Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

Yesterday one of the foulest of GOP presidential candidates formally announced his candidacy: Mike Huckabee.  While he tried to come off as folksy and concerned about average Americans, he had total amnesia as to how those same Americans have come to find themselves in financial straits: failed GOP policies, George W. Bush/Dick Cheney's unfunded wars, and unfettered Wall Street greed that the GOP endorsed.  Huckabee - at least from the portions of his speech that I heard - tried to stay away from "social issues" but it is important to remember that his views have not changed and that he has not "evolved" whatsoever.  A piece in Mother Jones reminds us what Huckabee is really all about.  Here are highlights:

Mike Huckabee . . . . . launched his second bid for the White House in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, vowing to stop the "slaughter" of abortion and calling for the protection of the "laws of nature" from the "the false God of judicial supremacy." 

Huckabee is joining a GOP field that's bigger and more competitive than the one he out-hustled to win the Iowa caucuses seven years ago. The Christian conservatives who flocked to the former Baptist preacher in 2008 can now turn toward other evangelical-minded candidates in the GOP presidential race.

Since dropping out of the 2008 race, he's flaunted a more combative, occasionally conspiratorial brand of politics—flirting with birtherism, advising prospective enlistees to avoid joining the armed forces until President Barack Obama has left office, and, just last month, warning social conservatives that the United States is "moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity."

Huckabee is staying true to the kinds of red-meat issues he first entered politics to promote, in a long-shot 1992 bid for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

Huckabee, then a Baptist pastor who operated a small television station out of his Arkadelphia church, made sex and morality the centerpieces of his '92 campaign—and he preached as fiery a message from the stump as he did from the pulpit. The novice politician let loose with eyebrow-raising tirades that occasionally put him to the right of the most fire-breathing conservatives. He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients, condemned efforts to shield homosexuals from discrimination, and called for the death penalty to be imposed on big-time drug dealers.

He endorsed quarantining AIDS patients from the rest of society—a radical view even among conservatives at the time—while arguing that the severity of the epidemic had been exaggerated because gay people wielded so much political clout. The federal government should spend less money on AIDS, he insisted, and more on diseases that the afflicted had not brought on themselves, such as cancer.

He attacked his opponent for supporting the Americans with Disabilities Act (because it included protections for AIDS patients) and a 1991 civil rights bill that would have prohibited housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

According to Huckabee, being gay wasn't just a sin—it should be a criminal offense. . . .
calling for enforcement of state sodomy laws," which made gay sex a felony "crime against nature" in many states.

"I think he's the same guy who started out," says Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, who covered the 1992 race. "He's got a penchant for sort of cheap-shot quips. He thinks a lot of himself. He thinks he can talk himself out of anything. The main thing I still marvel at is how many people think he's a nice guy, because he's got a real mean streak."

But at this point, after spending the years since the 2008 election feeding red meat to his base, the tapes may not even matter much. In just the last six months, he's urged states to ignore a possible Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage and attacked Jay-Z for "arguably  crossing the line from husband to pimp by exploiting his wife [Beyonce] as a sex object." Researchers won't have to scour church basements for dusty VHS cassettes containing his stem-winding sermons. They can just turn on the television.

The man was and remains an extremist.  One can only hope that the mainstream media will get off its lazy ass and expose Huckabee for the foul individual that he is.

Cuccinelli Involved in Conflict of Interest in Lawsuit?

It looks like Virginians may be seeing another example of Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli believing that he is above the laws and rules that apply to everyone else.  How so?  A company in which Cuccinelli has made his principal financial investment is involved in litigation with the Commonwealth of Virginia in which Virginia is seeking $700,000, yet Cuccinelli has not removed himself from the case nor has he hired outside counsel.  And - perhaps not unsurprisingly - the case has languished for 19 months.   Any other lawyer in Cuccinelli's position would have removed himself/herself from the case.  But not Kookinelli.  Such rules and ethical standards don't apply to him apparently.  The Virginian Pilot looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

A lawsuit against the state of Virginia by a nutritional supplement maker whose stock comprises Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's total investment portfolio is raising questions about the Republican's potential conflicts of interest.

Henrico-based Star Scientific Inc. sued Virginia's Department of Taxation in Mecklenberg Circuit Court in July 2011 over a $700,000 tax dispute with the state. A deputy attorney general filed an answer to the complaint the following month. There have been no new motions, pleadings, filings or hearings in the case since.

The issue comes as the conservative attorney general — who is unchallenged for the Republican gubernatorial nomination this year — fends off critics, particularly Democrats, over his refusal to resign his current office to run for governor. His decision ends a tradition observed by six attorneys general since 1985 who resigned to campaign for governor, including current Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Paul Campsen, a private attorney in Norfolk for whom tax litigation is a specialty, said he seldom sees tax cases languish the way the Star Scientific lawsuit has. If plaintiffs don't push them along, then the government to which the disputed tax bill is due usually moves more quickly to recover its money.

The delay, however, viewed alongside Cuccinelli's financial ties to the plaintiff, exposes Cuccinelli to criticism on the ethical question of whether to recuse himself and his office from the case by hiring a private law firm to litigate it, something the office has done regularly for any number of reasons.

"I think in a case like that, it's probably better for the attorney general to step out of it," Tobias said.

Campsen said he believes the decision to step aside and hire outside counsel should have been an easy one for Cuccinelli, given his direct financial interest in the company.  "To me this isn't just the appearance of a conflict, it is a conflict of interest," he said. "This looks bad and this smells bad."

Gottstein dismissed suggestions that Cuccinelli or his staff had shown Star Scientific preferential treatment.

Gottstein also said it would be almost impossible for the office to operate if it bowed out of any case where its attorneys owned stock in widely traded public companies. For instance, he said, employees may own stock in Virginia-based utility giant Dominion, which is also among the largest contributors to political campaigns in the state, "yet the OAG is involved as opposing counsel in large Dominion Power rate cases."

Even though Cuccinelli's Star Scientific holdings are appearing widely in news accounts, staff lawyers with the attorney general's office will continue to handle the Star Scientific tax lawsuit.

Gottstein's comparison of other staff attorneys with Cuccinelli is ridiculous.  Those attorneys do what they are directed to do.  Kookinelli, on the other hand is the one who tells the rest of the AG staff what to do.  The man is an arrogant menace and needs to be defeated in November.

Anti-Abortion, Anti-Contraception Group Trying To Buy Virginia’s Governor’s Mansion

If LGBT Virginians have reason to wake up with night sweats at the thought of Ken "Kookineelli" Cuccinelli in the Governor's mansion come 2014, so too do women.  Kookinelli would cause untold damage to women's rights if elected, packing boards and commissions with extremists hand picked by The Family Foundation and virulently anti-abortion and anti-contraception groups.  As note here earlier in the week, the farcically named Susan B. Anthony List (Anthony was an early feminist and thought by some historians to have been a lesbian) has launched the extremist effort to buy the governor's mansion for Kookinelli.  A piece in Think Progress looks at not only this effort by extremists but also Kookinelli's views towards women which echo those of failed senatorial candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN).  Anyone who isn't a far right Christianist or angry while male who wants to disenfranchise blacks and sabotage freedom ought to be terrified at the prospect of Kookinelli winning in November.  Here are article highlights:

Virginia’s gubernatorial election, is eight months away, but a leading anti-choice group is already spending big money to buy the governor’s mansion for Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA). Susan B. Anthony List — an anti-abortion group that launched a program early this year to teach Republican candidates how to talk about rape without using words like “legitimate” or “gift from God” — pledged at least $1.5 million to Cuccinelli’s campaign, an amount that approaches the entirety of its spending on federal races in 2012.

Cuccinelli has not been captured on film expressing the kind of career-ending gaffe about rape that kept candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) out of the United States Senate last year, but his stance regarding the rights of women who are raped is more or less identical to Akin and Mourdock’s. In his first campaign for elected office, Cuccinelli said that he “opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” So women who are pregnant because of rape or incest are out of luck.

Rape survivors aren’t the only people who face a bleak future in Ken Cuccinelli’s vision for America. In a book he published last month, he endorsed the view that Medicare is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.” He claimed that Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps are attacks on people’s freedom. And he suggested that we should stop spending money on these programs because “[y]our government will never love you.”

The man is down right scary and, in my opinion, certifiably mentally ill.

Joe Scarborough Mocks Ken Cuccinelli on National TV

Sane elements within the GOP seem to be waking up to the fact that Ken Cuccinelli isn't only bad news for the Republican Party of Virginia but that he could likewise be toxic for the national GOP given the high profile status of this year's gubernatorial race in Virginia.  There is no getting around the fact that Cuccinelli - or Kookinelli as I prefer to call him - is an extremist who embraces everything that is wrong with today's Republican Party.    Thus it was little surprise that Joe Scarborough blasted Kookinelli on nation television.  Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot:

MSNBC television host Joe Scarborough is no fan of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and he's not shy about sharing that with his "Morning Joe" viewers.

On Tuesday's broadcast, Scarbourough provided some cover to Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell for his role in passing a $3.5 billion Virginia road funding bill with new taxes -- those tax hikes have infuriated fiscal conservatives, and Cuccinelli opposes them.

Scarborough called McDonnell a conservative and praised his fiscal management of the state before saying McDonnell has been distancing himself from Cuccinelli because of his extreme statements.
"I wonder what Bill Buckley would have said about a guy like Cuccinelli?" Scarborough said of the conservative thought icon.

"Remember when Buckley went after the John Birchers?" he added. "Threw 'em out. Threw 'em out of the movement. These are the people that are now infiltrating the movement, excluding winners like Chris Christie and embracing conspiracy theorists like Cuccinelli."

Scarborough previously targeted Cuccinelli, the Republican nominee for Virginia governor this year, in a late January online column and on the airwaves earlier this month, calling him "certifiable when it comes to mainstream political thought."

"This is a guy that has said more things that will offend the voters that swing elections than is humanly possible," Scarborough previously said of Cuccinelli.

As for Scarborough, Cuccinelli spokesman Jahan Wilcox dismissed his comments and the cable network that broadcast them.

"It is not surprising the same network that contracts President Obama’s buddies for their point of view doesn’t like Attorney General Cuccinelli’s mission of protecting the Commonwealth from a government takeover of our health care system," Wilcox said in an e-mail. "This is another example of out-of-touch liberals spouting their views on television and calling it news."

Christianist Watch - Rick Santorum

As I hoped and suspected would be the case, now that Rick Santorum has moved up and is challenging Mitt Romney he is getting long overdue spotlight treatment and a much more detailed review of his past statements and positions is taking place. And what's being found and/or rediscovered is a record of breath taking extremism that ought to scare the daylights out of everyone but the most untethered, Kool-Aid drinking Christianists. Santorum is the Christian equivalent of a fire breathing Islamic Iman and someone who should definitely hold public office again. But it's not just Santorum's religious fanaticism that is disturbing. A piece in the New York Times describes his ideas on fixing the countries ills - in addition to turning it into a Christianist theocracy - are idiotic and "small minded." Here are some article highlights:

Rick Santorum coyly promised a group of Detroit business leaders Thursday that his plan to restore manufacturing and revive the economy was “just a little different” than those of the other candidates. The plan he then described was nothing more than a rehash of tired Republican ideas stretching back decades. Name a tax, and he proposed to cut it . . .

Then, of course, come the spending cuts: $1 trillion a year for five years. He didn’t bother to list the hundreds of vital programs that would be devastated in the process. He had one easy prescription for any given safety-net program for the poor: “Cap it, cut it, freeze it, and block-grant it to the states.” And inevitably there was the call for far more domestic oil drilling.

But perhaps his most jarring assertion — especially in Michigan, which has suffered more than most from devastating unemployment — was that many people are deliberately staying out of the work force in order to luxuriate in their unemployment benefits.

That is not only out of touch with reality; it is deeply insulting to millions of struggling Americans.

It’s true that some companies are looking for well-educated workers, or those with specialized training. But Mr. Santorum’s wild spending cuts would ravage the nation’s education system and the skills programs those employers need. He has repeatedly made clear his contempt for what he calls “government-run schools” (more commonly known as public schools), and has expressed a strong preference for home schooling.

And of course he believes government entitlements replace America’s moral foundation with soul-killing dependency. He says the nation’s civil laws must comport with God’s laws. But not the laws of all religions. “Where do you think this concept of equality comes from?” he asked in South Carolina last month. “It doesn’t come from Islam. It doesn’t come from the East and Eastern religions. It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Unlike his main rivals for the nomination, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Mr. Santorum has held these kinds of views for many years, and is a far more authentic representative of the Republican Party’s angry base. But he does not represent the American mainstream, or its tradition of confronting big problems with big ideas.

The article provides a taste of Santorum's extremism, but Santorum's own past statements and speeches underscore his religious extremism and open contempt for the religious freedoms of other citizens. Right Wing Watch reports on a speech that Santorum gave in August 2008 at the ultra-far right Ave Marie University where he contends that Satan - and liberalism - is destroying America. Santorums views ought to make the blood of every moderate and every religious minority run cold with fear. Here are some highlights as well as a video clip:

Back in 2008, Rick Santorum traveled to Ave Maria University in Florida to deliver an address to students attending the Catholic university founded by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan which he moved from Michigan as part of his effort to build his own personal theocracy in Naples.

Santorum told the students at Ave Maria how lucky they were to be living in a time when God's Army is more needed than ever because all of the major institutions in society were under attack by Satan.

The audio of Santorum's remarks is still posted on the Ave Maria website and the bulk of his speech was dedicated to explaining how God had used him, his political career, and even the death of his son Gabriel in the fight to outlaw abortion in America.

But Santorum began his remarks by explaining to the students in attendance how every institution in America has been destroyed by Satan; from academia to politics with even the church having fallen under His sway - not the Catholic church, of course, but "mainline Protestantism" which is in such "shambles" that it is not even Christian any longer

Don't believe me? Here's what Santorum said:

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. . . . . Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. . . . we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.

After that, you start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today.

The man is down right scary and, in my opinion, belongs in a mental institution. I would also venture that given his extreme homophobia, he has some serious issues with his own sexuality. What better way to try to convince one's self that they are straight than to father all those children. It goes without saying that in Santorum's bizarre world view, gays are the tools of Satan.



One can only hope that the main stream media begins to truly focus on Santorum's insanity and extremism.

Washington Post Blasts Pope

As God's Rottweiler continues his tour of parts of Africa spreading idiocy and delivering an anti-condom message with apparently no thought or care whatsoever to the lives he is endangering, the Washington Post got it right and blasted Benedict XVI for his almost criminal behavior. Here are some highlight:
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THE LATE New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts." This holds true even for the pope.

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Are condoms foolproof protection against infection by HIV, which causes AIDS? No. Sometimes they break, and sometimes people put them on incorrectly. Still, doctors on the front lines of the fight against the AIDS epidemic established long ago that the use of condoms greatly diminishes the transmission of HIV, the cause of a disease that has no cure. That the pope chose to question the value of condoms in fighting the nearly 28-year-old scourge while heading to the continent whose people are most affected by it is troubling. According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, sub-Saharan Africa is the epidemic's center, with 67 percent of the world's 32.9 million people with HIV and with 75 percent of all AIDS deaths. Heterosexual intercourse is the "driving force" of the epidemic.

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The pope's comment was so alarming that a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said, "We consider that these statements endanger public health policies and the imperative to protect human life." . . . To halt the march of HIV/AIDS, those who have the infection must be treated. Those who do not have it need all the information and tools possible to remain HIV-negative. The pope's denunciation of condoms is of no help.

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As on Nigerian blogger correctly noted, why does anyone listen to Benedict XVI:

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What does the Pope know about condom? Scratch that! What does the Pope Know about marriage? What does the Pope know about sex? One hundred years from now, the people who will inhabit this earth will read our stories of today and laugh at our stupidity. They will wonder how millions of people with brain cells in their heads chose to listen to a man who never married and never had sex teach them about marriage and sex. They will wonder, “What the hell was wrong with our foreparents?”

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The Pope is irresponsible, many now say in the wake of this new controversy. But I think the Pope’s stance on many social issues is criminal. . . . Since the 80s when AIDS was first diagnosed, 25 million people have died. Many more were saved due to prevention methods like the promotion of condom use. If the Pope will not keep his religion, he should be ready to have the blood of these brainwashed followers on his head.

Palin's Alternate Universe

Bob Herbert has a column in yesterday's New York Times that looks at the frightening lunacy of Sarah Palin and her fellow Kool-Aid drinkers in the GOP base. It is obvious why anyone with a brain and capable of logical thinking patterns finds the woman down right scary - I certainly do - since she seems to have no connect with reality. Reality is whatever she thinks and feels with no need to look at objective facts. If she doesn't like a question posed to her, she just pretends something else was asked of her. I suspect that much of this phenomenon comes from her crazy religious background which believes that the earth is 6000 years old, that man and dinosaurs lived on the earth together, and that one can "pray away the gay." Science, medical facts, etc., mean absolutely nothing to the woman. The thought of someone like Palin potentially ending up as president of the United States ought to give everyone the world over cold sweats. In my view, Sarah Palin represents a clear and present danger to the nation and the world. She needs to remain nothing more than a hockey mom. Here are some highlights from Herbert's column.

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Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years. We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality: “Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.” . . . Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

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In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.” What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

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This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”

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The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August. Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks. Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.

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The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”

Sarah Palin’s Worldview

With each passing day it should become increasingly obvious that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McSenile's running mate is an insult to every American other than perhaps the deranged elements of the Christian Right who are not, in my opinion, "dealing with a full deck" in any event and who always put religious fanaticism ahead of logic, reason and competence. As I have mentioned before, I have real suspicions whether or not Palin was foisted on McCain by the far right elements in the GOP such as James Dobson and other Christianists. If such is the case, McCain's knuckling under shows he is too senile to be president. Today's New York Times in its main editorial raises similar concerns which ought to demonstrate that by picking Palin, John McCain has confirmed that he is not fit to be president. Here are some editorial highlights:
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As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking. If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

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The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

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One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

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But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.

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This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis. In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.