Mike Pence Is Intertwined in the Russia Scandal

Like the ever, in my view, despicable Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence acts sanctimonious and wears his right wing Christian faith on his sleeve.  Yet, like Sessions, Pence seemingly has a big problem when it comes to truth and veracity.  The only other explanation for Pence's constant back tracking on statements - or perhaps lies - is that he is an idiot and has been played like a gullible fool by Der Trumpenführer and his sycophants.   Over the last 20+ years that I have followed Christian "family values" groups, the one thing that is striking is the abandon with which the "godly folks" lie almost constantly.  This is precisely the background from which Pence derives his "Christian beliefs" - a background where lying to further theocratic goals is completely acceptable.  It's as if the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness doesn't exist.  It is in this context that a column in the Washington Post looks at Pence's incredible claims that he knew nothing of the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia.  Here are column highlights:

Vice President Pence is hip-deep in the Russia scandal, his best defense being that he was inattentive or an easily manipulated dunce. His home-state paper, the Indianapolis Star, reports:

Another of Vice President Pence’s past statements came back to bite him this week. This time it had to do with his denial last year that the Trump-Pence campaign had been in contact with WikiLeaks.

Donald Trump Jr. on Monday shared several messages he exchanged during the 2016 campaign with WikiLeaks around the time it was publishing leaked and secret material from Democrats. Those messages were exchanged in the fall, leading up to Trump’s eldest son tweeting out a link to WikiLeaks’ documents on Oct. 14, 2016, the same day Pence was asked by Fox News to respond to suggestions “that your campaign is in cahoots with WikiLeaks.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Pence responded. “Here you see the national media chasing after unsubstantial allegations, the allegations that Donald Trump has categorically denied.”

Pence has a trail of inaccurate statements concerning the Trump campaign and Russia, nearly as many as the memory-challenged attorney general.

Consider the hiring of former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. . . . . Flynn also lied to the vice president about his contacts with Russian officials during the transition, a lie that set in motion Sally Yates’s conversation with the White House general counsel and ultimately resulted in Flynn’s resignation, the opening of the Russia probe and the firing of former FBI director James B. Comey.

When Trump wanted to lean on Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn, he ordered both Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of the Oval Office. Put that down as evidence that Pence was being kept in the dark.

However, Pence reportedly was present at the Oval Office meeting where Trump read the draft memo concerning his decision to fire Comey. That memo apparently was a screed about Comey’s handling of the Russia probe. Pence subsequently related to Congress and the press the phony cover story that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein had cooked up, namely that Comey had improperly handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Pence denied Comey was fired over the Russia investigation, a position Trump swiftly contradicted in his interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt.

[L]ike now-embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Pence repeatedly denied that the campaign had any contacts with the Russians. Perhaps Pence knew and forgot, perhaps he knew and lied on behalf of the president, or perhaps he was kept in the dark.

At some point, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III almost certainly will want to interview Pence. (Pence’s lawyer reportedly met with Mueller over the summer.) At that point, Pence will need to explain how it was that he never learned in real time about Flynn’s legal problems as an unregistered foreign agent, never knew about campaign or transition contacts with Russians and/or WikiLeaks and didn’t know that Comey was being fired at least in part because of the Russia episode.

[O]ne wonders why he would want to continue serving in an administration that uses him to deceive Congress, the press and the public. At some point, if Pence is an innocent man wrapped up in a web of dishonesty and subterfuge, you’d think he’d get angry, refuse to carry the president’s water and even quit.

In any event, Pence’s political future is dim. If he’s complicit in a coverup, he’s in legal peril. If he’s not, he’s a fool and a pawn, someone far too naive to be entrusted with power.  

 Like Trump, Pence needs to be removed from office.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

From Liz Smith To Kevin Spacey: How The Hollywood Closet Endured

Gossip columnist Liz Smith died this week at the age of 94.  During her most powerful years, her gossip column could boost careers or trash them.  Ironically, through it all, Smith was a largely closeted lesbian with long term relationships with women.   The other irony is that Smith and others aided in maintaining the Hollywood closet and all of the harm that it wreaked on numerous lives.  Fellow LGBT blogger and activist Michelangelo Signorile has a piece in Huffington Post that looks at Smith and others who perhaps unwittingly aided in sexual harassment by closeted figures while maintaining the Hollywood and celebrity closet.  Here are excerpts:

This week’s death of 94-year-old Liz Smith, the queen of gossip columnists, brought some frank assessments of her complicated relationship with the closet, including in the New York Times, Vanity Fair and a detailed, personal piece by Michael Musto in the fashion bible, W magazine.

I wrote angry columns as an editor and columnist at OutWeek from 1989 through 1991, referenced in some of these current assessments, excoriating Smith for her role in helping to keep the queer closet in pop culture tightly closed at a time when visibility was literally a life or death issue.

As the AIDS plague escalated, Smith, in her New York Daily News column, syndicated to dozens of newspapers nationally in those days before the Internet, was helping to cover for people like Calvin Klein, Jodie Foster, Hollywood mogul David Geffen, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Malcolm Forbes, photographer Annie Liebovitz and many, many more ― all of whom have since come out, no doubt due to the pressure and the exhaustion of keeping the closet door tightly closed.

Smith not only “respected” the closets of Hollywood celebrities and other public figures, but she also actively promoted lies and distortions, running items about false heterosexual affairs that their publicists fed her, though she knew the truth full well, since she traveled in these celebrities’ circles. 

That was the epitome of Fake News, way back in 1989.   When it came to heterosexual public figures and their affairs, divorces and other romantic interests, Smith and other celebrity and political chroniclers not only had to get their details correct ― per proper journalism ― but they knew the public saw this as glamorous and exciting. Homosexuality, on the other hand, was something that revolted many in that profoundly homophobic era, so these scribes hid behind the notion of protecting “privacy” as an excuse for hiding information or outright lying.

This was of course hypocritical ― not caring about the privacy of heterosexual public figures but suddenly having more ironclad ethics when it came to the privacy of homosexuals, even when reporting on their sexual orientation was relevant to a larger, important story ― as the only thing they were protecting was often the industry that they, too, built their careers within.

And worse off, many or most of the columnists ― like Liz Smith ― were closeted and queer themselves. What better system for the powers-that-be than than to have queer people who have their own vested career and financial interests in the closet guarding the secrets of other closeted prominent and powerful people? What we’ve learned is that when celebrities feel pressured by both the LGBTQ community and the media to come out ― from Melissa Etheridge and Rosie O’Donnell to Neil Patrick Harris and Demi Lovato ― rather than being hurt they actually thrive, both personally and in their careers.

We’re also able to look back now on the dangers of the closet and protecting it at all costs with zealous anti-“outing” polices with regard to public figures, and rethink just what “outing” means. As I wrote recently regarding Kevin Spacey, protecting his closet was dangerous because some, even in the gay press, who knew of his sexual harassment of an underage actor refused to report it, wrongly equating his abuse of a male minor with being gay itself and thus afraid they were going to “out” him.

So many closeted public figures have in fact engaged in same-sex harassment and assault often because they couldn’t go out in public to bars or elsewhere and knowing they could get away with it because no one in the media would ever dare report on it.

That was the case with multimillionaire Malcolm Forbes, who was sexually harassing his male employees ― and also living a secret life dating men while people like Liz Smith, who’d been flown by him to his lavish parties on yachts around the world and in places like Morocco, perpetrated the glamorous but false notion that he was romantically involved with his platonic friend Elizabeth Taylor. 

That’s not to say Smith herself didn’t do good things for charity, including in battling AIDS, raising money for the cause and promoting such events that raised funds. But the most powerful thing she could do in those times was to come out and stop closeting others, and show the visibility of queer people, and stand up to the homophobes.

Eventually she did come out as bisexual, many years later. . . . . And this year, at the age of 94, she finally admitted she should have come out sooner. 

I do not mean to be unkind to Smith and others like her.  I existed in a combination of self-loathing and terror of my secret being discovered for many years in the closet.  It is not a good place to be and often blinds you to the better course of action.  Hopefully, despite the efforts of the Trump/Pence regime to re-mainstream anti-LGBT discrimination, the era of the closet is fading and fewer and fewer people will feel the need to be untrue to themselves and less than honest with others.  No one chooses to be born LGBT just as no one gets to choose to be black or born into a Muslim family.  It is far past time that ALL of us simply accept each other as creations of the Creator/god who are equal to one another, no one better than another.

Yet Another Woman Accuses Roy Moore of Groping Her

Moore's latest accuser a few years before Moore allegedly groped her in his law office

UPDATED:  The Washington Post has released a story confirming that still another accuser of Roy Moore has come forward.  This one was a high school student when Moore pursued her.  Here are excerpts:

Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore.

“He said, ‘You can just call me Roy,’ ” says Richardson, who says this first encounter happened in the fall of 1977, just before or after her 18th birthday, as Moore, then a 30-year-old local attorney, was gaining a reputation for pursuing young women at the mall in Gadsden, Ala. His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to “watch out for this guy,” another young woman to complain to her supervisor and Richardson to eventually hide from him when he came in Sears, the women say.

Richardson says Moore asked her out again on the call. A few days later, after he asked her out at Sears, she relented and agreed, feeling both nervous and flattered. They met that night at a movie theater in the mall after she got off work, a date that ended with Moore driving her to her car in a dark parking lot behind Sears and giving her what she called an unwanted, “forceful” kiss that left her scared.

Richardson, whose account was corroborated by classmate and Sears co-worker Kayla McLaughlin, is among four women who say Moore pursued them when they were teenagers or young women working at the mall — from Sears at one end to the Pizitz department store at the other. Richardson and Becky Gray, the woman who complained to her manager, have not previously spoken publicly.

With one Republican poll showing that GOP candidate Roy Moore may be sinking in the polls and more Congressional Republicans running from Moore like he's the plague, the last thing that Moore needs is more accusations against him for sexual molestation, yet that is precisely what happened today as yet another woman came forward with accusations against Moore.   By all appearances, Moore is that most reprehensible type of man who views women as inferiors how exist for his gratification and pleasure - the very same mindset exhibited by Der Trumpenführer, who to date has said nothing about Moore's growing sexual predator scandal.   AL.com looks at the latest accusations.  Here are excerpts:

A Gadsden woman says Roy Moore groped her while she was in his law office on legal business with her mother in 1991. Moore was married at that time.

In the past week, Moore has been accused by five other women of a range of behaviors that include sexual misconduct with a woman when she was 14, and sexual assault of another when she was 16. This is the first public accusation of physical contact that happened after Moore was married.

In recent days, Moore has publicly denied any wrongdoing, and has denied knowing some of the women.

In interviews with AL.com, Tina Johnson recalls that in the fall of 1991 she sat in the law office of then-attorney Roy Moore on Third Street in Gadsden. Her mother, Mary Katherine Cofield, sat in the chair next to her. Moore sat behind his desk, across from them. Johnson remembers she was wearing a black and white dress.

Almost from the moment she walked in to Moore's office, Johnson said, Moore began flirting with her.  "He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked," recalled Johnson. "He was saying that my eyes were beautiful."

It made her uncomfortable. "I was thinking, can we hurry up and get out of here?"  Johnson was 28 years old, in a difficult marriage headed toward divorce, and unemployed. She was at the office to sign over custody of her 12-year-old son to her mother, with whom he'd been living. Her mother had hired Moore to handle the custody petition.

Once the papers were signed, she and her mother got up to leave. After her mother walked through the door first, she said, Moore came up behind her.  It was at that point, she recalled, he grabbed her buttocks.  "He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it," said Johnson. She was so surprised she didn't say anything. She didn't tell her mother.

She said she told her sister years later how Moore had made her feel uncomfortable during that meeting. Her sister told AL.com she remembers the conversation.

AL.com located the court documents from 1991, detailing the custody transfer. Cofield's petition for custody is signed by Roy S. Moore, attorney. It lists his address as 924 Third Avenue, Gadsden.

"This is not a politics thing with me," she said. "It's more of a moral and religious thing." It has bothered her over the years to see Moore on TV, talking about his Christian faith.  She wanted to come forward publicly now, she said, because it's hard for victims of harassment to talk openly about their experiences.

"I want people to know that it's OK to finally say something," she said. "I guess I'm ashamed I didn't say nothing, didn't turn around and slap him."

It's an issue both Johnson and Thorp wanted to address.  Thorp said local women have not spoken publicly against Moore before now because he had power in town and in the state, and they didn't think they would be believed.  "Everybody knew it wouldn't matter," she said, "that he would get elected anyway because his supporters are never going to believe anything bad about him."

Johnson said the answer was even more simple.  "It's because somebody asked," she said. "If anybody had asked, we would have told it. No one asked."

 If evangelicals continue to support Moore, their moral bankruptcy will be complete.  I hope the larger society is watching and will judge them - and shun them - accordingly. 

More Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

The Death of Christianity in the America

I have often made the argument that if Christianity dies in America it will be because of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who are literally killing the Christian brand with many, but especially the younger generations.  They have made Christianity a message of hate and hypocrisy and their long success in conning the public into believing that they are nice and decent people seems to be coming to an end.  I was very surprised to see this argument made in a column in of all places Baptist News Global.  Here are highlights from the column which is spot on: 

Christianity has died in the hands of Evangelicals. Evangelicalism ceased being a religious faith tradition following Jesus’ teachings concerning justice for the betterment of humanity when it made a Faustian bargain for the sake of political influence. The beauty of the gospel message — of love, of peace and of fraternity — has been murdered by the ambitions of Trumpish flimflammers who have sold their souls for expediency. No greater proof is needed of the death of Christianity than the rush to defend a child molester in order to maintain a majority in the U.S. Senate.

Evangelicals have constructed an exclusive interpretation which fuses and confuses white supremacy with salvation. Only those from the dominant culture, along with their supposed inferiors who with colonized minds embrace assimilation, can be saved. But their salvation damns Jesus.

To save Jesus from those claiming to be his heirs, we must wrench him from the hands of those who use him as a façade from which to hide their phobias — their fear of blacks, their fear of the undocumented, their fear of Muslims, their fear of everything queer.

Evangelicalism has ceased to be a faith perspective rooted on Jesus the Christ and has become a political movement whose beliefs repudiate all Jesus advocated. A message of hate permeates their pronouncements, evident in sulphurous proclamations like the Nashville Statement, which elevates centuries of sexual dysfunctionalities since the days of Augustine by imposing them upon Holy Writ. They condemn as sin those who express love outside the evangelical anti-body straight jacket.

Christianity at a profit is an abomination before all that is Holy. From their gilded pedestals erected in white centers of wealth and power, they gaslight all to believe they are the ones being persecuted because of their faith.

Evangelicalism’s embrace of a new age of ignorance, blames homosexuality for Harvey’s rage rather than considering the scientific consequences climate change has on the number of increasing storms of greater and greater ferocity. To ignore the damage caused to God’s creation so the few can profit in raping Mother Earth causes celebrations in the fiery pits of Gehenna.

Evangelicalism forsakes holding a sexual predator, an adulterer, a liar and a racist accountable, instead serving as a shield against those who question POTUS’ immorality because of some warped reincarnation of Cyrus. Laying holy hands upon the incarnation of the very vices Jesus condemned to advance a political agenda — instead of rebuking and chastising in loving prayer — has prostituted the gospel in exchange for the victory of a Supreme Court pick.

Evangelicalism either remained silent or actually supported Charlottesville goose steppers because they protect their white privilege with the doublespeak of preserving heritage, leading them to equate opponents of fascist movements with the purveyors of hatred.

You might wonder if my condemnation is too harsh. It is not, for the Spirit of the Lord has convicted me to shout from the mountaintop how God’s precious children are being devoured by the hatred and bigotry of those who have positioned themselves as the voice of God in America.

Like many women and men of good will who still struggle to believe, but not in the evangelical political agenda, I too no longer want or wish to be associated with an ideology responsible for tearing humanity apart. But if you, dear reader, still cling to a hate-mongering ideology, may I humbly suggest you get saved.

Wow!  And, yes, the author is correct.

Australia Overwhelmingly Votes "Yes" for Marriage Equality

Despite the efforts of the sex abuse scandal plagued Roman Catholic Church and reactionary Christian denominations - some of which were aided by American Christofascist and their hate group organizations - Australians overwhelmingly voted "Yes" for marriage equality.  Now, it is up to that nation's parliament to enact a bill that puts in place laws consistent with the will of its citizens.  The Sydney Morning Herald looks at the results of the vote.  Here are excerpts:

A majority of people in every state and territory said Yes. The Yes vote was largely consistent, representing 60-65 per cent of the vote in all but two states and territories. In the ACT, nearly three quarters of the population said yes (74 per cent) while in NSW only 57.8 per cent was in favour of same-sex marriage.

More than three quarters of the Australia’s eligible voters took part, with the Northern Territory (58.7 per cent) the only state or territory to not reach that level.
 Only 17 of Australia’s 150 electorates voted No. Most of these (12) were in New South Wales. Three electorates in Queensland voted No, and two in Victoria. That means every single electorate in Australia’s five smallest states and territories voted Yes.

Yes votes reached up to 83.7 per cent in the inner-city electorates of Melbourne and Sydney.

It may host the annual Mardi Gras but Sydney is not as gay-friendly as it may seem. The Yes vote was lower in Sydney (55.3%) than in any other of Australia’s five biggest cities. In fact the Yes vote in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide was almost identical - all falling within one per cent of each other.

In everywhere but NSW, city-dwellers were more likely to vote Yes than people in regional areas.

The overall participation rate was nearly 80 per cent, a very high number for a voluntary survey. More than 70 per cent of eligible voters in every single age bracket took part.

Be prepared to see right wing Christians in Australia begin to claim that they are being persecuted because they are unable to inflict their beliefs on all of Australian society. 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

More Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

George Will: Roy Moore and His Evangelical Supporters Are an Embarrassment

Elect Doug Jones on December 12, 2017

Like many conservative columnists, George Will largely lost favor with me when he became largely an apologist for failed Republican Party policies and a cheerleader for reprehensible Republicans and Christian extremists.  It took Donald Trump, and now Roy Moore, to seemingly finally wake Will up to the ugliness he has been helping to support.  I guess, it's better to wake up late to reality as opposed to never like so many in the Republican Party base, but so much damage could have been avoided had people like George Will had ceased to be enablers years ago.   In his latest column, Will goes after Roy Moore and his evangelical Christian supporters and makes the case why Democrat Doug Jones should win the Alabama special election next month.  Here are column highlights:

But for the bomb, the four would be in their 60s, probably grandmothers. Three were 14 and one was 11 in 1963 when the blast killed them in the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is four blocks from the law office of Doug Jones, who then was 9.

He was born in May 1954, 13 days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. . . . . As a second-year law student, Jones cut classes to attend the 1977 trial of one of the church bombers, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. In 2001 and 2002, as U.S. attorney, Jones successfully prosecuted two other bombers. Was there resentment about this protracted pursuit of justice? No, he says as he nurses with tea a voice raspy from campaigning, because after 9/11 intervened, punishing domestic terrorism was not controversial.

Moore campaigns almost entirely on social issues — National Football League protests, the transgender menace — and the wild liberalism of Jones, a law-and-order prosecutor and deer and turkey hunter who says he has “a safe full of guns.” Jones’s grandfathers were members of the mineworkers’ and steelworkers’ unions. . . .

Evangelical Christians who embrace Moore are serving the public good by making ridiculous their pose as uniquely moral Americans, and by revealing their leaders to be especially grotesque specimens of the vanity — vanity about virtue — that is curdling politics. Another public benefit from the Moore spectacle is the embarrassment of national Republicans. Their party having made the star of the “Access Hollywood” tape president, they now are horrified that Moore might become 1 percent of the Senate. Actually, this scofflaw, twice removed from Alabama’s Supreme Court, once for disobeying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, is a suitable sidekick for the president who pardoned Joe Arpaio, Arizona’s criminal former sheriff. Even after Donald Trump conceded that Barack Obama was born in the United States, Moore continued rejecting such squishiness.

It has been 21 years since a Democratic Senate candidate won even 40 percent of Alabama’s vote. It has, however, been even longer — not since the George Wallace era — that the state’s identity has been hostage to a politician who assumes that Alabamians are eager to live down to hostile caricatures of them.

Nothing about Moore’s political, financial or glandular history will shake his base, unless the credible accusations of serial pursuit of underage girls are suddenly overshadowed by something his voters consider serious, such as taking sides in the Alabama-Auburn game. Jones’s hopes rest with traditional white Democrats (scarce), Republicans capable of chagrin (scarcer) and African Americans. They are 27 percent of this state in which “civil rights tourism” (the 16th Street church, Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery church, and more) is economically important.

This month, Virginia’s African Americans turned out for Gov.-elect Ralph Northam, a Democrat who, like Jones, invited voters to take a walk on the mild side. Approximately a quarter of Alabamians live in the metropolitan area of Birmingham, which has had an African American mayor since 1979.

Next month’s election will occur during many distractions, midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas and, more important, 10 days after Armageddon — the SEC championship game. Perhaps an Alabama victory would make the state hanker for a senator worthy of its football team. If so: Roll Tide.