Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.
ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchanges, which former pages say were sent by Foley, using the screen name Maf54, to two different boys under the age of 18.
This message was dated April 2003, at approximately 7 p.m., according to the message time stamp.
Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too
The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms.
Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don’t want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:
The House voted that evening on HR 1559, Emergency War Time supplemental appropriations.
According to another message, Foley also invites the teen and a friend to come to his house near Capitol Hill so they can drink alcohol.
Teen: are you going to be in town over the veterans day weekend
Maf54: I may be now that your coming
Maf54: who you coming to visit
Teen: haha good stuff
Teen: umm no one really
Maf54: we will be adjourned ny then
Teen: oh good
Maf54: by
Maf54: then we can have a few drinks
Maf54: lol
Teen: yes yes ;-)
Maf54: your not old enough to drink
Teen: shhh…
Maf54: ok
Teen: that’s not what my ID says
Teen: lol
Maf54: ok
Teen: I probably shouldn’t be telling you that huh
Maf54: we may need to drink at my house so we don’t get busted
Uhm…Mark… You’re a Lawmaker…
Okay…at least one of these teens wasn’t nearly as embarrassed by this as the other one was. But there is still no excuse. What a kid may want to do with an adult is one thing. But part of being an adult is you know what your responsibility to kids is. And Foley was a lawmaker. That’s (if you’ve read your Constitution lately) what congress does. So…to recap…Foley walks away from a vote in progress, to have IM sex with a teenager, and then in another message suggests they all get together at his house for a little underage drinking where they might not get busted for it. Sweet. If either one of those kids grows up to be a responsible adult they won’t have Mark Foley to thank for setting an example.
And…not anyone in the republican leadership either. So remind me again, what is the value to young Americans to serve as congressional pages? I can see the value to the republican congress easy enough. Free labor…a handy pool of awe stricken kids who are easily manipulated into having sex…
What next was Mr. Hastert supposed to do with an elected Congressman? Assume that Mr. Foley was a potential sexual predator and bar him from having any private communication with pages? Refer him to the Ethics Committee? In retrospect, barring contact with pages would have been wise.
But in today’s politically correct culture, it’s easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts’ decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where’s Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?
So is the Wall Street Journal calling for a ban on gay congressmen then, on those same grounds? That was a rhetorical question. Without a doubt they would if they thought they could get away with it.
As if this was rocket science. All you have to do to grasp the magnitude of the failure on the part of the republican leadership is ask yourself if any warning flags should have been raised if a heterosexual congressman made comments about a female page’s body, and asked for pictures of her friend. I’ll bet most parents of teenage daughters would instantly pick up on the subtext of that kind of email. You don’t need to set different standards of behavior for gay adults. Just treat them the same as any heterosexual in a similar context.
I know…I know…it’s Capital Hill. Maybe they just need to set a minimum age of 70 to be a congressional page, or at least to be a republican page.
There’s a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate – they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander’s page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.
But that’s irrelevant, and here’s why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That’s what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn’t want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That’s just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.
[Emphasis mine] All these fuckers had to do was look into the matter. That’s fucking all. Didn’t matter if it was a heterosexual congressman or a gay one. If it looked even vaguely inappropriate all they fucking had to do was look into it. Maybe it amounts to nothing and then they just quietly drop it. But all they fucking had to do was lift their little finger and look into it and they didn’t. It took ABC one day, just one fucking day, to get to the rest of the horrid story. To blame all this on PC coddling of homosexuals is grotesque. But then the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is pretty much the same kind of creeps that are in the republican leadership.
That Wall Street Journal editorial fairly drips with longing for the old days. Back in the 1950s a scandal like this would have resulted in gay purges and witch hunts from one end of the country to the other, and these right wing louts are probably crying in their beer right this moment that it isn’t happening now, that America has matured enough regarding homosexuality that it isn’t going to go into wholesale convulsions of anti-gay hate for what one pathetic closet case republican did. Now all the old guard can do is piss and moan about political correctness while the rest of the nation looks on appalled at this complete failure of oversight on the part of a party that’s made Family Values its pet issue, and wonders, rightly, just how safe their children are from heterosexual republicans. There’s not a single person in the republican leadership who signed on to the Adam Walsh Act who isn’t involved somehow in this coverup.
U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, one of Washington’s leading advocates for missing and exploited kids, doesn’t like the idea of a clothes-free camp for teenagers. After reading a story Wednesday in the New York Times, he decided to raise a fuss.
Foley, running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Bob Graham, plans to deliver letters today to Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist, singling out Lake Como nudist resort in Land O’Lakes, which hosted a bare-skinned youth camp that ended last week.
Foley said the camp, sponsored by the American Association for Nude Recreation, appears to exploit children to make money.
The camps operate under a Florida law that allows people to be nude as long as they’re not lewd. Foley wonders if state statutes should change. Thus the letters to Bush and Crist.
"What’s wrong with your kids going to Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls or sports camps?" Foley, the West Palm Beach Republican, said Wednesday from Washington. "It’s beyond the pale that this is a normal way to bring up a 14-year-old child."
…
Foley, a fifth term congressman, denies that he’s raising the nude camping issue to bolster his chances for the Republican nomination for Senate.
Well your chances of holding any office at all are pretty slim now aren’t they?
The Representative Foley "scandal" is really worthy of a whole book on hypocrisy…
Deux…
On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys…
Trois…
On the other hand, we have a Democratic party that worships (not likes, WORSHIPS) a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive e-mails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…
Quatre…
We have a Republican man in Congress who sent e-mails to teenage boys asking them what they were wearing…
Cinq…
…and an entire party, the Democrats, whose primary constituency, besides the teachers’ unions, is homosexual men and lesbian women…
Six…
I hope it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys…
And Speaking Of Closet Cases That Shouldn’t Be Allowed Anywhere Near Kids…
Via Firedoglake…the unsurprises just keep on coming. Here’s another republican operative and closet case, Matt Drudge, on the despicable predatory sexual behavior of…wait for it…teenage boys …
And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the Internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You’re not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven’t got the whole story on this.
Well we’ve got the whole story on you Matt, now don’t we?
You could say "well Drudge, it’s abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet." Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven’t…they were talking about how many times they’d masturbated, how many times they’d done it with their girlfriends this weekend…all these things and these "innocent children." And this "poor" congressman sitting there typing, "oh am I going to get any," you know?
Well those shameless young hussies. Strutting their stuff in front of that poor closet case of a wack job republican congresscritter. Maybe next congress they’ll put them all in burkas just in case there are any grown adults on capital hill who can’t fucking control their libidos, let alone can’t remember that part of being an adult is Fucking Setting A Goddamn Example!
Obviously the difference between an adolescent and a child is that the teenager is becoming sexually mature. But the operative word there is becoming. At Minimum it is not the prerogative of grown adults to indulge that sexual inexperience and immaturity, to push a kid’s buttons when the kid is only just discovering that the buttons are even there to begin with, for the sake of their own greedy selfish urges…I won’t even dignify it with that beautiful word desire. Jesus Christ Almighty! Adults are supposed to be teaching and encouraging kids at that stage in their lives how to Fucking Manage Their Sexual Nature Responsibly And Honorably not exploiting their inexperience, their naivety, their adolescence, for pleasure, like they’re some kind of sexual junk food.At long last, at long fucking last, is there Anyone left in the republican party that knows how to be an adult?
I can see where a kid would be positively creeped out by what Foley was doing. But I’m 53 years old now, and I can see something else perfectly well: how deliberately, how calculatedly Foley was pushing that kid’s buttons. There is no mistaking it for what it is. Foley was taking sexual advantage of that kid…even if at that point he hadn’t laid a fucking hand on him. I can see how a kid would be creeped out. But as an adult I can see something more. At our age (Foley is a year younger then me it seems) even a guy who has very little life experience knows perfectly well where those buttons are, and just how to push them. That’s what’s so disturbing. Foley is sexually manipulating that kid and the kid sort-of seems to realize it, but he’s still too young to really grasp what’s going on the way a mature adult can.
And the profound embarrassment lurking just behind that kid’s words are palpable to me. Drudge it seems, can only see the surface bravado…but not the heart…of a kid. Why is that not surprising? Are they fucking all a bunch of sociopaths in the republican establishment?
A Republican staff member warned congressional pages five years ago to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley, according to a former page.
Matthew Loraditch, a page in the 2001-2002 class, told ABC News he and other pages were warned about Foley by a supervisor in the House Clerk’s office.
Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association, said the pages were told "don’t get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."
…
Pages report to either Republican or Democratic supervisors, depending on the political party of the member of Congress who nominate them for the page program.
Several Democratic pages tell ABC News they received no such warnings about Foley.
Mark Foley, co-author of the Internet Child Protection Act, supported by the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children, is discovered having Internet Chat Room Sex with a 16 year old former congressional page boy. At one time he had an 84 percent rating from the Christian Coalition. He’d voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act, refused to commit to repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and after being outed by a reporter for the Advocate, offered lukewarm opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment. He consistently refused to acknowledge his sexual orientation, even as it was an open secret on Capital Hill. But in the world of republican virtue and morals, being homosexual is alright, so long as you’re ashamed of it, so long as you keep your sexuality in the shadows, in the gutter, where they think it belongs…
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image…(Continued)
Via Atrios… The True Blue Patriotic Christian Americans responsible for covering up Mark Foley’s behavior with teenagers (that would be House Majority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Dennis Hastert) are planning a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood, who by the way, recently settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit with a young mistress who accused him of abuse. Pam’s House Blend had the details…
Rep. Don Sherwood reached a settlement Tuesday with a former mistress who accused him of abuse in a $5.5 million lawsuit, according to his lawyer.
Terms of the settlement between Sherwood, R-Pa., and Cynthia Ore, with whom he acknowledged a five-year affair, will remain confidential, said Paul Clark, a spokesman for Sherwood’s attorney, Bobby Burchfield.
"Attorneys for Cynthia Ore and Congressman Don Sherwood announced today that their clients have resolved their differences, and the lawsuit will be dismissed," Clark said, reading from a statement.
…Sherwood, a fourth-term congressman, is married with three daughters. He issued a statement this summer apologizing for the affair but denying he physically hurt Ore. He also said she never lived with him, which she had claimed in her lawsuit.
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image
Pam’s House Blend has a poll up, from the right wing World Net Daily, which asks the question…
What does the Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation mean for the Republican Party?
The highest affirmative response, at 37.66 percent, is…
What Foley did is inexcusable, but if the U.S. is to win the war on terror, republicans must win in November.
Well what a coincidence. As it turns out, 37 percent seems to be about the floor beyond which Bush’s approval ratings never seem to drop any lower, no matter what jackass thing he says or does. Iraq. Katrina. A mountain of debt amid corruption and cronyism that would make Grant blush. None of it seems to matter. Bush never gets below the mid thirties in the polls no matter what.
Well now we now where that 37 percent is coming from don’t we? This is the Bush power base talking. They are the 37 percent of True Blue American Patriots who will vote republican, even if it means putting a grown man who hits on vulnerable teenage boys back into office…for the sake of…what was it again? Oh yes…to bring America back to decent Christian Moral Values.
Remember this the next time some republican starts yapping at you about liberal moral relativism.
You know it’s a bad time for America, when the survivors of the Soviet gulags start sharing their jokes with us. Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, shares us this one in Sunday’s Post …
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."
Hahahaha…Get it?
This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.
Kinda makes you wonder why we fought the cold war anyway, if only to eventually become what the Soviet Union was, if not in principle then in practice. You can call a nation whose single party rule decrees that anyone, even its own citizens can be arrested, imprisoned and tortured on the sole say-so of the party leader a lot of things, but a civilized nation isn’t one of them.
But behold George Bush’s America. Remember when republicans were always bellyaching about liberals and "big brother" government? Well…it all turned out to be just a lot of empty rhetoric didn’t it? Look at what they’ve turned America into in just six short years of total control of the federal government.
Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?
Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.
Vladimir Bukovsky speaks from first hand experience here. Listen to him. This is our future if the republicans can get away with this.
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
And…You know what…I’m laughing in the faces of everyone who is surprised, let alone shocked at what things have come to now. We all knew who George Bush was long before he dragged America into this sewer. Never mind the gaming of the vote in Florida. Tucker Carlson give us the telling glimpse of the man behind the folksy mask in the premiere issue of the now defunct Talk Magazine, back in the summer of 1999…
In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn’t meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like, "What would you say to Governor Bush?" "What was her answer?" I wonder.
"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don’t kill me."
I must have look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking.
If that’s not stomach churning enough, Carlson also says that the exchange between Tucker and King that Bush mimicked never took place. It’s not the big lies Bush tells that you need to pay attention to…it’s the little needless ones like that. They say it all. This is the man the republicans put into the highest office in our land. This is the man they’ve all been marching in lock step with ever since. Now the republican congress of the United States of America is debating…as though a civilized nation considered such things even debatable…the use of torture, while the whole world watches. Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free…rooms are still available at Guantanamo Bay, and many other fine locations throughout the American Gulag Archipelago… There isn’t a gutter crawling despot in the world who can’t laugh at us now.
Is there anyone who read Carlson’s article, and who later watched Bush taking the oath of office, who didn’t see this moment coming?
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters.
The best bit is this:
When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, "If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?"
Maybe he wanted to see if your nose grows when you repeat the white house storyline Kent.
WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
… Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.
In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was "dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer."
Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer’s letter as of midafternoon Thursday. In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners "past or present" knew of the report’s existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was "shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?"
The report, written by two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of "on-location" news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules.
At that time, the agency pointed to evidence that "commonly owned television stations are more likely to carry local news than other stations."
And you just know that evidence was skewed to fit a pre-ordained ideological belief as opposed to any actual examination of the facts at hand. So when someone later on Did examine the evidence and saw what really happens when you let big media companies monopolize the local airwaves, that evidence was thoroughly destroyed. It wasn’t true, because it didn’t agree with the party line. It had to be destroyed. They probably danced in the paper shreds afterward.
Big corporate media monopolization is the single biggest reason why tv and radio are so worthless nowadays. Thank god for the Internet. And now that I think of it, that might be why the big media companies and news networks hate Al Gore so much.
A year after the World Trade Center towers fell, I attended a software developer’s seminar at Sun HQ in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks away from the big hole in the ground. Our classroom was well up one of those tall financial district towers and faced out toward the Statue of Liberty. On a hunch one afternoon during break I strolled to the other side of the building and sure enough, there would have been a glorious view of the twin towers there, had they still been standing. A little hesitantly I brought that up to our instructor, a young lady who seemed more then willing to talk about it. I guess a lot of people in that city still needed to talk about it then. Yes, she said, she had been at work there that day. Yes, you could see the towers clearly. In fact, she said, her co-workers on that side of the building saw the whole thing happen.
She sat at her desk in the front of our classroom during the afternoon break, telling us all this matter of factly. And as her story came out, what struck me was how little people know about what is happening to them, when they’re right in the middle of it. In the smoke and dust and confusion of the evacuation, as her and her office mates left the financial district to try and, somehow, make their way back to their homes when the streets were jammed, the bridges closed to traffic and the subways not running, nobody knew that one of the towers had already come down (they thought all the smoke and dust was from the fires), nobody knew if the attacks were still coming, and nobody knew which direction safety was. She told us that it was when she and her co-workers got to the Brooklyn Bridge, that it really hit her how bad their situation was. Some of her friends implored her to come with them to Brooklyn where it might be safer, while others feared the bridge itself would be the next target. She parted ways with some of her friends there, not knowing if she’d ever see them again.
It’s five years later, and many people in this country still don’t really know much about what happened that day. In all the anger over ABC/Disney’s right wing porn flick The Path To 9-11 (produced, unsurprisingly, by a secretive right wing network within the network…), I keep waiting for someone to preach a little fire and brimstone that ABC or any TV network, would dare produce and air a goddamned Docudrama on the anniversary of a terrorist attack that killed more Americans then died in Perl Harbor. A docudrama for Christ’s sake! Hey…how about…you know…a plain old Documentary? You know…one of those things where the events are recounted, Factually, and people who were there tell their stories, and some kind of sense is made of the chaos of the event? But then I must be living on another planet these days. Documentary? Factual? Oh good heavens no…we’re a Television Network…it isn’t our business to actually keep Americans informed about anything…
But it’s not as though Dear Leader has been anxious to keep us informed either. In fact one of the biggest sources of disinformation about 9-11 has been the Bush white house and the republican party. And that isn’t merely because doing that dispicably serves them politically. Joshua Marshall, writing about the relentless lying by Dick Cheney, posted this from a reader…
Speaking as a historian, no historians won’t be puzzling, not at all. A future historian might state, matter of factly, "Vice President Cheney, one of the administration’s most ardent advocates of war with Iraq, continued to maintain that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda long after the existence of such a connection had been disproved. Critics at the time noted that the Bush administration was unable to respond to changing circumstances in the Middle East because, instead of responding to new information, it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Subsequently historians have concluded this approach to problems was the chief reason for the Bush administration’s multiple failures, of which the debacle in Iraq is the most stunning – and, because of its lasting impact on America’s standing in the world – unfortunate example."
…it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Yeah. That’s the republican party I know and love. Your Gay and lesbian neighbors of the Stonewall generation have been seeing it for decades. Hell, we’ve had our faces rubbed in it time and time again. Never mind the facts…here’s what we believe… But don’t just go by us. Ask the men and women of American science what it’s been like since the republicans took charge…
A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the space agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency’s 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."
The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
And…about that age of the universe thing….
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
Of course. But…mind you…not a religious issue in the sense of…well…religion. But politics. The religion of the republican party is that it isn’t true, unless its in the party’s interest for it to be true. The god of the republican party, is the republican party.
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
I’ll tell you how. He was a party loyalist. No, no…don’t mistake him for a devoted creationist. That, he may well have been, but it wouldn’t have mattered. What mattered wasn’t his devotion to god, but to the party. That’s why he got the job.
The path to 9-11 didn’t start with Osama bin Laden. It didn’t even start at the signpost that read The Ends Justify The Means. That doesn’t get you there. There’s a turnoff from there marked We’re On The Side Of God, but that doesn’t quite get you there either. Somewhere down that road there is a signpost that reads: Truth Is What We Say It Is. Take that road and eventually you come to 9-11. And Iraq. And Abu Ghraib. And Guantanamo Bay. And Katrina. And our slowly warming planet earth. The Taliban are resurgent. Iraq is in chaos, and now we learn that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who even thought about a plan for stabilizing it after the invasion. al Qaeda is more popular now in the middle east then it has ever been. Our military is stretched so thin it’s putting middle aged men and women back into uniforms they haven’t worn in years and recruting autistic teenagers. And as long as the Bush gang is in power, we are staying the course. Because truth is what they say it is. Except it isn’t.
The one supremely damnable thing about what the Bush gang has done to America is this: We had more then lies to fight the terrorists with, and yet they chose to fight with lies. But understand this one thing: lies were all they knew how to fight with. This serenely clueless mendacity on display didn’t just happen overnight. It didn’t even start with the stealing of the vote in Florida in 2000. Anyone remember the Brooks Brother’s Riot? For certain, there isn’t a single one of those "rioters" who couldn’t look you in the face, even now, and tell you that what happened was a spontaneous act of local voter anger, even as they know damn well it was orchestrated and performed exclusively by republican operatives. Truth is what we say it is… Or as one Bush gang member famously put it:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
What they did: Turn the moral power of liberty and justice for all into a dirty joke every tinpot dictator in the world, and even the Taliban, could laugh at. But that’s because they hated it too. The Bush administration is an American cultural catastrophe that was in the making for decades. Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors. We’ve had to endure their single-minded march away from justice, away from reason, away from the reality based community, for decades.
Wait…you just gotta love this. A Pennsylvania pro-family group… Later in the article you discover that it’s the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association. Agape Press is owned and operated by the American Family Association. So it isn’t merely "A Pennsylvania pro-family group", but themselves that they are are talking about here. They can’t even get the first sentence of their "news article" out without being deceptive. Not one single sentence into it and they’re already being deceitful. If there is an answer to all the wickedness in this world, a way out of sinfulness and toward redemption and hope, their religion sure isn’t it, is it.
But…anyway…
…suggests that the recent arrest of a University of Pennsylvania professor on child sex charges should cause the school to consider banning homosexual professors, just as the Boy Scouts ban homosexual troop leaders.
Considering how often heterosexual teachers have been caught recently in bed with their students, your reflex might be to just toss this off as yet another fart from the kook pews. But what’s interesting about this piece is that, for a change, they seem not to be relying on Paul Cameron’s junk science to back them up, but another guy who I hadn’t heard of before. His name is Gene Abel.
The AFA of Pennsylvania leader cites a study of non-incarcerated child-sex offenders by research scientist Gene Abel that found homosexuals "sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls." Abel’s research reports that, on average, 150.2 boys are molested per homosexual offender, whereas 19.8 girls are molested per heterosexual offender.
Well that sounds pretty bad. Bad in the same way mind you, as Paul Cameron’s factoid that the average lifespan of a homosexual is 46 years sounds pretty bad. Right away, even before you look into it deeper, you just know that there is something a tad…er…queer, about it. If homosexuals are molesting kids at a rate several orders of magnitude greater then heterosexuals are, then even if we’re just a tiny fragment of the population as a whole you’d expect to see something like nearly every kid in America having been molested at least once in their lives. And since kids eventually grow up to become adults, nearly all adults alive today must have been molested when they were kids. And yet, that is just not the case. So you know something’s wrong here right away, and that something is either Abel, or Agape is distorting the work of another honest scientist.
But Abel, though he seems credentialed in a way Paul Cameron is not, is a crank. Maybe even a bigger uglier crank then Paul Cameron, because Abel actually thinks that most child molesters are other children, not adults. Paul Cameron is something of a pathetic figure. Abel, at least to the degree I’ve been able to find out anything about him so far, is horrifying.
You can tell that something’s not quite right about this man immediately, simply by doing a Google search on him. What you get, page after page of it, are cites by the right wing kook press and nobody else, until you’re very, very deep in the rankings. So that’s the first tip off right there. A little casual digging further, and you start running across his books, like Stop Child Molestation, and that’s where it starts getting interesting.
Abel thinks the average age of a child molestor is 13, which means that most child molesters, according to Abel, are children themselves. According to one reviewer at Amazon.Com, Abel blames that on…testosterone, accidental pairings of orgasm with thoughts of younger children, sexual victimization, or "biology that is deviant." Don’t bother looking up "deviant biology" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because you won’t find it.
Deviant biology. Deviant biology. If you’ve ever entertained the thought that finally convincing the homophobes that our sexual orientation isn’t chosen, isn’t an artifact of poor parenting or ungodliness, but that it is something hard wired into us either at or before birth, if you’ve ever thought for a second that convincing them of this fact would make them hate us a little less, you can disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Repeat after me: Deviant biology. Deviant biology.
There is much in that review of Abel’s book that is worth noting. The emphasis in the following is my own…
The first sign that something is amiss is his claim that one out of every twenty boys develops pedophilia, usually in childhood or puberty. He never explains how he arrives at this figure, one which cannot be found anywhere else in the literature. This 5% prevalence rate would mean that pedophilia is one of the most common serious childhood diseases in America, similar in prevalence to asthma.
A handful of influential therapists began promoting the belief in an epidemic of childhood sexual deviance about 20 years ago-at the same time that some of the same therapists convinced the public that satanic ritual sexual abuse was occurring at nursery schools across the nation, and that large numbers of women had been sexually abused by their parents in childhood but had repressed their memories of it. Both of these beliefs were eventually disproved by investigators and researchers, but only after thousands of children were traumatized and adults’ lives were destroyed. However, the myth of rampant childhood sexual deviance has survived, most likely because its believers-juvenile sex offender therapists-comprise an industry mostly hidden from public view and exempt from oversight by the mainstream mental health community. Sexuality researchers have noted that these therapists commonly label children as "sex offenders" for mutually desired sexual contact with each other, then imply that they are dangerous to other children.
Abel recommends that all parents question their sons at around 6th grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been sexually touched by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a "sex-specific therapist" who will test him for pedophilic symptoms. The test should be either a sexual interest test (developed by Abel himself, in which the boy examines photographs of children and adults in swimwear while a computer measures visual reaction time), a lie detector test, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals while he looks at or listens to sexually stimulating material.
The problem with such tests (aside from their intensely humiliating and stigmatizing effects) is that they have never been validated, a process which would require testing a representative sample of American children to establish norms. In fact, all researchers are agreed that very little is known about normal sexual feelings during childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, Abel refuses to release data necessary for independent researchers to evaluate his test.
I’m still digging for a reliable link to this, but I see out there what looks like a news article noting that Dr. Paul Fedoroff (who is a staff psychiatrist with the Law and Mental Health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and co-director of the sexual behaviors clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital in Canada), said that at least some of Abel’s studies might not be reliable because…
…they were conducted on sex offenders who were given certificates of confidentiality, meaning that they would not be turned over to the police, no matter what they admitted. To get the certificate of confidentiality, the offender had to admit something. The more they divulged, the better they looked in front of their therapists.
So Abel was apparently interviewing subjects who had a vested interest in telling him what he wanted to know. And since he doesn’t divulge his data, we cannot even know whether even this self serving source of information was enough to justify his conclusions.
But never mind. It isn’t science, if you’re not willing to publish your data along with your results. That one fact alone tells us all we need to know about Abel. He is not a man of science. This is why you see him being cited approvingly in the kook pews. And just like all his other neighbors there, while posturing as a defender of children, Abel shows a stunningly depraved indifference toward them.
However, the most chilling part of Abel’s book comes when he outlines treatment methods to cure "pedophilia" among boys: separation from other children (possibly removal from the family), monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior by family members and friends who report to the therapist (and sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. The last two methods are intended to eliminate particular sexual thoughts by pairing them with pain, fear, or humiliation. Any of these methods may be imposed on the boy for life by the therapist, regardless of his or his parents’ wishes.
Although Abel refers to them as "breakthroughs in testing, medicine, and therapies," students of history will recognize plethysmographs, sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, and covert sensitization as the methods used decades ago to "cure" homosexuality. Mainstream health professionals and the public (even those who disapprove of homosexual behavior) now consider them ineffective, dangerous, and unethical. Numerous accounts show they lead to nightmares, depression, chronic anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts among both gay men and children labeled as "deviant." And no wonder: Considering the fact that we know almost nothing about the development of sexual feelings, it is clear that such efforts amount to messing with something we don’t understand.
Like the "expert" doctors and therapists who justified their use on homosexuals, Abel shows no concern for emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods inflict on boys, instead rationalizing such abuse by writing that the protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of deviant children.
Especially disturbing is the apparent endorsement of this approach by some other leaders in the juvenile sex offender industry-an approach that would create a new class of lepers consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys.
So with utterly no actual science grounding his notions of the developing sexuality of children, Abel proposes to subject any of them, as young as sixth graders, to having their genitals hooked up to a machine while they’re shown provocative images of scantily clad children and adults, and then perhaps a nice regimen of sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, covert sensitization and the occasional lungful of ammonia. Sixth graders mind you. And he figures some of them may have a "deviant biology" which makes them dangerous to the other kids. That…and testosterone. This is the man being cited by ersatz Christian publications as an authority on child molestation. Well…I guess so. Picture him shoving ammonia in a sixth grader’s face while the kid has his genitals hooked up to a machine and he’s being shown a picture of another kid in a bikini.
So by that logic, and accepting the premise (which I do not) that men who molest boys are by definition homosexuals, then we should not only keep gay professors out of colleges, we should keep gay students out of colleges too. And grade school. And you’d better believe that this is also on the agenda of the AFA too. Just…one step at a time please.
Eventually, it’ll be only Christian Nationalists who are allowed to go to school. Well…the straight boys anyway. The ones who pass the plethysmograph test. Because a women’s place is in the house, being gracefully submissive to her husband and bearing him as many children as he wants her to, so girls don’t need much of an education really. And the boys will only be taught by male professors, since women shouldn’t have authority over men. Remind me again…why did we bomb the Taliban?
So…here’s the scenario… A man who was hired by a city police department to psychologically screen prospective new hires is discovered to be a member of an antisemitic group that distributes copies of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pamphlets denying the holocaust really happened, and asserting that Jews are anti-Christian Christ killers. It develops that this man was conducting psychological tests against prospective employees which hedeveloped on a grant from the Bush Department of Justice. Some say his membership in the antisemitic group is suggestive of why he’s disqualified many Jewish applicants, and they complain to the police community relations council, which orders an investigation. The police department stops using his services while the investigation is underway.
The head of the antisemitic group is suitably outraged. "Does this mean that any person with a Christian or moral belief system cannot work for the city?" he asks. "This case has all the markings of blatant anti-Christian discrimination and bigotry. People of faith should follow it carefully, because they could be next." Everyone writes him and the former police department screener off as a couple of bigoted crackpots.
Minneapolis interim police chief Tim Dolan has ordered an inquiry into the use by his force of a psychologist tied to a group that opposes LGBT civil rights, gay marriage and endorses the so-called ex-gay movement.
Michael A. Campion has been used by the police department for more than a year to screen prospective police officers. Campion also has worked for departments in more than 100 cities over the past 30 years. He is based in Champaign, Illinois.
His involvement with the Illinois Family Institute was brought to Dolan’s attention at a meeting last week with the Police Community Relations Council when it was learned that Campion had made negative comments about single parents.
…
Although some of Capion’s comments to prospective officers "disturbed" members of the Council, Chief Dolan said there was nothing specific to indicate he was biased in his testing. Nevertheless he ordered an independent inquiry and said Capion would not be used until the inquiry finished its work.
…
"Does this mean that any person with a Christian or moral belief system cannot work for the city of Minneapolis?" said David Smith. "This case has all the markings of blatant anti-Christian discrimination and bigotry. People of faith should follow it carefully, because they could be next."
Bigotry. Bigotry. Homosexuals are disease spreading, child molesting, family destroying perverts that god hates and who don’t deserve any sort of civil rights and people who tell us not to kick them in the face are not moral and are not Christian. And we’re not bigots, the rest of you are. Bigotry. Bigotry.
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