An organization dedicated to electing queer political candidates is actually "honoring" Nancy Pelosi, who gay baited her way into Congress in 1986 against openly gay Harry Britt, who was the early frontrunner to become the first openly queer member of Congress to be out before being elected. Does this sound surreal? It's real. (Washington Blade 9/9/10)

The Victory Fund is set to award Pelosi with the organization’s 2010 Gay & Lesbian Leadershup Award for her “leadership on issues important to LGBT Americans” and for how she “continues to challenge official Washington to realize and embrace the fair-mindedness of their fellow Americans,” according to a promo for the event.

Nancy Pelosi has never challenged "official Washington to realize and embrace the fair-mindedness of their fellow Americans." That's completely fictional. She is an obstinate part of official Washington who needs to be challenged on queer issues.

It gets worse. Remember how Nancy Pelosi sabotaged ENDA in the last congress? Remember her taking gender identity out to attack trans queers and to give corporate lawyers a loophole to screw over cis queers? Remember how she riddled ENDA with a multitude of other loopholes to make almost completely unenforceable?

Is the Victory Fund so completely out of touch with reality that they haven't noticed that Pelosi has done everything in her power to block ENDA, the most important LGBT civil rights issue, from even getting a vote in the House during this session? Do they know and just don't give a flying fuck?

The "Victory Fund," like the Champagne Fund, and what passes for GLAAD these days, are completely uninterested in the queer civil rights movement or any middle class or poor queer. All they care about are wealthy donors who are solely interested in getting their pictures taken with powerful and influential figures.

Fortunately, there are grassroots activists who are still fighting back against vicious bigots like Nancy Pelosi.

The LGBT organization responsible for acts of civil disobedience across the country is considering taking action against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her appearance this month at a Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund fundraiser.

Robin McGehee, co-founder of GetEQUAL, said activists affiliated with the organization are weighing the possibility of action directed toward the speaker at the Victory Fund’s Gay & Lesbian Leadership Awards, which is scheduled for Sept. 29 at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C.

If I get a fundraising letter from the so called "Victory Fund," I won't burn it. That would be bad for the environment. I'll recycle it instead.

Photo: SanFranAnnie

 

Klan Brewer made up comments about "headless bodies" in the Arizona desert that turned out to be false. When reporters asked her about it after her infamous debate earlier this month, she is ducking rather clumsily. Brewer isn't as funny as Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, or Linda McMahon, but she is certainly fodder for a few giggles here and there.



I wonder how much longer the drooling knucklewalkers in the GOP will continue to talk her up as a potential future president.

 

Glenn Beck at a CPAC Hatefest - Photo: Gage Skidmore

Stating some facts will piss a lot of people off. One of them is that Mormons are not Christians.

An evangelical Christian recently pissed off a lot of Mormons by saying the following:

I do not think Mormonism is an orthodox Christian faith, with a small O. I think perhaps the most charitable way for an evangelical Christian to look at Mormonism is to look at Mormonism as the fourth Abrahamic faith.

There's nothing "charitable" about it. Mormonism is just as much of an Abrahamic faith as the other three. However, it is not Christian.

Let's look at some of the things Mormons believe.

1) Wearing magic underpants will protect them from harm.

2) Jesus existed before there were people on the Earth, and he got in a big spiritual battle with Lucifer back then. Black peoples' ancestors' souls were the punished souls of spirits that stayed out of it. White peoples' ancestors' souls fought on the side of Jesus.

3) Joseph Smith was a prophet.

4) A heterosexual male Mormon with a wife and otherwise in good standing will become a god over his own planet. (Quite the ego boost.)

5) God lives on a planet in a nearby solar system.

6) Mormons can convert people after they are dead. (That's why, by the way, they have so much genealogy information.)

You don't have to have an IQ over 150 to figure out that these beliefs are completely incompatible with Christianity. Yet, in 2008, 52% of Americans got it wrong and thought that Mormonism is a Christian religion. This is as factually inaccurate as saying that Obama is a Muslim or that the Moon is made of cheese.

Now that we have established the fact that Glenn Beck, like all Mormons, is not a Christian, we should ask why he keeps nattering on about being Christian and making claims about the Christianity of people he disagrees with.

I just received a DNC fundraising letter with a phony baloney "2010 Presidential Survey." It's just a scam to get people to open fundraising envelopes and give them money.

Admitedly, I shouldn't have opened it, but I found something disturbing in this "survey." In one of the questions, the DNC asks people to prioritize 15 major issues. Global Warming and queer issues don't even make the list. In fact, they don't even make the survey at all. The Employee Free Choice Act and other labor issues are conspicuously absent, as is the right of women to have abortions. State/Church separation is AWOL too.

This is symbolic of a Democratic Party leadership which is completely contemptuous of the concerns of Democrats, even in its intraparty communications. They aren't just governing like Republicans. They are talking more and more like Republicans every day.

It's no wonder the Democrats are headed towards getting their butts kicked badly this November. They deserve it. Unfortunately, Republicans who also deserve to get their butts kicked seriously will benefit from it.

 

Christine O'Donnell, like the rest of the teabaggers, certainly fits this definition of "jerkoff" from the Urban Dictionary (#3):

Someone who is a complete dickhead and is a complete and total loser. Someone who has just completely and utterly screwed up your day, just by sight, and no one can fix it.

I would add an element of uselessness to the definition to get at what I think of for the nonliteral definition of the term. Anyway, O'Donnell is the teabagging candidate for Deleware Senate seat up this year. In the 90s, this brilliant person made the following statement on an MTV show about sex. (Huffington Post 9/2/10)

The Delaware Republican, who is challenging Rep. Mike Castle in the state's Senate primary and has earned the financial backing of a portion of the Tea Party movement, made an appearance in the MTV series "Sex In The 90s." Entitled "The Safest Sex Of All," the episode was ostensibly geared towards understanding the importance of abstinence. But O'Donnell's guidance went a bit further. Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."

"The reason that you don't tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue," she extrapolated. "You're just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun."

Like a lot of people who are running on behalf of the Astroturf teabagger "movement," O'Donnell's right fringe views are not limited to economics.

This teabagger has been making the news for her gay baiting campaign tactics. Her former campaign staffers have spread claims that her Republican primary opponent is gay and having an affair behind his wife's back without any evidence. She has gone out of her way to publicize these rumors in a nondenial denial. This shows that the teabaggers are indeed heterosexist, thinking that saying someone is LGBT shows that they are somehow bad people and unfit for public service.

I'd say "jerk this" to O'Donnell, but I really am gay and don't have sex with women.

Photo: naama

Illustration: ddogbreath

 

The WWE under Linda McMahon certainly did feature roided out muscleheads.



 

The people shouting "war criminal" are absolutely correct. (Hat Tip: Let Freedom Rain)



Americans have plenty of reasons to hate Tony Blair too. His lies and Bush butt kissing played an instrumental role in getting us into Iraq and keeping us there.

Blair was at a book signing event. I've heard that his book is sellilng a lot of copies. I wonder if rich rightist are buying copies by the thousands. Most rightist books that get on the US bestseller lists do so because of this kind of bulk buying.

 

Klan Brewer's fanatical obsession with her white supremacist agenda certainly has gotten a lot of attention. Lately, her stupidity is in the spotlight. But, what about her heterosexism?

Brewer's bigotry against us started before she went on her notorious racism binge. (From Change.org's Gay Rights section)

But long before Brewer was running over the rights of people of color and huffing and puffing about immigration, she was also targeting Arizona's gay and lesbian population. Right after taking over for former Governor Napolitano, Brewer signed legislation that dismantled a domestic partnership program in Arizona that allowed state employees to extend benefits to their domestic partners, as well as their children. She did this by switching up the word "dependent," so that it meant only those spouses or children that were products of straight folks (or, in other words, "traditional marriage").

The move drew outrage from many around the state, including folks from the University of Arizona, which were dramatically impacted by Brewer's decision to redefine family. Liz Sawyer, an employee at the school and a spokesperson for a staff group, OUTReach, that works on behalf of LGBT rights, called Brewer's move "deplorable" and "tragic." After all, this was a callous move by Brewer to swipe benefits away from men, women and children.

The queer community, the Obama Administration, and Arizona all would have been better off if Janet Napolitano hadn't been appointed to run Homeland Security, allowing Klan Brewer to slide into the governor's mansion.

Now, the peace movement has faced the fact that it cannot rely on the Obama Administration to stop the wars. At the same time, our economy is still in terrible shape, though it no longer is in free fall like it was in 2008.

Here's a great video from the Veterans for Peace conference, shot by the Punk Patriot, where a peace activist from CODEPINK connects the dots between our wars and the financial and social costs the American people are paying at home. (Hat Tip: Bruce Gagnon)



There is another connection between the wars and what ails our country: corporations corrupting our political system. (I originally had the Freudian typo, "poolitical system.") The efforts to keep us at war are supported by corporate interests who buy the politicians with big money campaign contributions. Under the oligarchic Citizens United ruling, those corporations now can run their own political ads. Media owned by huge corporations and advertised on by more huge corporations (the latter also applies to NPR) propagandize ruthlessly on behalf of the bloodshed, regardless of the economic devastation and loss of lives caused by these wars.

And, the vast majority of Christian churches side with these corrupt wars, engaging in a Christian jihad against Islam abroad, a jihad which is being extended to attacks on mosque construction here at home. These same churches, with corrupt and greedy leaders, oppose Wall St. regulation and taxes for the rich because the preachers want to keep speculating on church funds they have bilked from their congregations. They attack government spending on the poor at home because poor people are good excuses for church fundraising, almost none of which actually goes to helping the poor. Yes, there are a few honest preachers who don't do this, but the are, by far, the exception to the rule.

This isn't limited to Christianity or the United States. The mullah's in Iran who assault democracy and freedom there, as the Christian preachers want to do here, also are robbing their country blind. Their Revolutionary Guard have gotten themselves neck deep in corporate interests there. Religion, oligarchy, oppression, and violence have been common combos throughout world history. It doesn't really matter which country, faith, or time in history.

Corportions, churches, lies, corruption, and war are part of a vicious cycle which is destroying the country.

 

Bigotry often is based on stupidity. "I have really did" publish this blog posting.



Brewer is such a ridiculous person that she was bound to be the target of satire. People are having fun with her already on YouTube.



 

The teabaggers like babbling about the Constitution and what the founders believed, yet they get it wrong a lot of the time. They like ranting about America being a "Christian Nation," even though anyone familiar with the Constitution or American history would know otherwise.

The First Amendment explicitly forbids the establishment of religion.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that the First Amendment says Congress can't make a law respecting the "establishment of religion." It does not say "establishment of a particular religion" or even "establishment of religion." The latter two are common lies told by Christian religious extremists who don't like the wall of separation between church and state mandated by the text of the First Amendment. So, they just lie about what it actually says.

Logic is often considered evil by the rightist teabaggers. Yet, the rest of us would point out that it isn't logical to think that founders who wrote and ratified the First Amendment would see our country as a "Christian nation." But, that doesn't keep the teabaggers from lying and saying it was the original intent.

One of our nation's first treaties was the Treaty of Tripoli. The main significance of the treaty to our lives today can be found in one part.

ARTICLE 11.

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This treaty was signed by President John Adams after being ratified by the US Senate. It should be noted that Adams is quite trendy on the right these days, but most of his conservative admirers know nothing about the Treaty of Tripoli (or much else).

Even worse for those who want to believe that America was founded as a Christian Nation was this part of his statement at signing the treaty. (bolding mine)

Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.

Atheists, agnostics, and non Christian religious leaders are sick and tired of this nonsense about America being a Christian nation. You teabaggers need to stop spewing this bullshit.

Why is an Astroturf scam like Teabagger Inc. pushing these lies about the Constitution and the founders? The rich bastards and corporate leaders behind the scam want to keep people too busy ranting on about religious hatreds to notice how we are being robbed by the very interests behind all the nonsense being fed the drooling knucklewalkers who have been suckered by the con job.

Photos: naama

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