Benghazi Farce Blows up in GOP’s Face

From its outset, the GOP controlled House Benghazi committee has been a partisan witch hunt with only one goal: Damage Hillary Clinton as much as possible and Barack Obama as well should the opportunity present itself.  The GOP hit men have conveniently developed amnesia on the issue of their own cuts to funding for State Department security.   Meanwhile, they have near orgasm leaking selective tidbits to the media - which is itself part of the problem - with the knowledge that lazy journalists will likely run with the proffered GOP sound bite/talking point.  Thankfully, the charade is now getting unwanted scrutiny that shows that the committee's work has been akin to one of Josef Stalin's show trials in the 1930's.  A piece Salon looks at the GOP's wet dream unraveling.  Here are highlights:

The chaos and dysfunction currently roiling the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has made life difficult for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, the committee had been maintaining a low profile, keeping quiet and staying out of the news as it dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton to strategically leak to the press. The low-profile game plan was shot to hell by Kevin McCarthy, who bragged of the committee’s political agenda on national television, and was then forced to walk back his comments and deny saying the thing he said several times over. Suddenly, Gowdy and his committee were facing the one thing they’d hoped to avoid: scrutiny.

That scrutiny has taken the form of a front-page New York Times investigation into what the committee has been up to over the past year and half. What the paper turned up is an investigation that didn’t really seem to be going anywhere until Hillary Clinton’s emails emerged as an issue, at which point its focus “shifted” from the actual attacks in Benghazi to Clinton’s electronic communications. 

As the Times notes, the official response from the Republicans on the committee is to “dispute any suggestion that their inquiry… has been partisan or ineffective or that it has changed course.” . . . though it became harder to maintain that fiction in the aftermath of McCarthy’s inopportune truth-telling.

But the unofficial Republican response to the committee’s recent troubles is a bit more enlightening:

Senior Republican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential conversations, said that Mr. Boehner had long been suspicious of the administration’s handling of the attacks and that Mrs. Clinton’s emails gave him ato keep the issue alive and to cause political problems for her campaign.

[[N]ow Republican officials are dishing to the Times about how it was all the outgoing Speaker’s idea to focus on Hillary’s emails for political benefit. This has all the hallmarks of a cover-your-ass operation – Paul Waldman sees this as Gowdy and his people working to push away any responsibility for what is turning into a damaging story for his committee.

But it doesn’t really matter what excuses Republicans come up with. The Times story has punched a hole in the committee’s credibility and made clear just how little trust one can place in the public statements emerging from the Benghazi investigators.

The three-pronged investigation was supplanted by a singular focus on Clinton’s emails. The interviews they promised would happen were, per the Times, “never followed up on.” And its mandate seems to have been abandoned in a messy political fight that is threatening to blow up in their faces.

Bus Driver Tells Teenager His Gay Dads Will Go to Hell

All three of my children - who are within the so-called Millennial generation - have walked away from organized religion, in particular the Roman Catholic Church.  Most of their cousins and many of friends have done likewise.  Why?  It's actually very simple: the rabid homophobia of many supposed Christian denominations and for those who are Catholic, the sex abuse scandal.   The two combine to make the hypocrisy of the Pharisees in the Gospels pale in comparison.  That's not to say that many Millennials aren't spiritual.  They simply want nothing to do with denominations best defined by their hatred towards others.  And I suspect the number of those who will walk away from religion in my grand children's generation will be even higher.  As a piece in LGBTQ Nation makes clear, there is no better reason to leave Christianity than the godly Christians.  (Note the fact that coming out is not a one time process.  It is ongoing and often involves standing up to bigots and changing hearts and minds).  Here are article excerpts:

My husband and I live with our twin sons in rural New Jersey — the garden of the Garden State. We moved there shortly after we adopted them in 2001. We don’t live in the mythic “gay community.” We live in a community. A fully integrated community. We attend the kids’ sporting events, drive the kids to and from basically everywhere a teenager would need to go (indeed the ol’ “sometimes I feel like I’m running a car service” applies). I’ve even ascended through the cutthroat ranks to become president of the PTA. Along the way, my husband and I have needed to constantly educate other non-LGBT people around us about our family, and we are happy to do it — to better the lives of our children.

We may not be throwing bottles and bricks in a bar in Greenwich Village, but we are on our own front line advocating for change right here, in suburban America. Simple, small battles, year after year, like meeting with the superintendent ensuring all school forms from our district read “Parent and Parent” and not “Mother and Father.”

Always the ten-second feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach as we “educate” and “integrate” our family into the community around us.

Just this week our 15-year-old son’s bus driver was listening to her “Christian” radio station while driving the school bus, giving him religious propaganda — in the form of a comic book — with Jesus as Superman and the rest of us poor citizens of Gotham living a dark dreary life until we accept the Man of Steel as our Lord and savior. Why has she taken it upon herself to volunteer this information? He already subscribes to all the teenage angst: attempting to fit in, questioning his parents’ beliefs and doubting his self confidence. As my son listened to the religious Sermon on the Mount…or rather the Sermon on the Bus, he discussed with the driver that he had two fathers. She imparted her wisdom unto him; she doesn’t have a problem with homosexuals, but “they are not blessed, and they will go to hell.”

So again — I had to “rouse rabble,” teach and advocate for change. Our son’s bus driver has been swapped out, and she was given a slap on the wrist. The very kind and helpful woman from the bus company told us, “She is not to listen to religious programming on the bus, discuss her religious views or talk about people’s lifestyle.”

Lifestyle?

Next battle: Umm, It’s not a “lifestyle.” It’s not some choice like jetting off to Napa (maybe we have), baking like Martha Stewart (possibly we do) or keeping a regular yoga practice (definitely guilty). But I’ll save that “opportunity to teach” for next week.

I am a lapsed damaged Catholic. I was raised Catholic: Sunday School, Stations of the Cross, altar boy. At 14, when I mentioned to my pastor that I was having certain strong feelings (it was way more than feelings, but I only told him it was “feelings”) about men, he told me not to worry. “You’re just starting high school. This can be normal at this age. If you were starting college, then we might consider it a problem.”
LGBT people and our families cannot allow the Catholic church to willingly escort us to the back of the bus as second-class citizens. “Love the sinner, but not the sin” is not even a little bit acceptable. It also makes it difficult for me to make the kids clean up their rooms when the Catholic church is telling them they won’t see me in the afterlife.

And to anyone — whether a Pope, bus driver, butcher, baker or candlestick maker — who wants to begin a conversation where I or my family are second class citizens, My inner Dad voice says “go fuck yourself,” then I remember: this is an “opportunity to teach” right here. Pull this bus over.

Folks like this brain dead bus driver will be the death of Christianity.  Thankfully, my grandchildren are growing up seeing gay granddads as normal - just this weekend the husband and I baby sat my grand daughter overnight - and those who condemn us as abnormal.  Time truly is on our side.  Meanwhile, we need to live our lives openly and with pride, taking opportunities that present themselves to "educate" anti-gay bigots and those who are to lazy to question the status quo. 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

How the GOP Establishment Allowed the Hijacking of Congress

There have been many post mortems of how the Republican Party got to the point where it now finds itself hostage to extremists who have no desire to govern the nation but instead wreak havoc on the system and increase government paralysis.   A piece in the Los Angeles Times rightly lays out the reality that the current hijacking of the House of Representatives was done with the complicity of the so-called GOP establishment.  The only thing that it fails to do is to properly tie the descent into insanity with the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP - the very same Christofascists who make up the bulk of the Tea Party saboteurs.  Expect nothing to change in the GOP until this lunatic element is eradicated from the GOP or becomes irrelevant.  With the would be 2016 GOP presidential candidates prostituting themselves willy nilly to these folks, this is not going to happen any time soon.  Logic, reason and a grasp of objective reality simply hold no sway with those living in a fantasy world. Here are column excerpts:

The irony is that McCarthy and Boehner helped many of the rebels get elected. McCarthy was one of the three leaders of the GOP's “Young Guns” program, which recruited up-and-coming conservatives for House elections in 2010 and after. Another was Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a Boehner deputy who lost his seat when an insurgent defeated him in the Republican primary. The third, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), is now almost every Republican's favorite candidate for speaker — but on Friday he said he wasn't interested.

Boehner wasn't part of the new wave; he was an old-line conservative who believed in blocking the agenda of a Democratic president, but also accepted the need to compromise to keep the federal government running. And that enraged many of the insurgents, who had promised voters they wouldn't agree to half-measures. They believe they were sent to Washington to obstruct compromises, not support them.

Their intransigence produced a series of fruitless crises.

In 2011, they demanded that Boehner refuse to allow a rise in the federal debt ceiling if Obama and the Democratic-led Senate didn't agree to all the spending cuts they wanted. The gambit failed. In 2013, they shut the federal government for 16 days in an attempt to force the repeal of Obama's health insurance program; that gambit failed too.

After his decision to retire, Boehner denounced the GOP radicals as “false prophets” who misled their own voters. They “whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know — they know! — are never going to happen,” he said last week.

But don't feel too bad for him: Boehner stood by while that whipping took place.

“Now he's saying the House has been hijacked by radicals, but the pilots of this airline gave the hijackers first-class seats,” Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime Congress-watcher, told me. “They encouraged them, incited them, promised them things. And now the hijackers want what they were promised.”

As radical as the insurgents are, it would be wrong to dismiss them as a fringe group. Even as they antagonized Boehner, they built a national constituency that may be a majority among grass-roots Republicans. A Fox News poll last month reported that 62% of GOP primary voters believe they have been “betrayed” by the party's leaders; 66% believe leaders have failed to do everything possible to block Obama's agenda.

The GOP's insurgent impulse, in other words, isn't merely a result of gerrymandering or conservative microclimates in rural America. It's a product of the same widespread anger that has made Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina potential presidential nominees.

Last week, the insurgents — who have organized themselves as the Freedom Caucus, with about 40 members — auditioned McCarthy and others for speaker. As the price for their support, they demanded written promises from McCarthy: a Freedom Caucus member as his deputy, more limits on the speaker's power to appoint committee chairmen, no punishment for members who buck party discipline. McCarthy would have been crazy to say yes.

The sensible thing at this point might be for the Republican conference to split. After all, it's already operating as an unstable coalition of two mini-parties: the Freedom Caucus and what you might call the Governing Caucus.
Republicans will keep their majority — but it still won't be a usable, workable majority. They'll have the satisfaction of telling their constituents that they refused to compromise. But they still won't get anything done.

More Monday Male Beauty

Dedicated to One Million Bitches Moms

Hate Group Affiliate Fuming Over Campbell's Soup Ad With Gay Dads

As Americans are increasingly accepting of gays and their families, hate groups such as The American Family Association ("AFA") are finding it harder and harder to keep the cash rolling in so that the Wildmon clan - the group's founding family - can live the good life to which they have become accustomed.  Thus the need to constantly convince the organization's sheep like, lobotomized followers that they and their fantasy world religious beliefs are under attack.   Hence the latest threats against Campbell's Soup from falsely named AFA front group One Million Bitches Moms  - AFA itself only has 186,000 paid members, so it's unlikely its smaller affiliate has numbers remotely approaching a million - in the wake of the company's ad showing two gay dads and their son.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the self-serving rants from the sexually frustrated women at the AFA affiliate. Here are highlights:

Days after Campbell's Soup unveiled a new commercial featuring gay dads, a right-wing group notorious for getting worked up over everything from Toys 'R' Us to Chobani yogurt slammed the ad for "normalizing sin." 

In a post on its website, One Million Moms members argued that Campbell's Soup is "attempting to desensitize viewers" with the clip, which is part of a larger campaign called "Made for Real, Real Life."

"Obviously, Campbell's is sending the message that homosexual men are raising children, whom they wouldn't have if a woman wasn't involved, and they are ok with it," One Million Moms wrote. Calling the commercial (which can be viewed in full below) "a marketing decision [the company] will regret," they urge readers to stop buying Campbell's products if the company continues to the air the ad. 

"They should not be highlighting who is attracted to whom or who sleeps with whom," they wrote. "There is concern about the way this ad is pushing the LGBT agenda, but an even greater concern is the way that they are attempting to redefine 'family' and 'real marriage.'"

In June, they argued that Greek yogurt giant Chobani was "attempting to normalize sin" with a recent commercial that featured a same-sex couple. 

Still, it's unlikely that Campbell's Soup will take One Million Moms' words as a legitimate threat anytime soon. The group's best-known boycotts, including one of JCPenney after the retailer hired Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman, have had a zero percent success rate. 

As noted, the One Million Bitches are not interested in a real boycott.  No, it's all about shaking down the ignorant, bigoted and gullible for more money by pretending to be "protecting" marriage" and the family.   Carnival barkers have higher integrity than these bitches.  The biggest fear of the Wildmon family is that someday they all might have to get real jobs. Oh the horror!!

The Right's Frightening Cult of the Second Amendment

There are many things that are frightening about today's GOP base: religious extremists, open white supremacists and racists, raging homophobes, male chauvinists, the celebratory embrace of ignorance, etc.  But perhaps one of the most frighten aspects is the far right's love affair with guns and willingness to use violence against those deemed "other" - hence the growing number of murders of unarmed black males by police.  Tied to this mindset is a growing belief that if their views are threatened, then an armed response is warranted.  To justify this insanity, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been perverted and claims are now widely made that the Founding Fathers wanted arm revolution to be an option against the very form of government they labored so hard to create. It is, of course, total batshitery.  But then, so id much of what now passes for thought and intelligent discourse among the slobbering, spittle flecked masses of the GOP base.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this disturbing development.  Here are excerpts:

[T]o a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government. 

This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.

But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists—who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”—that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted. 

Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates.

Perhaps the most surprising statement on this subject from a Republican presidential candidate was by a rare figure who dissents from the right-to-revolution talk, per this report from Sahil Kapur at TPM a few months ago:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's argument that the Second Amendment provides the "ultimate check against government tyranny" is a bit too extreme for potential 2016 rival and fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

"Well, we tried that once in South Carolina. I wouldn't go down that road again," Graham said, in an apparent reference to the Civil War. "I think an informed electorate is probably a better check than, you know, guns in the streets."

Graham joked about this, but liberals generally are not amused by the suggestion that “patriotic” Americans should be stockpiling guns in case “they”—it’s not clear who, of course—decide it’s time to start shooting police officers and members of the armed forces in defense of their liberties, which in some cases are perceived to be extremely broad. Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary. Here’s Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the darling of the GOP Class of 2014, talking about this contingency in 2012:

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere...But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

You can wonder, as I often do, how people like Ernst would react to such rhetoric if it were coming from a member of a black nationalist or Islamist group. But clearly, there’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation. But it’s important to understand that according to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally.

Sunday Male Beauty

Christians Need to Stop Hurting LGBT People

The bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican continue their farcical synod on the family and are making it very clear that LGBT families simply do not count under the Vatican's 13th century understanding of sexual orientation (I'd like to make them be limited to utilizing only 13th century medical treatment, if they think the 13th century provides all the answers).  Meanwhile, Sister Simone Campbell, the Executive director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, is call on the Vatican - and other homophobic denominations - to cease the harm being done to LGBT individuals.  Here are highlights from her post at Huffington Post:

I've been described as 'radical' by the Vatican; it's pretty funny really. I have no idea what some people find so radical about accepting 100 per cent of people on this earth.

As a movement, NETWORK, America's National Catholic Social Justice Lobby relates to everyone in society and that obviously includes the LGBT community. I've witnessed the amazing courage of folks in the LGBT community, who have come out and spoken publicly and respectfully on what had been taboo subjects. Because of their bravery, all of us have discovered we know at least someone - a friend, relative, colleague, whoever - who is LGBT, and I think that's been huge in moving society towards greater acceptance. 

I wonder if the challenge for some people in dealing with anxieties around sexual definition is their own lack of working through their sexual identity. When we're comfortable in ourselves, outside things can't threaten us. I know, when I'm nervous about something, it's usually got something to do with me and my own unresolved stuff. So I wonder that when folks are angry or judgmental or prejudiced if it's a reflection of their own insecurities. And I think there are some people within the Church, some priests and bishops included, that haven't wrestled with their own sexuality and instead spend a lot of time worrying about everybody else's. I think it comes from needing to judge others to feel better about oneself, or projecting onto others the things that one fears.

[T]he Bible doesn't really say anything about LGBT people. There is that line in the book of Leviticus, but really, give me a break! That is not the LGBT community as we in the 21st century understand it. Instead, what I see over and over in the gospels is Jesus walking towards all kinds of folks. The scriptures say repeatedly that you should walk towards everybody, no exceptions. If some folks have a sexual identity that's different to mine, so what? God doesn't make mistakes and if that's how folks are created, then that's a reflection of God's love too. We need to wake up to the fact that love is a wonderful thing, building families is a wonderful thing, and there are a variety of ways to do either.  

On our last bus tour, I met a young woman who had escaped from a program to 'cure' her of being gay. She's now married to her female partner and together they have a baby - she was just radiating joy! But then she started telling me that some years before, her Christian family had sent her away to a curing program. Her father - a preacher - told her that she was possessed by the devil, and she even came to believe that herself for a while. I don't know how she had the courage to break out of it, but five months in she ran away and hasn't had contact with her family since.

I could feel her anguish in the judgement from her family, but also her relief in being true to herself and trusting that she wasn't wrong or crazy or possessed.  

When folk hate or reject LGBT people, it affects the person who is doing the hating. If you spend your energy being fearful and criticizing others, that anger erodes who you are and really limits the joy and love that Jesus calls us to. 

For me, that means we have to listen to people rather than making assumptions about them. Anyone can create their own theory and feel very sure about what LGBT people are or are not, but when you meet people it changes everything. Talk to people. Be open and accept the truth of who people are. That's all we need to do.

I love the shots she takes at the Church hierarchy.  Would that Sister Simone was the pope.

Ex-GOP Staffer: Benghazi Panel on Partisan Mission to Destroy Hillary

First Kevin McCarthy slipped up and made it clear that the real mission of the GOP organized Committee conducting hearings on Benghazi is to destroy Hillary Clinton. Now, a former GOP staffer who has left working for the committee has confirmed McCarthy's slip up and confirmed that the Republican majority is conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton.  Truth be told, the GOP doesn't give a rat's ass about Benghazi except as a vehicle to destroy Hillary who they see as the main presidential rival for whichever occupant of the GOP candidate clown car ultimate gains the GOP nomination.  A piece in Politico looks at the statements of Major Bradley Podliska who was fired because of his refusal to engage in the partisan with hunt. Here are highlights:

An ex-GOP investigator for the House Select Committee on Benghazi says the Republican majority is conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton.

Major Bradley Podliska, who was fired from the committee in June after about 10 months on the job, told CNN the panel has veered off its original course to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 attack that left four Americans dead — instead zeroing in on Clinton following news that she used private email while Secretary of State.

The segment, to be broadcast on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, is sure to feed the partisan fire surrounding the committee, which has been on defense for more than a week after comments Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made suggesting the committee’s work has hurt Clinton on the 2016 campaign trail, where she is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

A GOP Benghazi panel spokesman in a statement called Podliska's allegations “transparently false.”

The Air Force Reserve intelligence officer, who told CNN that he himself is a Republican, said he’s planning to file a lawsuit against the panel next month for wrongful termination after “resisting pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely on the State Department and Clinton's role surrounding the Benghazi attack," reads a CNN preview. 

He also alleges he was fired for taking time off the job to fulfill his military duties.

"I was fired for going on military service and I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, non-partisan, thorough investigation," Podliska will say, according to the CNN preview.

Podliska will say his firing had more to do with his unwillingness to focus his probe solely on Clinton and State — something the panel says it’s not doing — and a leave of absence he took to fulfill military service obligations. 

Podliska told CNN he was only now talking about the matter because of the panel’s continued focus on Clinton.

"I'm scared. I'm nervous. I know that this is, you know, I'm going up against powerful people in Washington. But at the end of the day I need to live with myself," he is quoted saying in the CNN report. "I told my wife, I will view myself as a coward if I don't do the right thing here."

Obviously, the GOP committee members have every reason to be lying.  For Podliska, the benefits are far less obvious.