids. There’s a hero.
Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:
Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.
Yes. Yes! But Sullivan doesn’t get it…
So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.
But it wasn’t random. There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all. It certainly wasn’t in this case. He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out. He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo. It was cold and brutal and calculating.
There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal. But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people. I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover. Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents). Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating. Ask me how I know. But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much. If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be? Nobody, that’s who.
DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.
The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.
"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.
That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.
"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.
"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.
Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.
Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.
Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.
You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here. He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk. He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car. He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in. For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area. He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages). A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away. Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.
To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face. If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.
[Update…] Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all. So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all. Cho seems to have simply just been mad. As in…crazy.
Horrific news from VA Tech. I suppose I don’t have to repeat the headlines you’ve already seen. Just keep in mind that the first things you hear about ugly, shocking events like this are almost always the noise coming out of the fright and confusion. If you have friends or loved ones down there, don’t take the initial reports you hear to heart. Hang on, find some family and friends to be with, and wait for the solid facts to start coming in.
The Daily Dish: Enemy of the People: Meet Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. He’s a former Marine, with five years of active service and 19 years in the reserve, and a legal critic of Roe vs Wade and supporter of the Alito confirmation. He’s also on the Terrorist No-Fly List:
I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said."
Just a heads up about what these people are up to.
I am posting the below with the permission of Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. For those who do not know, Professor Murphy is easily the most distinguished scholar of public law in political science. His works on both constitutional theory and judicial behavior are classics in the field. Bluntly, legal scholarship that does not engage many themes in his book, briefly noted below, Constitutional Democracy, may be legal, but cannot be said to be scholarship. As interesting, for present purposes, readers of the book will discover that Murphy is hardly a conventional political or legal liberal. While he holds some opinions, most notably on welfare, similar to opinions held on the political left, he is a sharp critic of ROE V. WADE, and supported the Alito nomination. Apparently these credentials and others noted below are no longer sufficient to prevent one from becoming an enemy of the people.
"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."
"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."
"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said. "
"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they=re going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I’m a tad skeptical."
Nice. Welcome to George Bush’s America. If you’re thinking they "lost" his luggage so they could take it somewhere they could inspect it more thoroughly for evidence of a crime, you’re still not paying attention. This was harassment. State sanctioned harassment of someone who was critical of Bush. And they would have Wanted him to complain publicly about it. So harassment not only punishes its target, but also sends a message to anyone else thinking about speaking out against the Bush administration. One of DeLong’s commenter’s avers the following:
Possibly, just possibly, Walter Murphy might now question his support for the nomination of Samuel Alito.
Yah Think? Another commenter brings up the firing of all those federal prosecutors via this New York Times story:
April 9, 2007
Another Layer of Scandal
As Congress investigates the politicization of the United States attorney offices by the Bush administration, it should review the extraordinary events the other day in a federal courtroom in Wisconsin. The case involved Georgia Thompson, a state employee sent to prison on the flimsiest of corruption charges just as her boss, a Democrat, was fighting off a Republican challenger. It just might shed some light on a question that lurks behind the firing of eight top federal prosecutors: what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?
Ms. Thompson, a purchasing official in the state’s Department of Administration, was accused by the United States attorney in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic, of awarding a travel contract to a company whose chief executive contributed to the campaign of Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. Ms. Thompson said the decision was made on the merits, but she was convicted and sent to prison before she could appeal.
The prosecution was a boon to Mr. Doyle’s opponent. Republicans ran a barrage of attack ads that purported to tie Ms. Thompson’s "corruption" to Mr. Doyle. Ms. Thompson was sentenced shortly before the election, which Governor Doyle won.
The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. "It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin," Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic’s office.
For years now critics of those of us who have been warning of the creeping facisim of the Bush administration have been called hysterical, and suffering from something they call "Bush Derangement Syndrome". The only thing surprising about Ms. Thompson’s case is that she was allowed to challenge her imprisonment in the courts at all. Bush, Gonzalas and the republicans have made it quite clear that they think Habius Corpus is a luxury America can no longer afford…
At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.
Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:
(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";
(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";
(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";
(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,
(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…
The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says. That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies. Who do we trust? Well…not ABC News. We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting. Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.
The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.
Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.
The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:
Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).
Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."
Go read the whole thing. The drumbeat to war is happening again. Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points. Nothing is beneath them. Nothing.
The Faggot Always Has It Coming…Just Ask Elizabeth Vargas
So…here’s the scenario. A young gay man is found brutally murdered. The murder scene shows the classic evidence of overkill. The killers, leaving behind not only a host of physical evidence, but statements to friends about how they’d just "killed a faggot", are quickly apprehended. Then as news of the vicious murder percolates, first through the gay community news channels, and then, somehow, manages to find its way into the consciousness of the nation at large, and people recoil at the senseless brutality of it, we begin to hear that the gay victim of the crime had been out cruising for sex, or was looking for drugs, or some sort of criminal activity, had gone willingly with his killers, who by then look in their newspaper perp walk photos like they had "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads…and you can almost hear the sigh of relief from one end of the country to the other…because now we know it wasn’t really hate that killed the victim, there is no hate in America, and especially not any systematic hatred directed at homosexuals…it’s their own stupidity after all, that keeps getting them killed…
Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…
One of the saddest aspects about the aftermath of Ryan Skipper’s murder is that no one outside his friends and family seems to care about the heinous manner in which he was killed.
Neither the governor nor the attorney general in Florida — both of whom are Republicans — has expressed concern about the fact that Skipper’s murder has been labeled a hate crime. National gay organizations have been largely mute, and coverage in the local and national gay press has been very slim, especially considering the brutality of his murder.
Sheriff’s Assertions Were Based on Killers’ Statements
It is likely that the lack of outrage stems from a series of misstatements to the media at the outset of the investigation that have been attributed to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and others in his office. One the face of it, the motivation for making these statements appears to be bigotry toward gay people.
On Friday, March 16, two days after Skipper’s body was discovered, the local newspaper, The Ledger, reported:
Skipper, 25, was driving around Eloise late Tuesday night looking to pick up someone when he met [his all edged killer, Joseph] Bearden, whom he took back to his home in Winter Haven, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The next day, the paper ran a quote from Sheriff Judd that sounded like it could have been the basis of the earlier reporting:
“What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening,” Judd said.
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.” [Emphasis added.]
In fact — and as we have said in other coverage of this story — Sheriff Judd did not “know” this. It was immediately obvious to my colleague Trish, who reported the story here on March 18, that, since the victim was dead and could not speak for himself, the only source for this information had to have been the alleged killers.
But the slander against Ryan Skipper did not stop there. In its coverage on March 17, The Ledger published the trawling-for-sex allegation as well as three additional completely unsubstantiated statements:
[1] Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [murder suspect Joe] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. [2] The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they [3] smoked marijuana and [4] discussed using Skipper’s [laptop] computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Three weeks later all four of these statements are in dispute:
No one who knew Ryan Skipper believes he had a propensity for trawling for anonymous sex.
The other alleged murderers, William Brown, was an acquaintance of Skipper’s. We have seen a statement from one of Ryan’s roommates that Ryan got a call after he got home from work at 10:30 that night, which appeared to have prompted him to go back out. It seems more likely that Brown phoned Ryan and asked for help in the form of giving him ride somewhere, and that the call was part of premeditated ambush plot by Brown and Bearden against Ryan.
No evidence has been produced that Ryan was involved with these chuckleheads in a check forgery scheme — and no one who knew him believes he would do anything of the sort.
Ryan’s roommate has said that after Ryan received the phone call, he left and never came back. She denies that he brought anyone home with him that night.
Ryan’s friends and family all confirm that he had a desktop computer but did not own a laptop. And yet, early reports stated that Brown and Bearden were charged with stealing a laptop from Ryan after they murdered him..
No one who knew him believes Ryan smoked pot.
That the "trawling for sex" story is so reaily accepted by the mainstream news media when it comes to gay victims of violent crime, Even When The Source Of The Story Is The Victim’s Own Killers, is all the proof you need that there is a climate of contempt toward gays right here in America, that is relentlessly fueling that violence. No climate of hate in America? Compare and contrast…a white jogger is raped and nearly killed in New York’s Central Park and the focus slams immediately on a gaggle of black teenagers who were said to be out "wilding" that night. Nobody suggests the woman was out looking for rough sex. Had that woman been a gay man instead, does anyone seriously believe that the Very First Thing out the gate in the mainstream press wouldn’t be that he was probably there looking for sex.
Ryan Skipper walks out the door to his apartment and is found dead hours later with 20 stab wounds in his body, and his car is found later with the insides soaked in his blood. The killers are arrested, claim their victim was hitting them up for sex and anyway he was helping them forge checks. It’s just their word at that point, but guess what the Accepted Narrative is the following day…
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
And we know that how precisely? We know it, because his killers said so, and because he was a gay man, and gay men always do something stupid to cause their own deaths…just ask Elizabeth Vargas and ABC News …
O’Malley was a detective with the Laramie Police when 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered six years ago.
He was one of several people interviewed for ABC’s 20/20 that aired Nov. 26. He said that the interview and the way the show was ultimately put together has left him angry.
O’Malley was notified about a week in advance of the ABC crew’s arrival for the interview. He invited them into his home and they stayed for “maybe three to four hours.”
He did not see the tape until the night the show aired.
The people interviewed for the show did not surprise him. He was, however, surprised that “a production as popular as 20/20 would hinge all of their support for their theory on meth addicts, Doc O’Connor and two convicted murderers … it did not surprise me the way the thing came out.”
O’Malley said that he did find out what the focus of the show was shortly after the interview was over and the crew left Laramie. Someone with the crew had left copies of e-mails on his dining room table — 10 pages of information discussing the overall focus of the program and “their pre-conceived focus that this was not a hate crime. This was a drug crime. That’s what they went with,” he said.
When he was approached by the producers of this particular segment, O’Malley said he had a weird feeling. “After 30 years, you learn to trust your gut instinct. I asked them specifically if they were coming to do something from a particular angle … I wanted to be able to answer intelligently, think things out.”
In the conversation with the producers, O’Malley was assured that the report would be objective, six years after the actual event.
Sucker.
Prior to the arrival of the 20/20 crew, he had heard that the show might be more about the methamphetamine issue. When they arrived at his home, O’Malley asked a few questions of his own.
“I was trying to be comfortable … and I felt comfortable. But when Elizabeth Vargas got into the methamphetamine portion of it, it surprised me,” he said. “Actually, it made me extremely angry and, in my opinion, these guys lied to me.”
During the segment of the 20/20 program, O’Malley said that he believed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two Laramie men convicted in Shepard’s death, intended to rob the University of Wyoming student. But, for reasons only McKinney and Henderson know, something happened and the killing became a hate crime based on Shepard’s sexual orientation.
“My feelings have been that the initial contact was probably motivated by robbery because they needed money,” O’Malley said. “What they got was $20 and a pair of shoes. … then something changed and changed profoundly.”
But whatever that was, it couldn’t be hate. No. Never.
20/20 did not discuss the expertise of the arresting officer.
“Flint Waters is a trained narcotics officer. … in controlled substances,” O’Malley said.
Waters reported that Henderson exhibited no signs of being under the influence of meth, just an odor of alcohol.
O’Malley said that 20/20 failed to report on the jailhouse letters that McKinney had written — letters that added information that this could have been a gay-hate crime.
The 20/20 segment with McKinney indicated that he, along with his lawyers, had concocted this gay panic issue, but, according to O’Malley, police interviews with McKinney showed that he had already started that (the gay panic issue) without the benefit of council.
“The statements he made, the fact that after he was sentenced he was high-fiving other inmates and signing autographs in the jail — if it wasn’t motivated by bias, he was sure eating that up.” O’Malley said.
Shepard was struck between 19 and 21 times, all to the face and head area.
“It was a concentrated effort to destroy somebody,” O’Malley said. “I believe it was triggered because Matt was gay. I’ll go to my grave believing that.”
O’Malley said that “It is abysmal that they (20/20) don’t present the other side of the issue … to be objective in their reporting.”
But they had a job to do…not merely to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard, but more importantly, to undermine the fight against anti-gay hate. The problem for ABC New and other Bush/Republican Friendly mainstream news media outlets, is that for the nation to finally begin to combat the kind of hate that killed Matthew Shepard means taking away one of the republicans better vote getting tools…
So Matthew Shepard’s murder, against all the evidence to the contrary, had to be a drug deal gone bad, and Shepard a druggy, or trawling for sex, or something. And the payoff wasn’t just hope that his killers might be paroled, but breathing life into the cultural indifference to anti-gay violence, which at that moment in time was seriously in jeopardy of, finally, being taken seriously for the unmitigated horror that it is. It’s not so much about the gay panic defense, as the gay panic vote. You can’t drive voters to the polls with the gay bogeyman, without getting some gay people killed in the process. It has to be their own damn fault they got themselves killed, not the climate of hate. Never the climate of hate.
Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
So ABC and Vargas’ did their job and you can see the results of it now, in the case of Ryan Skipper with sickening clarity. The meme that gay victims of violent crime always, somehow, bring it on themselves, were idiots who should have seen it coming, went cruising for guys who have "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads, fell prey to a kind of crime that the rest of us need not worry about, because We’re Smart And We Don’t Do Things Like That, will probably live on for quite some time to come. Hate crime laws are unnecessary, because the victims of these kinds of crimes are always stupid. There is no epidemic of violence against gay people, just an epidemic of stupidity. You are now free to look the other way. Pay no attention to that blood on the floor…it doesn’t concern you…
Cameron has now documented Early Gay Death Syndrome (EGDS). According to this new research, which Cameron claims is the largest random sex survey ever conducted, the oldest male that could be found who engaged in homosexuality was 54 years old and the oldest female was 49. According to Dr. Cameron the reason for this is because the average life span of a homosexual is 20 plus years shorter than for a heterosexual.
According to Richard Rothstein at QueerSighted, this new Paul Cameron propaganda offensive is bases on his sex survey of a single Canadian community of just over 120, 000 adults. And you just know you can take Cameron’s word for it, that his methods and his data on this were all top notch…
The best part of this story is that Cameron put out a press release that suggests that he presented his latest research during yesterday’s sessions of the annual Eastern Psychological Association Convention in Philadelphia. According to his press release, "Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron told attendees of the Eastern Psychological Association Convention…" In fact, he did not present and was not on the agenda at this meeting. The fact is that he roamed the public corridors of the convention venue and "told" doctors about his research. Cameron was neither a registered speaker nor a member of the convention faculty.
Yeah…and he once cited a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, in one of his publications, as if it were an actual peer reviewed article. Trustworthy guy, eh? The Morals and Values crowd just loves him.
Nonetheless he will present this research to lawmakers and judges as data that was "presented" at this legitimate convention and it will be published (@ $27.50 per page) in a so-called scientific journal, a publication that will be slapped down on desks in court houses and legislatures and successfully used against us.
Yes. That’s how the game is played by the Morals and Values crowd. Rothstein gives us an insight into how junk like this effectively poisons the political process…
As an aside, I rarely reference my professional life, but for the purpose of this posting I will tell you that I have engaged in professional lobbying on behalf of private industry both in Albany and in Washington. And this kind of crap really resonates. If it’s easy to read, can be summarized on one official and slick looking sheet of paper, lists titles like PhD, MSS and ARNP and was published in a journal with an impressive name, congressional and legislative staffers and their bosses will not look beneath the surface. Only two things really matter: how will it play with voters and will you be supporting my campaign efforts.
(Emphasis mine…) So the Morals and Values crowd has understood for a long time now, not only that lies are effective, but Why they are effective and How to make them even more effective. And you thought it was us godless heathens who made the best liars.
John Ashcroft. You remember him…right? The man who scared the steaming crap out of everyone when President Junior made him Attorney General, because of his bedrock fundamentalist contempt for all that civil liberties and religious pluralism stuff? The man whose father, a traveling Pentecostal minister, anointed him with oil in the kitchen the day he took office? The religious zealot who asked nominees for judgeships if they were faithful to their spouses, and whether they drank? Who vetoed a bill while governor of Missouri to allow liquor sales on Sunday? The sanctimonious jackass who said, "I don’t particularly care if I do what’s right in the sight of men. The important thing is for me to do right in God’s sight. The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts." The self righteous prig who ordered a cover for the statue of the "Spirit of Justice" in the lobby of the Justice Department because one of her breasts was exposed?
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who sent a letter this week to his successor Alberto Gonzales blasting the proposed merger of Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., approached XM in the days after the merger was announced offering the firm his consulting services, a spokesman for XM said Saturday.
The spokesman said XM declined Mr. Ashcroft’s offer to work as a lobbyist for the company.
Mr. Ashcroft was subsequently hired by the National Association of Broadcasters, which is fiercely opposed to the merger. On its behalf he conducted a review of the effects on competition if the two satellite radio companies were allowed to merge.
See…all this time you thought what made Ashcroft dangerous was his moral fanaticism. But people become fanatics precisely because they have no personal sense of the moral and decent. Their inner lives are a vast unexamined wasteland where no personal sense of right and wrong ever had a chance of taking root. So as they walk through their lives, they come to embrace a kind of idolatry that’s all performance and ritual and ostentatious humility, dress themselves up as the idol’s champion and commissar, wage righteous war on behalf of it, so they can appear to themselves, to each other, and to the world, as all they are not within. Moral. Honorable. Decent. They wear their religiosity on their sleeve like that because not having a conscience, it’s the only place they have to put it.
Which is why fanatics are so dangerous. It’s not their moralizing. Fanaticism is the opposite of moralizing. They are incapable of moralizing. They have no brakes. They’ll do whatever that stone idol sitting silently in the middle of that vast inner wasteland tells them to.
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
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