Point Taken…But You Still Aren’t Paying Attention…
Andrew Sullivan updates his post on Virginia Foxx and Matthew Shepard…
I should be clear: I do not for a minute believe that the bigotry behind the Matthew Shepard murder was a hoax. I think it was murkier and more complicated – i.e. more human – than some want it to be. Of course, if you believe that his murderers deserved the maximum sentence because they brutally murdered someone, and not because they were meth-fueled bigots, it doesn’t matter. I want the same laws against the same acts enforced equally on everyone. If police don’t enforce the law equally, get on their case. But leave the laws alone.
Okay…point taken and granted. He’s not saying hate had nothing to do with the murder, which is Exactly what the kook pews are saying. As to his horribly misinformed attitude about anti-lynching laws hate crime laws, I’ll leave that argument for another time. But this business that the murder of Matthew Shepard was "murkier and more complicated" then it at first appeared is a load of horseshit.
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
There is more. Much, much more. But that last paragraph I quoted pretty much sums it up. There is absolutely nothing murky or mysterious about the death of Matthew Shepard. It is one of the most crystal clear examples of purely venomous anti-gay murder in the record. They spent time torturing that kid. That is not hyperbole, it is the one overwhelming fact at the heart of what happened. That, and that they made an effort to take him where they did. Whatever their intent when they walked into that bar that night, when they walk out of it with that kid, they were about torturing and killing a homosexual.
The only confusion regarding this case, is what has been deliberately and maliciously injected into the national conversation about it by the religious right. And to understand why they’ve been so vehement about denying that anti-gay hate was the root of it, you have to consider not only the political context of their opposition to hate crime laws, but the context in which Shepard’s death came to light.
What happened was that Shepard’s death brought to a grinding halt, their brand new nationwide 600,000 dollar anti-gay ad campaign. That summer, starting with a full page ad in the New York Times that proclaimed "I’m Living Proof That The Truth Can Set You Free", a group called "Truth In Love" sponsored by fifteen arch right anti-gay groups began a national campaign to roll back the gains gay activists had won, using ex-gay therapy as their ruse, not to talk about curing homosexuality, but to demonize homosexual people. Wayne Besen in his book, Anything But Straight, documents the brutality of that campaign. Behind the smiling faces of people who were now free, free at last from the loathsome taint of homosexuality, the campaign was peppered with lies about gay recruitment in schools, child molestation, the spread of AIDS, and how homosexuality leads to drugs, disease, and death and many biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Don Wildmon, whose group was one of the sponsors, was busy telling people that…
Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to "breed" is to RECRUIT!"
In the midst of this propaganda onslaught, comes the news that a gay college student was practically crucified on a deer fence in Wyoming…that the kid who found his dying body thought a first that it was a scarecrow. And then a couple days later, news that Fort Collins Colorado fraternity revelers during their homecoming parade, entered a float that bore a scarecrow with a sign that read "I’m gay" And disgust swept across the nation. The ad campaign now seemed less an outreach to homosexuals in the public mind, and more like what it really was, an attack on their lives.
Almost Immediately the religious right set about blaming Shepard for his own death. It’s not hard to understand why. They deliberately created the climate of hate toward gay people that made that both kid’s death and the mockery of it in Fort Collins not merely inevitable, but intentional. Desired. The homosexual monster must be feared. The homosexual monster must be eliminated from our midst. The very last thing they wanted was that the climate of hate would be held to account…that terrorizing homosexuals would be considered criminal.
For generations the act of beating, and even murdering, homosexuals was considered less a crime and more a distasteful consequence of homosexuality in society. Randy Shilts related how a young gay man who was raped sought medical help, telling a doctor what happened, only to have the doctor look at him and say "Well you’re a homosexual aren’t you?" Matthew Shepard put a human face on all that…the face of anyone’s kid…and suddenly it seemed as if for once beating and killing a homosexual wouldn’t just be swept under the rug as par for the course…no more then what you got, and probably deserved if you were a homosexual. Instead, the nation was appalled at what happened to that kid.
And that made the religious right livid.
They began Immediately to smear and slime that poor kid’s memory. What ABC News and 20/20 did by taking that smear campaign and elevating it to the level of "respectable journalism" is unforgivable. ABC News ground another cigarette into a dead gay kid’s body so they could get some ratings. At least the hatred of Fred Phelps is genuine.
There is nothing murky about what happened to Matthew Shepard. Nothing. The evidence leaves absolutely no doubt that a 112 pound gay college student was tortured and murdered by two thugs because they thought homosexuals were human garbage and their contempt for them justified anything they did to that kid that night. They had Fun. They enjoyed themselves. Anyone who cites that 20/20 hit piece is in about the same category as William Bennett, citing Paul Cameron on the shortened lifespan of homosexuals. You are dispensing bullshit that even Baghdad Bob would laugh at.
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Take a wee stroll around that lonely prairie grass field of evidence sometime. It’ll rip your comfortable 20/20 myths…and then your heart…to crying pieces.
The footprints and the tire tracks were perfectly etched; Matt’s watch, his student ID, and a quarter were laid out by the fence like props. All that told DeBree a pretty clear story about what had happened there, including something I’d never heard in all the reporting of the crime – that Matt had made a run for it that night. First, he had desperately "tried to stay in the truck," Rob believes. Once out, he tried to escape. "Henderson had made a statement to Chasity Pasley that she told us about, that Matt was able to break free and tried to run. And according to what we were able to see at the crime scene, we could pretty well put that together. His wristwatch was located twenty-three feet or so from where he was tied up, and I think that’s essentially what he was trying to do, was just to run. He was tackled down; then he was drug over to the fence and tied by Henderson."
Actually Mr. Sullivan, The Facts Are Staring You In The Face.
I see Andrew Sullivan is still trying to make that 20/20 hit piece on Matthew Shepard into something it isn’t…namely journalism…
I don’t doubt that homophobia fueled the disgusting murder. But I am unconvinced it was the sole motive. ABC’s 20/20 report brought some serious facts to the table – most specifically the crystal meth binge that the killers had been on, and the original motive being possibly robbery of someone McKinney knew casually
No…No…and, No…
To: Andrew Sullivan
From: Bruce Garrett
Subject: What Facts?
You’re still trying to make that 20/20 episode into something it isn’t…a serious exploration of the circumstances of Matthew Shepard’s death. There is nothing confusing or mysterious about what happened that night. It is in fact, one of the best documented cases of a gay bashing/murder, with that classic aspect of overkill that such murders almost always have. Yeah…they robbed him. But had be been heterosexual, a robbery would have been all that it was.
The facts are there, staring you in the face…you’re just not paying attention to them. Question: if McKinney and Shepard knew each other, then why did he ask Shepard if he could read his license plates?
Both sides agreed that McKinney committed the murder, with Custis actually using that legal term in his closing argument. The points of contention boiled down to whether the act was premeditated or the result of extreme intoxication.
Prosecutor Cal Rerucha alluded to testimony that McKinney was actually sober at the time of the killing, and focused on his final request for Shepard to read McKinney’s license plate as the most damning proof of premeditation — allegedly proving that McKinney intentionally killed Shepard to make sure he could never be a witness in a case against him.
If they knew each other, even casually, then this is pointless. Shepard already can identify him. But there it is.
If you have any doubts about what was going on that night, I suggest you do what I did. Go to Laramie, and drive the route Shepard’s killers took from the bar they picked him up at, to the fence where they beat him to the edge of death. I have family in California and I regularly drive out to visit them because I love seeing America from the road. One year I detoured to Laramie and just to see for myself.
Well you can’t get to the fence now from the road: there are signs warning you that it’s a private driveway now. But you can take the drive from where the bar was to close enough to where the fence is and I am here to tell you that you won’t get halfway there before it becomes sickeningly clear that it may have started out as a robbery in the bar, but by the time the two of them got that 112 pound kid in the truck and started heading out of town it wasn’t that anymore. They could have robbed him anywhere along that route pushed him out of the truck and gotten safely away. Hell, they could have put a bullet in his head and dumped his body out in various spots along that route where nobody would likely have seen anything. Drive the route late at night. I did it one July, but doing it around the time of year of the killing would be even better, because the route would be even darker, the air much colder, the driver even less likely to see other people out there. It is very clarifying.
You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond. Into the rolling sage. Into the darkness. I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive west and back toward town or drive east for miles and miles to Happy Jack Road. So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. Into the darkness. Where no one would see. Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time. They made an effort to take him where they did, and that only makes sense if they planned to beat the living daylights out of that poor kid, simply for being a homosexual, because he disgusted them. Perhaps…perhaps…because they disgusted themselves, and now they had a queer they could take it out on.
I repeat: if McKinney and Shepard knew each other, then why did he ask Shepard if he could read his license plates? Oh…and Doc O’Connor says they were never together in his limo. And the detectives found no evidence of any kind of drug connection to the crime. But who are you going to believe…the detectives or the killer’s friends? All 20/20 did was take the drug saturated gossip of the friends of Shepard’s killers and elevate that to "serious questions" about the killing. Their testimony is contradicted in so many ways by both the evidence and the testimony of the detectives that it’s impossible to see what 20/20 did as anything other then a hit piece.
But if you have doubts, like I said, go there and drive that route for yourself. Do it around the same time of night as Shepard’s killers kidnapped him. Try to keep a picture in your mind of those two thugs with a 112 pound kid in their truck, driving that route, and all they have in mind is robbing him. Trust me, it won’t last long.
There Is No Morality That Stands On A Bedrock Of Lies
Via Dan Savage… I’ve been railing online since the early 1990s about how essentially immoral the anti-gay religious right is. How the scorched earth take no prisoners war they’ve been waging against gay people demands absolute renunciation of everything fine and decent a human being can possibly be, systematically strips away any human nobility they might have possessed, any aspiration to honor and justice and truth, any higher emotion then simple, relentless, pure as venom hate. The culture war leaches out of them anything decent they might ever have been, leaving behind a pathetic caricature of a human being, whose only purpose in life is hating someone a little more today then they did yesterday.
The Moral Majority. Family Values. Traditional Values. Christian. God Fearing. Bible Believing. I grew up in that milieu, and the people waving those flags today have utterly no relation to any of that. None. Morality, virtue, values, these are not things they aspire to, they are masks they hide behind. Time and again back in the Usenet days, I would find myself arguing with a bigot who told me with easy confidence that I didn’t want to get into an argument about morality, so thoroughly had they co-opted the meaning behind the words. Time and again I would beat them over their pathetic heads with their own cheapshit failures of moral character. I was raised in a Baptist household, and I know how fire and brimstone are done. Often I wished that I could see others doing the same, rather then conceding the moral argument to a bunch of gutter crawling louts. Listening to James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Lou Sheldon, et. al., yap, yap, yapping about morality is like listening to Al Capon bellyaching about crime.
These are not moral people. They are thieves in the house of human virtue, leaching off the efforts of better men and women who have tried over the ages to lift humanity from the caves to the stars. They steal from those of us who love life, and love humanity, and love this good earth and want to leave it a little better for our having walked upon it, the tools we have uncovered over the centuries for testing right from wrong, true from false, good from evil, and turn them against us, to drag us down into their gutter, so that they will shine. They have preached for so long that they are the keepers of civilization’s essential virtues that many of us have come to believe it. They are vampires, feeding on them, never to be nourished by them.
If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that I lived long enough to see the moral crusade being brought right back to them. Here’s a video from YouTube user robtish that shows in neon lights how horribly warped the moral compass is over at the Traditional Values Coalition. What do you call a people who claim FBI statistics show only a small number of violent crimes were committed against homosexuals in 2007, while omitting, among other violent crimes, the category of murder from the tally? Moral? Virtuous? Christian?
This is what the culture war does to its soldiers. It strips them of everything within them that could have been fine and noble and decent. No higher virtue then hating the enemy is allowed to live within you. Not honor, not reason, not any sense of right and wrong is allowed. Hate does not share power with anything else a human heart might be capable of. You let it in, and it will consume you. There is the evidence…right there, laughing in your face.
For the past couple weeks or so, the net has been all abuzz about that almost too campy to be real National Organization For Marriage ad…you know…the Scary Gathering Homosexual Menace Storm ad. The National Organization For Marriage said it was spending 1.5 million dollars to saturate several New England states considering same sex marriage with it.
Listen okay…just listen. When some group you only vaguely ever heard of before suddenly bursts into the national dialogue with millions of dollars to spend on anti-gay advertising, the very first fucking thing that should cross your mind is: Where Did The Money Come From?
That was my first thought, but I didn’t see anyone else out there who seemed to be sharing it. I knew that the usual suspects, Forcus On Your The Family and other religious right groups were actually hurting for money since Proposition 8 drained their coffers of what little was left. They’re just not raking in the dough from the faithful like they used to, since the Bush Gang started eating the life savings of all those older folks in the pews. So where the hell did the National Organization For Marriage suddenly get one and a half million fucking dollars to wage a targeted media campaign in New England?
I figured I’d wait and see, because sooner or later someone was going to turn that rock over and see what maggots crawled out of it. Swear to God I thought it was going to be one of the usual right wing billionaires funding this. Ahmanson most likely…
Tomorrow Californians Against Hate will be launch a six-state online ad campaign in the Northeast to let everybody know that NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, is a front group for the Mormon Church. Banners ads will appear on the capital city hometown papers of states currently in play for marriage equality: NY, NJ, DE, ME, NH, and RI.
Jesus Christ…why couldn’t Joseph Smith have sold extended automobile warranties or hedge fund shares or something?
Divide the nation, Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan told him, and we’ll have the bigger half. Several decades of culture war later, the right has simply led a fairly sizable slice of America into a kind of mental prison more lock tight then anything old Joe Stalin, Mao or Goebbels could have wished for in their wildest dreams. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers explaining something I’ve seen with my own eyes in my own family, and among folks who once upon a time were friends of mine…
I celebrated Easter yesterday with my ultra conservative family. I love my family but they have gone so far to the right over the past 8 years that it is difficult to have any sort of discussion with them. I think they are typical of conservatives born in the baby boom. They are scarred by the culture wars and the hatred they have for the left is so strong that it becomes disturbing.
That hatred, let it be said, didn’t start with Reagan. It started with Nixon. These are the folks of my own generation and earlier, who cheered on the hard hats as they bashed the hippies protesting racism, the Vietnam war, and fought for women’s rights and sexual liberty. You need to remember about this crowd that they thought that the twin beds in Lucy and Ricky’s television apartment and the fact that even when Lucy was clearly "with child" nobody was allowed to utter the word "pregnant" on TV was as perfectly appropriate for TV as Fred Flintstone selling cigarettes. Separate But Equal was working just fine until some communist inspired uppity blacks and a bunch of New York Jews started agitating everyone. A woman’s place was in the house cooking dinner for her husband not in the workplace unless she was too ugly to find a man and maybe those women could be secretaries or nurses or waitresses or something. And the more horrifying symbol of social decay, the biggest threat to the sanctity of American family life wasn’t homosexuality or even the Communist Menace, it was males wearing their hair so long it went below the collar.
These people weren’t scarred by the culture wars. They were scarred by the shock, shock of seeing that there were other people in the world who didn’t buy into their racist, sexist, war mongering moral values. Let’s see how well they’ve matured over the years shall we…?
So with this in mind I compiled a few themes from the days discussions that you might find interesting (or horrifying). None of this is ground breaking but it is interesting to see these generalizations about the current conservative movement be personified in ones family.
1. Total insulation from MSM.
Everyone refuses to read the New York Times or Washington Post. Sunday morning while getting ready for Church I put on "Meet the Press" and my father looked on with disgust and changed the channel to Fox News. At dinner I brought up an article in The Economist that was critical of Barack Obama and my uncle said that it was a socialist rag.
2. Distrust of centrists When discussing the future of the Republican party I suggested that we needed to create a bigger tent and avoid social issues that alienated us from younger voters. My GRANDMOTHER responded that we don’t need the back benchers like Christopher Buckley dictating our principles. I think that line was straight from the Mark Levin show.
3. Neoconservative aspirations The most interesting part of the day, was that so much of the discussion focused on the Somali Pirate issue. It was the story of the day, but I didn’t think their was that much to talk about. Surely, not as interesting as talking about Iran, Obama’s budget, the economy etc. However we spent most of the day discussing Obama’s lackluster response to the issue and the weakness he displayed in not acting quicker. My father was incensed that the media kept referring to this as a crime rather then an act of terrorism. His suggestion was to engage in a land war in Somalia…
This tracks pretty well with my own personal experiences, particularly among a few ersatz friends of the Republican Persuasion who kept right on voting for the Shrub even when his party waged one of the most blistering anti-gay election campaigns in American history. They get their news from FOX. As terrified of them as the mainstream news media is, the hard core Still avoids it like it was radioactive, and read only their own tribal publications.
Let me tell you a wee story about that. After I’d been to Memphis to show my support for an Ex-Gay Survivor’s conference, I noticed that Time Magazine did a story that week on gay teens that touched on how this new generation of gay teens is often pressured by their families into ex-gay camps. So I figure I’ll pick up a copy on the drive back home. My drive took me east on I-40 to I-81 and up the backbone of Virginia. Starting around just north of Galax I began to check the drugstores and WalMarts for copies. What I found was that nowhere…and I mean nowhere I stopped, and I must have stopped at dozens of places on the way home…had Any mainstream news magazines for sale on their racks anywhere between Hillsville and Winchester Virginia. Not just no Time, but no Newsweeks, no U.S. News…nada…nothing. Maybe there were some to be found somewhere in that stretch of countryside…but I never found any near the highway until I got to Winchester and pulled into a shopping mall. And the young lady behind the counter gave me a dirty look when she saw what I was buying.
They don’t want to even hear it now. And they don’t have to. They can get their news exclusively from tribal sources. But those sources are anything but grass roots. They imagine they are part of a disenfranchised grass roots majority that was…somehow…denied power that is rightfully theirs by a variety of secret liberal-communist-socialist-homosexual cabals. In fact, they are almost completely owned by right wing billionaires and corporate America.
Case in point…this sad, odd, pathetic tea protest. I’m going to steal this post from Digby (who you should read more often if you don’t already) because it pretty well sums it all up…
Following up on Krugman’s column today and the shrieking and rending of garments by the rightwing, I think it’s it’s probably important to make very clear why the tea-bagger parties are not a grassroots uprising.
The right seems to want us to believe that Fox News is promoting this non-stop as a genuine news event rather than a sponsor — despite the fact that it is an event which hasn’t happened yet. They are, by definition, promoting it.
Local news organizations, which are reporting on the planning for this event either do not realize that they are being spun by a front group pretending to be a grassroots organizing campaign or they don’t care. That front group is called Freedom Works, which presents itself as the conservative answer to Move On.
The MoveOn.org domain name was registered on September 18, 1998 by computer entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the married cofounders of Berkeley Systems, an entertainment software company known for the flying toaster screen saver and the online game show "You Don’t Know Jack." After selling the company in 1997, Blades and Boyd became concerned about the level of "partisan warfare in Washington" following revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The MoveOn website was launched initially to oppose the Republican-led effort to impeach Clinton. Initially called "Censure and Move On," it invited visitors to add their names to an online petition stating that "Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country."
At the time of MoveOn’s public launch on September 24, it appeared likely that its petition would be dwarfed by the effort to oust Clinton. A reporter who interviewed Blades on the day after the launch wrote, "A quick search on Yahoo turns up no sites for ‘censure Clinton’ but 20 sites for ‘impeach Clinton,’" adding that Scott Lauf’s impeachclinton.org website had already delivered 60,000 petitions to Congress. Salon.com reported that Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing commentator, had collected 13,303 names on her website, resignation.com, which called on Clinton to resign.
Within a week, however, support for MoveOn had grown. Blades calls herself an "accidental activist. … We put together a one-sentence petition. … We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives. A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives." MoveOn also recruited 2,000 volunteers to deliver the petitions in person to members of the House of Representatives in 219 districts across America, and directed 30,000 phone calls to district offices.
Here’s how it does business:
MoveOn uses e-mail as its main conduit for communicating with members, sending action alerts at least once a week.
The MoveOn.org web site also uses multi-media, including videos, audio downloads, and images. In addition to communicating via the Internet, MoveOn advertises using traditional print and broadcast media, as well as billboards, bus signs, and bumper stickers, digital versions of which are downloadable from its web site. It also contains an area called the "Action Forum", which functions much like a traditional electronic discussion group. The Action Forums act as a grassroots organization allowing members to propose priorities and strategies.
Through this grassroots methodology, MoveOn collaborates with groups like Meetup.com in organizing street demonstrations, bake sales, house parties, and other opportunities for people to meet personally and act collectively in their own communities.
Some of its core principles are that it is not dependent on foundation money and that it has the ability to use ‘hard money’ – as opposed to grants and tax-deductible contributions – which enables them to be partisan, contribute to political campaigns, and exercise clout in the political process.
Stealing a page from MoveOn.org‘s successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks – a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America – hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.
The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE’s "grassroots" following.
Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.
If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The organization’s new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."
The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush’s father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush’s right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.
And here’s how it operates:
FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy‘s revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).
And like their progenitors they get millions from the conservative foundations.
Can we all see the difference between Freedom Works and Move On? I knew that you could.
This is what a grass roots movement looks like in conservative America. It’s fake. Just like all the rhetoric about individual freedom, Jesus and family values. Just as The Washington Times could not survive without the infusions of large piles of cash from messianic crackpot Sun Myung Moon, nearly every so-called conservative grass-roots organization could not exist without the largess of corporate America and the stable of right wing billionaires who have been funding the modern conservative movement since the culture wars began in the 60s. Scaife. Ahmanson. Coors. Bradley. Olin. Koch. These people, and the rest of what Eisenhower warned as The Military Industrial Complex, are the crack epidemic poisoning the veins of our country. Without them Americans might actually be getting along with one another reasonably well.
And families like those of Sullivan’s reader might not be living in a 21st century cave, complete with nice TVs and radios that stroke their bar stool conceits, making goddamned sure they see of the world outside only what the ayatollahs of the hard right want them to see, and think Exactly what they want them to think. They are tools, useful idiots, disposable human lives in the war a small but very powerful group of billionaires and corporate interests have been waging for decades now on the American Dream.
What you need to understand: many of them made that of themselves willingly. Joyfully even. Better to live in a cave, then to know that the heathens aren’t monsters after all, but other human beings, happy and content with their own lives just as they are. Anything to not have to know that.
Exactly what Lopez said in Matteson’s class is unclear. Lopez turned down an interview request, Matteson did not respond to e-mails, and French said he did not know enough about the speech to detail it.
So we still don’t know what it was he actually said. And that’s the crux of the entire episode. But…dig it. Lopez, the kid who is suing (through the courtesy of the culture warriors at the Alliance Defense Fund), isn’t saying. Now…why would he not want to tell anyone what it was he actually said? Better yet…why would couldn’t the reporters covering this story not be bothered to find out?
His Alliance Defense Fund mouthpiece (French) says Lopez spoke two verses from the bible that "had nothing to do with homosexuality." But…look at this…he’s not saying what they were. If he knows for a fact that they had nothing to do with homosexuality, then he knows what they were and he can tell the reporters what they were. If he doesn’t know what Lopez actually said then he can’t say that they had nothing to do with homosexuality.
They’re being very evasive here. It’s not hard to figure why.
The unemployment numbers are dreadful. But for once, there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon: conservatives are going Galt.
"While they take to the streets politically, untold numbers of America’s wealth producers are going on strike financially. Dr. Helen Smith, a Tennessee forensic psychologist and political blogger, dubbed the phenomenon "Going Galt" last fall. It’s a reference to the famed Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged," in which protagonist John Galt leads the entrepreneurial class to cease productive activities in order to starve the government of revenue. (…)
The perpetual Borrow-Spend-Panic-Repeat machine in Washington depends on the capitulation of the wealth producers. There’s only one monkey wrench that can stop the redistributionist thieves’ engine. It’s engraved with the word: Enough."
"Just think what kind of nightmare scenario we might be inflicted with if the titans of finance who’ve made up such a large proportion of high earners in recent years were to pull back on their efforts! I shudder."
Unfortunately, we don’t know how many of America’s wealth producers are going to go on strike, since their number is "untold".
There’s a wee problem here that I’m sure has been spotted by the gasbags on the right. Vis:
But every one of them will free up work for someone else. And thanks to eight years of Bush’s economic policies, we are not short of unemployed people to take up the slack.
I am puzzled by one thing, however: the fact that none of the people who advocate "going Galt" seem to have actually done it.
I appreciate your puzzlement Hilzoy. Keep looking at the sentence you wrote about how every one of them that goes Galt frees up a job for someone else and you get the picture. They know damn well that quitting isn’t going to prove anything, other then how worthless they actually were in the grand economic scheme of things. Let’s face it, these are the folks who have been advocating, for decades now, the kinds of deregulation blue sky that got us into this mess in the first place. Wealth producers? More like wealth leaches.
I’m not clear whether the point of "going Galt" is to stop doing creative or productive work, as Rand’s novel would suggest, or trying to lower one’s income, as many of the people quoted in storiesabout "goingGalt" claim.
To stop doing productive work, you’d have had to have been doing productive work to begin with.
But as best I can tell, the people advocating this are doing neither. Consider:
Rep. John Campbell has neither resigned from Congress nor given back any part of his salary.
Michelle Malkin is still blogging, and still seems to be on the PJMedia payroll.
Dr. Helen, who is "still mulling over ways that she can "go Galt,"" has not taken any of the obvious steps: stopping blogging, giving up her career, severing her connection to PJTV, or even not taking BlogAds. Neither has her husband.
Cassy at Wizbang, who says it’s "time to go Galt", doesn’t seem to have stopped blogging either, and Wizbang is still running ads.
It’s almost enough to make me think they’re just posturing.
Like…when they’re going on about homosexuality and sexual morality? Personal accountability? Let’s face it, if it weren’t for the right wing billionaire dole most of these deep thinkers wouldn’t have an income, let alone a platform. They’re gasbags. And I’ll endure lectures on the evils of government spending and taxation from a lot of people, but not a congressman. Especially not a republican congressman.
Let’s take a closer look at this ersatz grass roots revolt against President Obama’s economic policies…shall we?
Populist revolt against the U.S. government is all the rage in the Republican Party, these days. As they tell the story, the public is so outraged by the recovery and reinvestment efforts of the Obama administration that Americans everywhere are turning out to overthrow the tyrannical king of the federal government by re-enacting the Boston Tea Party.
Funny thing, though: it turns out this whole "populist" movement was a planned PR stunt funded by big-money right-wing backers of the GOP who specialize in faking grassroots movements to drum up opposition to Barack Obama.
Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned–from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake–like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.
Playboy bloggers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine pulled together all the pieces of this puzzle in an incredible expose (Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine):
What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.
As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.
Go read the whole thing. It’s the right-wing billionaire club we’ve all come to know and love, screwing the political process so they can keep screwing the middle-class. If you thought the fight was over when Obama won, you are sadly mistaken.
If we could just get rid of these drooling morons we might have a rational discussion in this country about the economy and how to clean up the mess the billionaire teat sucking jackasses have brought down on all of us. Going Galt would be a blessing for this country…the best thing they’ve ever done for it. So, fat chance of that happening.
Jim Burroway makes a good catch I’d missed when looking at the new anti-gay ad campaign created by Campaign Secrets…the one that shows an unseen gay sniper putting a family and more specifically their little children in the crosshairs. This one is good…it really says it all…
By the way, we also learn that public schools no longer celebrate Father’s Day. Wait a minute. That couldn’t be because it’s celebrated on the third Sunday in June while school’s out, could it? Naah, it’s a much better story when it’s all the gays’ fault.
Dig it. Never mind that Father’s Day happens after the school year ends…just remember that the homosexuals have forced schools to stop celebrating Father’s Day.
Now…this kind of crap may actually fool a lot of people, not all of whom necessarily want someone to feed them pre-fabricated lies about gays they can pass around without taking responsibility for it. Some people will actually hear this and think…Wow…the gays took Father’s Day out of the schools… But you know goddamned well the people who made that ad knew that it was horseshit, and almost certainly so did the folks who bought it. And it’s a safe bet that its target audience doesn’t care if it’s truthful or not.
There’s your moral crusade right there. There’s your righteousness.
The Fine Art Of Inflaming Violent Passions Toward Homosexuals
Via Pam’s House Blend…and as of now racing across the net like a fire. West Virginia Christianists are gearing up for a push to enact an anti same-sex marriage amendment in their state. As always, it isn’t enough to simply make a case for heterosexual supremacy. They have to demonize gay people too. Their latest ad starts out with the image of a gay sniper putting a heterosexual family, and more specifically their little children, in the cross hairs. They are being targeted, to be gunned down, by some the homosexuals. Here’s a screen shot:
Bear in mind that this ad is running in a state that’s maybe only a tad less armed to the teeth then Texas. And the message of this particular sequence is crystal clear: The homosexuals are going to kill your family, starting with your children. Of course they’ll insist its only a metaphor. They don’t mean that homosexuals are Literally going to kill your family. Naturally all the West Virginians who see this ad will understand that.
This is what gets gay people killed in this country every year. And make no mistake, the people creating and the people running these ads are well aware of that fact. But we are not so much human beings as cockroaches to them. They want us gone. They want us eliminated. If the state won’t do what Leviticus commands, then maybe Bubba will…
The video is below. The sniper shot comes in at about .53 seconds. Then it’s another four minutes plus warning everyone about the threat the homosexuals pose to families and children. In 1977 Jerry Falwell stood beside Anita Bryant, who was then fighting to have Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance repealed by popular vote, and told a room full of reporters that “A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.” Now they are, almost literally, telling people in West Virginia that we do in fact intend to kill them, and kill their children. Gay people are going to die because of this ad.
Pam over at the Blend notes this same group who made the ad…Campaign Secrets…also created an attack ad against the AARP back in 2005. AARP’s crime back then was opposing Bush’s plan to let the stock market play with your social security pension money. To discredit AARP, Campaign Secrets cooked up this little gem:
Dig it. The AARP is wrong about social security, because it hates our men in uniform and loves faggots. That, literally, was the message.
A classroom dispute at Los Angeles City College in the emotional aftermath of Proposition 8 has given rise to a lawsuit testing the balance between 1st Amendment rights and school codes on offensive speech.
Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a "fascist bastard" and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.
When Lopez tried to find out his mark for the speech, the professor, John Matteson, allegedly told him to "ask God what your grade is," the suit says.
Whenever I see a story like this one pop up I scan down the article for the words "Alliance Defense Fund" and I am seldom dissapointed. That’s Pat Robertson’s ACLU evil mirror and it exists, not so much to defend the rights of Christians as to inflame religious passions in the mob toward secular government. Whenever you see the Alliance Defense Fund in a news story, the first thing you have to assume is that most of what you are reading is Alliance Defense Fund spin, because they’re very good at finding reporters who are too lazy to fact check them.
This story is a case in point. Your first reaction may be to question the wisdom of calling a student a fascist bastard in class. Certainly telling a student to ask God what their grade is was way out of line. Perhaps you didn’t notice this little tidbit in the L.A. Times story…
The Los Angeles Community College District’s offices were closed Friday for the Presidents Day holiday, and the general counsel, Camille A. Goulet, could not be reached. But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.
The Alliance Defense Fund is a master at this. They tossed this story out on a weekend, when nobody from the school district would be available for immediate comment. That way, they get to spin the story the entire weekend and through Monday, the holiday, without fear of anyone hearing both sides of the story.
But in a letter to Alliance, the district said it deemed Lopez’s complaint "extremely serious in nature" and had launched a private disciplinary process.
In the letter, Dean Allison Jones also said that two students had been "deeply offended" by Lopez’s address, one of whom stated that "this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom."
We are only getting the ADL’s spin on this story…but even in that spin there is a germ of something not-quite-right. It wasn’t just the professor, but at least two students in the class who were offended enough by the speech to register complaints.
But, you say, even so, the ADL’s side of it is serious enough. Professors shouldn’t be calling students fascists. In class. Other students should be told to respect the sincerely held religious beliefs of their peers, no matter how offensive those beliefs may seem to them. But notice the one thing you aren’t hearing from the ADL, or in fact, any of the other news sources: the speech the student gave.
It isn’t there. Not in the L.A. Times. Not in the San Jose Mercury News. Not in the ADL press release. Not even in the right wing loony bin that is Town Hall even, where you would expect to find nothing but hosannas for outright Christainist Fascism. The closest you get to the actual content of the speech in Town Hall, is this:
In November, Jonathan Lopez attempted to give his informative speech on God and the ways he has seen God act miraculously in his life and in the lives of others. In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible.
But before Lopez was finished with his speech, Professor Matteson interrupted him. After calling Lopez a “fascist bastard” in front of other students, Matteson invited students to leave the class if they had been offended. When no one left, the professor dismissed the entire class.
But in fact even the ADL conceeds that two students were offended enough to register their complaints. But look at that carefully. In the middle of that speech, Lopez spoke of God and morality and read the dictionary definition of marriage. He also read two verses from the Bible. Would one of those verses have been this one…perchance…?
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
We don’t know. All we know at this point, is that something was said during that class that shocked and outraged enough of the people who heard it that…well…what exactly? The suit doesn’t accuse the school of actually penalizing Lopez in any way, other then having his speech cut short and being ridiculed in front of the class. Which I’m sure has never happened to any other college student in a public speaking class. Oh yes, it accuses the the professor of making threats of retaliation…but no actual retaliation is in the ADL’s accusations. When you look at this one critically, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything at all other then…well…a lot of empty speechifying.
So what is this all about? Simple. It’s about generating a news story about Christians being persecuted to inflame the mob…to keep it fired up for the ongoing culture war. I strongly suspect that when we eventually find out what it was this lout actually said to his classmates it won’t seem such a clear cut act of religious persecution after all.
Of course…the reporters on the story could simply have done their damn jobs. The obvious thing here is to dig up what Lopez actually said. Nobody seems to have bothered doing that. And the ADL and Town Hall would have their reasons one strongly suspects, for not telling. Where are the goddamned journalists in this country? They all retire or something?
In the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, and predictably, you heard the voices from the back bench bellyaching that we were all fighting the wrong fight. Why are we making such a big deal out of marriage they asked, when we still lack basic anti discrimination protections in jobs and housing? Why are we putting so much energy into a fight about same-sex marriage, which most of the country is against anyway, when gay people can still be fired from their jobs, denied housing, denied service in stores and restaurants? Let’s fight for the basics first, they say.
Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative — a push for legal protections for gay and transgender Utahns — has drawn hundreds of marchers to a Capitol Hill rally, thousands of petition signatures and even broad-based support in statewide opinion polls.
The initiative also has ignited a backlash, led by defenders of "traditional marriage" who want to crush the effort.
Rather than "common ground," Gayle Ruzicka and the Constitutional Defense of Marriage Alliance are touting "common sense." And a Salt Lake City-based conservative think tank, The Sutherland Institute, wants Utahns to stand on "sacred ground" instead.
"The family is the central unit of society, and so our efforts in this regard are ultimately to protect the traditional family and protect marriage," said Sutherland spokesman Jeff Reynolds, who acknowledged Equality Utah has run a "very effective" campaign.
Next week, his group will kick off its Sacred Ground Initiative, a counteroffensive aimed at defeating the five gay-rights bills, all sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, that make up the Common Ground Initiative.
"The message [from opponents] is that our bills are an attack on marriage — which is exactly what they’re not," said Will Carlson, Equality Utah’s public-policy manager. The proposed laws range from protecting someone from being fired for being gay to establishing a statewide domestic-partner registry that would afford some legal protections, such as hospital visitation, to same-sex couples.
Emphasis mine. Here’s why we’re fighting for same-sex marriage. Because every fight we’ve ever waged as a people has been turned into a fight over same-sex marriage by our enemies. Watch it happen again in the fight for these so-called "common ground" gay rights bills in Utah. Just like it’s happened every time since the days of Antia Bryant and Save Our Children in Florida.
It’s ironic that the bigots understand our fight better then many of us do. The same logic that says it’s wrong to deny a gay man a job simply because he is a gay man, what do you know, leads in a straight and narrow path to the conclusion that it is also wrong to deny a gay man the right to marry the man he loves, simply because both of them are gay. To concede it in the one case is to concede it in the other. Though our enemies deny that rhetorically, you can see they know it perfectly well by how they turn every fight we engage in, for every meager right that heterosexuals take for granted every day, into a fight over same-sex marriage.
Deemphasize same-sex marriage all you want. Our enemies will underline it in neon. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to hold down a job. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for equal housing. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to adopt. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for safe schools. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting for the right to serve in the military. The homosexuals aren’t just fighting to repeal the sodomy laws. The homosexuals are fighting to make their perversion morally acceptable. They are fighting for the honor and the dignity of their perverted sexual relationships.
Yes. Yes we are. That’s the heart of it. Marriage isn’t central to this fight, but it’s damn close. Closer then anything else in civil law. If our sexual relationships are morally and civilly the equal of heterosexuals’ then not only is there no reason to deny us a job, there is no reason to deny us the right to marry. That is why every fight in this struggle, is a fight over same-sex marriage.
I’ll Take The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same For 1000 Alex…
Via Brad DeLong… Now I see that the republican bellyaching over contraceptives is even more dishonest then just their usual crude sexual mores posturing…
Bad Faith Economics: As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith…. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”…
Emphasis mine. And it get’s better…
[T]he bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created…. It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)…
Nice. They keep this up throughout the recession and they’ll be lucky if they get more votes next election then Lyndon LaRouche.
How To Wrest News From The TV In 21st Century America
Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese. But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington. You just have to adjust your perspective a tad.
For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.
One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.
EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.
Rule of thumb: When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.
What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean. Swell. That’s really swell. Glad to hear it. But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?
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