Thursday, November 30, 2006

World AIDS Day

Now that an estimated 40 million people are living with HIV worldwide, the AIDS epidemic has surpassed even the most dire predictions made by experts when the virus first surfaced 25 years ago.
AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, and the United Nations reports that somebody in the world is newly infected with HIV every 8 seconds. Many other numbers are just as grim as the globe prepares to mark World AIDS Day this Friday, December 1.
Since its inception in 1988, World AIDS Day has strived to raise awareness of the realities of the virus, which is spreading widely through sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and East Africa at the same time as new drug cocktails have served to push back the disease in the affluent parts of what we used to call the "First World."
How to help?
*Participate in a World AIDS Day event or action this Friday.
*Help save a child's life in an AIDS-affected community by becoming a HopeChild sponsor through WorldVision. (All it takes is one dollar a day.)
*Help build support for the AIDS Cure Act.
*Help support the Global Access Project's call to urge the US government to lead a global health workforce initiative in AIDS ravaged countries.
*Volunteer with the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), one of the country's most effective grassroots groups working to ensure the development of a broad and effective range of HIV prevention options in the next decade.
*Download the Free Treatment for All manifesto and add your name to the campaign.
*Show your symbolic support by wearing a red ribbon on World AIDS Day and putting a virtual red ribbon on your site or blog.
 
 
Finally, talk to people. Since HIV was first identified a quarter of a century ago, it has been a stigmatized disease, resulting in silence and denial. Talking openly about HIV to your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors is the most powerful way of ending prejudice.


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Monday, November 27, 2006

Web Sites Topped TV On Election Night

PEJ: Web Sites Topped TV On Election Night 2006

By E&P Staff and The Associated Press



NEW YORK Election night 2006 will go into history books as a triumph for Democrats and rebuke to President Bush. It was a watershed evening for the news media, too.

The first smoothly run election night of the Internet era left many news organizations unsure of where they stood and should prompt some rethinking in time for 2008, according to a detailed new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, to be released Monday.

The journalism think tank monitored several forms of media that night and concluded the best place to follow the story was on Web sites run by television networks -- as opposed to the networks themselves. This included political blogs ranging from DailyKos to Drudge.

Because of the richly detailed Web sites, fed by both results and exit poll data gathered by the networks and The Associated Press, Internet browsers frequently were more up-to-date than the anchors and pundits on the air, said Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director.

The network Web sites did so well this year presumably because they are run by news organizations accustomed to getting information out quickly, the project's report said.

And, said Rosentiel, "It may not be very long before we say, `Maybe I don't even need to have the television on.'"

By contrast, his think tank was less impressed by aggregators such as Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and Yahoo Inc. Except for Yahoo, they lacked the judgment of human editors to avoid conflicting or confusing information getting out.

Newspaper Web sites also appear to be in transition, he said. They have a strong tradition of narrative storytelling that isn't necessarily suited to the pace of election night, he said. (See excerpts from the report on several newspaper sites below.)

CNN held a party election night for some of the Web's most prominent bloggers. Good thing, because mingling and socializing was about all they really had to do. The bloggers serve best as sentinels when things are going wrong, and nothing much went wrong that night, Rosenstiel said.

For the news organizations, though, the best part of this year's election was avoiding the embarrassment of blown calls or faulty exit poll results.

"That's good," Wheatley said, "because it really was a dry run for 2008."

CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC offered wall-to-wall coverage on TV that night. To a large extent, the networks-- particularly CNN -- see elections as an opportunity to show off their biggest names, but the slow pace of results this year frequently left them with little to say or do, Rosenstiel said.

"Showcasing talent may not always be the best way of telling the story," he said.

The cable networks should spend less time on pointless talk and more time with reporters, and could even supplement coverage during quieter times with prepared reports on the personalities and issues, he said.

"If they wanted to tell the story of the election rather than put on a live television show, they could have had a much richer profile," he said.

Wheatley wonders whether all networks might soon entice people by video streaming coverage online, on the same site where viewers would also be able to search for results that interest them.

The section of the PEJ report on newspaper sites is excerpted below. The full report can be found on Monday at www.journalism.org.

**

For a generation of election nights, the nation’s newspapers have been relegated to an afterthought. While they might have promised depth and analysis, in reality, it was often less clear what the papers the next day offered that political junkies who had watched well into the night had not already learned.

The Internet offers the potential to turn that upside down. Whatever advantage might be promised in the supposed thoroughness, precision, sophistication and turn-of-phrase
offered by the culture of newspapers and the nature of the edited written word could now be delivered to audiences in real time. Newspapers could compete directly with
television. How did newspaper Web site fare?

After monitoring several sites, one has the sense of a medium in process, still finding itself. Several questions still need to be answered.

It is unclear whether newspapers are comfortable trying to combine giving readers news instantly while providing the depth and nuance for which they are famous. How much
should a newspaper Web site concern itself with breaking news, versus interpreting it, since the two tasks are often at odds when time and resources are limited? One option
would be incorporating real-time news from other sources, such as wire services.

But what is a newspaper site to do if those other sources contradict each other? How much should the secondhand sources be segregated from the newspaper’s original information on the site, or integrated? Do the standards of accuracy that the newspaper promises the next morning hold in the faster environment online? For the biggest sites, such as the Washington Post or The New York Times, how much should they emphasize national versus local if they are directly competing with the broadcast and cable sites that have no hometown?

The answers were not settled in 2006. The questions simply became easier to identify.

To get a sense of this, we monitored four different newspaper Web sites: those of two national papers—the NYTimes.com and the Washingtonpost.com, the largest West Coast paper—the LA times.com, and one that was in the home of a key Senate race—the Virginian Pilot.
*

The report then continues with in-depth looks at how the four sites fared. Its section on The New York Times online, for example, concludes: "Overall, the Times’ Web site offered users a wealth of original content, and some
combination of depth and speed. But in trying to be speedy its potential depth may have been undermined. One senses that trying to walk the line between being an “election night live” site and a newsroom organization that tries to understand and explain, is a divided task that will take some sorting out."

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Blogging In The News

Choosing Who Can See What on Your
Blog



Blogs have a place in many of our everyday lives, even if we
aren't bloggers ourselves. The word blog, short for Web log, is used to describe
personal Web sites that are frequently updated with entries for sharing with
others. They can range from your son's personal blog about baseball statistics
to a well-read and more polished political blog that gets tens of thousands of
hits each day.


A big problem with blogs is privacy. While some people --
especially MySpace fans -- don't mind posting personal news, photos and videos
for anyone to read, many of us hesitate to leave details about our personal
lives online.


This week, we tested a new, free blogging service called Vox, www.vox.com,
from Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software company. One of Vox's best attributes
is its ability to label each individual post, or entry, with a different privacy
filter, so that instead of setting your blog to be entirely private or entirely
public, you can pick and choose what you want to share.


Vox also excels at making it easy to add photos, audio, videos
and book links to your blog without any prior expertise. It lets you incorporate
content from Web sites like YouTube, Amazon and photo-sharing site Flickr in
only a couple of steps. Viewing of each multimedia element can also be
restricted to people you choose. Vox is supported by ads that aren't intrusive
or distracting.


We each made a blog in Vox, and updated them several times. We
found the process to be quick and simple, and the results to be attractive. We
liked the privacy features. But while its intentions are good, Vox has a few
downsides. Its idea of making each blog post visible to different groups is
useful. But everyone who views your privacy-protected entries must also be
registered with Vox, a quick process, but one that will discourage many
potential users.











[Photo]
One example of a Vox blog.

Also puzzling are Vox's categories for labeling those who view
your blog. Everyone must be labeled as friends, family or neighbors, but the
filters that determine who can view your posts don't include neighbors at all.


Vox also doesn't do a great job of implementing many features
that are standard in blog services. These features include interactive elements
on a page such as drag-and-drop organizing.


We got started by signing up for Vox -- a process that involved
entering our email address, creating a password and URL, and entering personal
information. A Design section walked us through choosing a layout and theme from
numerous choices. Katie chose the Cityscape Washington, D.C., theme, which
includes the Capitol and Washington Monument. Walt chose Firefly Night, which
includes the moon and stars and a silhouette of a tree.


To prompt you to blog, the Vox homepage always offers a
Question of the Day, or QOTD. With one click, you can optionally answer the QOTD
in your own blog. When you post your answer, or enter any post, a drop-down menu
lets you choose who can view it: The World (Public), Your Friends and Family,
Your Friends, Your Family or Just You. If, for example, you choose to allow only
your friends to see a post, other groups won't know that they're not seeing the
friends-only post.


If you see another person's Vox blog and would like to bookmark
it so that his or her latest entries are constantly updated on a special page
just for you, you can add that blogger to your neighborhood. Friends and family
are automatically part of your neighborhood, but when choosing who can see your
content, neighborhood isn't an option. Vox plans to make the neighborhood
concept more understandable in an updated version due out by December.











[Combo]
Each individual post can be made viewable by
certain people to provide privacy.

We first posted some simple text entries. Then in the Compose
section, we chose from five colorful icons labeled Photos, Audio, Videos, Books
and Collections. Selecting each icon let us load content from our computer or
from a Web site with that type of content.


In Videos Katie selected a YouTube tab, entered a search word
and found a favorite scene from the TV show "Grey's Anatomy." She
selected a thumbnail image of the scene, hit OK, and the scene loaded onto her
blog moments later. No formatting or HTML code is necessary, a requirement that
used to plague many blogging services.


As we became comfortable using Vox and its privacy options, we
started posting lots of things: vacation photos, a country music audio file to
play along with a post about two-stepping and even Amazon links to our favorite
books. And unless your post or profile is public, nothing can be retrieved using
the Vox search feature.


We found a few hiccups, but mostly forgot about the geeky side
of blogging and enjoyed sharing our digital media. And the idea that no one else
would randomly browse across our content was a comfort. But that poses another
problem: Not everyone will want to register with Vox just to see your protected
content. Vox hopes to offer a way to register others so that your grandmother
will be able to see your family photos online just by entering a username and
password.


Back on the home page of Vox, a section called VoxWatch let us
quickly see any recent activity from our neighbors or ourselves. Recently posted
digital photos, recent comments and recent posts from everyone in our
neighborhood were grouped here.


A helpful Organize section divvies all of your content up into
its proper section: Photos, Books, Audio, Videos, Posts and Comments. This
section let us quickly find a comment that we wanted to reread but didn't feel
like finding on our blog, and it helped us get a better idea of everything that
existed on our blog -- a boon as you add more and more content. This section
also displays the names of those in your Neighborhood, as well as Friends and
Family.


Vox does a nice job of jazzing up the world of blogging. Its
designs are attractive, but it really shines when loading media onto your posts,
making your blog richer in content and more sophisticated in looks. Updates will
continue to be released, improving Vox's weaknesses, the most important of which
is clarifying its group labels. Vox also plans to offer to import your content
from other blogging sites, encouraging experienced users to bring their last
blog along with them instead of leaving it with the old service.


Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Gay Adoption in the Animal world?

Homosexual Animals Out of the Closet
 
Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
 
 
From male killer whales that ride the dorsal fin of another male to female bonobos that rub their genitals together, the animal kingdom tolerates all kinds of lifestyles.
A first-ever museum display, "Against Nature?,"  which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.
"Homosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well described for 500 of them," said Petter Bockman, project coordinator of the exhibition.
The idea, however, is rarely discussed in the scientific community and is often dismissed as unnatural because it doesn't appear to benefit the larger cause of species continuation.
"I think to some extent people don't think it's important because we went through all this time period in sociobiology where everything had to be tied to reproduction and reproductive success," said Linda Wolfe, who heads the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University. "If it doesn't have [something to do] with reproduction it's not important."
For pleasure
However, species continuation may not always be the ultimate goal, as many animals, including humans, engage in sexual activities more than is necessary for reproduction. 
"You can make up all kinds of stories: Oh it's for dominance, it's for this, it's for that, but when it comes down to the bottom I think it's just for sexual pleasure," Wolfe told LiveScience.
Conversely, some argue that homosexual sex could have a bigger natural cause than just pure ecstasy: namely evolutionary benefits.
Copulation could be used for alliance and protection among animals of the same sex. In situations when a species is mostly bisexual, homosexual relationships allow an animal to join a pack.
"In bonobos for instance, strict heterosexual individuals would not be able to make friends in the flock and thus never be able to breed," Bockman told LiveScience. "In some bird species that bond for life, homosexual pairs raise young. If they are females, a male may fertilize their eggs. If they are males, a solitary female may mate with them and deposit her eggs in their nest."
Mom and Dad and Dad
Almost a quarter of black swan families are parented by homosexual couples. Male couples sometimes mate with a female just to have a baby. Once she lays the egg, they chase her away, hatch the egg, and raise a family on their own.
"Homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are terms defined by societal boundaries, invisible in the animal kingdom.
"Many species are hermaphrodites," Bockman said. Hermaphrodites have both male and female sex organs. A lot of marine species have no sex life at all, but just squirt their eggs or semen into sea.
Some creatures even reproduce asexually, by dividing themselves into two organisms. In one species of gecko, females clone themselves.
Like most complex issues, animal homosexuality is challenging and poorly understood. Therefore, educators tend to shy away from covering it in their teaching. Many scientists don't even want to be associated with this type of research.
"I've had primatologists offer to give me their data on homosexual behavior because they didn't want to publish it," Wolfe said.
"Against Nature?" was set up partly to demystify the concept. 
The argument that a homosexual way of living cannot be accepted because it is against the "laws of nature" can now be rejected scientifically, said Geir Soli, project leader for the exhibition. "A main target for this project was to get museums involved in current debate; to show that museums are more than just a gallery for the past."
To learn more, see LiveScience's Top 10 presentation, Gay Animals: Alternate Lifestyles in the Wild.
 
Other Really Wild Stories
Spider Cries Out While Mating The Painful Realities of Hyena Sex Salmon of Small Stature Endowed with Mating Advantage Well-fed Crickets Seek Sex Incessantly, Die Young Mystery of Empty Chicken Sex Solved Smart Bats Have Smaller Testicles Original Story: Homosexual Animals Out of the Closet
 
Visit LiveScience.com for more daily news, views and scientific inquiry with an original, provocative point of view. LiveScience reports amazing, real world breakthroughs, made simple and stimulating for people on the go. Check out our collection of Science, Animal and Dinosaur Pictures, Science Videos, Hot Topics, Trivia, Top 10s, Voting, Amazing Images, Reader Favorites, and more. Get cool gadgets at the new LiveScience Store, sign up for our free daily email newsletter and check out our RSS feeds today!


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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Why Steny hoyer Should Drop out

 
Why Steny Hoyer Should Drop out of the Race With John Murtha:
 
 
 
Sure we could use a antagonist, but in about four years, today we need to show unity and team work, Steny is not a team player.   


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Monday, November 13, 2006

A tale of two covers

A tale of two covers: Time's '94 postelection cover touted "G.O.P. Stampede," '06 cover asserts "the center is the new place to be"
The November 21, 1994, edition of Time magazine -- published following that year's congressional elections, in which Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate -- featured the headline "G.O.P. Stampede: A Special Report" on the cover, and featured a graphic of an elephant trampling a donkey.
Time Cover 1994
The November 20 edition of Time -- published following the 2006 congressional elections, in which Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate -- features the headline "Special Report: The Midterms," and features as the cover story "Why the center is the new place to be," by columnist Joe Klein, with a graphic of a Venn diagram.
Time Cover 2006
Contact:
Time Magazine
E-mail: letters@time.com


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Thursday, November 09, 2006

Morning-After

Pundits Take Winners to Task

Victorious Dems lectured by media establishment

On the day after Election Day 2006, pundits
from major U.S. news outlets had, as one would expect, substantial amounts of
political criticism for the party that faced major losses. What is more
remarkable is the amount of criticism and caution directed at the party that won
major gains.



Virtually unanimously, the political commentators providing the initial analyses
of the election for the nation's most influential news outlets downplayed the
progressive aspects of the victory, characterizing the large new crop of
Democrats as overwhelmingly centrist or even conservative. "These Democrats
that were elected last night are conservative Democrats," declared CBS
News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer (Early Show, 11/8/06). CNN's
Andrea Koppel (American Morning, 11/8/06)
referred to the "new batch of moderate and conservative Democrats just
elected who will force their party to shift towards the center."



"This is not a majority made from cookie-cutter liberals," wrote
Eleanor Clift for Newsweek online (11/8/06).
"Some are pro-life, some pro-gun, some sound so Republican they might be in
the other party if it weren't for President Bush and the Iraq War." This
echoed the thoughts of Fox News' Carl Cameron,
who found among victorious Democrats "many pro lifers, a lot of second
amendment supporters, those who oppose gay marriage and support bans on flag
burning. Things of this nature."



Not that many were "pro-life," actually; NARAL
(11/8/06) counted 20 pro-choice votes among the 28 announced House newcomers.
Does anyone think that incoming class is going to make a Democratic-controlled
house less likely to block new abortion restrictions? And gun control (for
better or worse) hasn't been a serious Democratic priority for more than a
decade. One ideological stance that was actually widespread among the incoming
Democrats, and one that is actually likely to alter Democratic Party priorities,
is an opposition to NAFTA-style trade agreements and an embrace of "fair
trade" principles (Public Citizen,
11/8/06)--but this key trend was little noted by the morning-after pundits,
presumably because such views are considered akin to a belief in leprechauns by
the media establishment (Extra!, 7-8/01). One
exception was the Los Angeles Times editorial
page, which did take notice--and alarm: "Democrats who wooed anxious voters
with sermons about the evils of outsourcing will be reluctant to support freer
trade," the paper editorialized (11/8/06), deeming this development
"bad for the country."



In the Washington Post (11/8/06), Peter Baker
and Jim VandeHei stressed that "party politics will be shaped by the
resurgence of 'Blue Dog' Democrats, who come mainly from the South and from
rural districts in the Midwest and often vote like Republicans. Top Democrats
such as Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) see these middle-of-the-road lawmakers as the
future of the party in a nation that leans slightly right of center."



It's not surprising that Emanuel would see the world that way, since he's a
centrist himself who has long been trying to push the Democrats to the right.
But the "Blue Dogs" are far from a majority in the new crop of
Representatives (nine, according to the Arkansas
Democrat Gazette
, 11/9/06), or in the Democrat's total ranks (44), so
their influence on the party as a whole will be far from overpowering.



What's more, even those "Blue Dogs" are not likely to vote with
Republicans on top Democratic Party issues: A Media
Matters
survey found (11/8/06) that all 27 new Democrats whose races had
been called support raising the minimum wage and changing course in Iraq, and
they oppose privatizing Social Security. Media
Matters
found only five openly described themselves as
"pro-life."



It’s not just centrist Democrats like Emanuel who are pushing journalists to
take this line: CNN anchor Rick Sanchez posed
a question (11/8/06) to National Journal
writer John Mercurio: "I heard this at least five or six times tonight from
Republicans. They say sure, these Democrats that you've elected tonight are
running as moderates. Some even sound like conservatives. They have crew cuts,
social conservatives, talk about moral issues. When they get to Washington,
they're going to find their leadership is filled with liberals. Is there really
a dysfunction there?"



Conservative New York Times columnist David
Brooks put forth a similar take (11/9/06): "On Tuesday the muscular middle
took control of America. Voters kicked out Republicans but did not swing to the
left." Brooks wrote that Democrats "will have to show they have not
been taken over by their bloggers or their economic nationalists, who will
alienate them from the suburban office park moms."



This supposed conflict between what Clift called "the demands of the
antiwar left" and "the more moderate voices that helped [House
Democrats] win control of the chamber" was a prominent theme. Baker and
VandeHei allowed how "the passion of the antiwar movement helped propel
party ctivists in this election year," but said that "the Democrats'
victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing
Republican-leaning districts."



This assumption that war critics and centrists are two opposing camps is
peculiar, given that 56 percent of exit-polled voters said they opposed the war;
surely they represent the center of opinion, rather than the 42 percent who
expressed support. In any case, opposition to the war was a widespread theme
among the "more centrist candidates" who captured Republican-held
seats (TomPaine.co, 11/8/06).



The pundits' prescription for the Democrats hardly varies (Extra!,
7-8/06), so it was unsurprising to see them urging "bipartisanship"
and a move to the right. "In private talks before the election, Emanuel and
other top Democrats told their members they cannot allow the party's liberal
wing to dominate the agenda next year," Baker and Jim VandeHei reported,
citing the centrist Democrats whose analysis of the election results was nearly
identical with that of media insiders. (Rick Perlstine made a strong case on the
New Republic's website--11/8/06--that Emanuel
had less to do with the Democratic victory than did the netroots that he
despises.)



"The voters, tired of Washington's divisive ways, want to see the two
parties cooperate," wrote Newsweek's
Clift. Oddly, though, those voters had recently told Newsweek (Newsweek.co,
10/21/06) that 51 percent of them wanted impeachment to be a priority (either
high or low) of a new Democratic majority. It's likely that these people, who
wouldn't mind seeing Bush tried for high crimes and misdemeanors, aren't
particularly eager to see the representatives they sent to Washington working
with him to advance his agenda.



One thing that the new Democratic legislature must surely avoid doing, according
to the media analysts, is investigate the old Republican executive: "The
danger is that the campaign of '06 will simply continue under the name of
'government,'" wrote Dick Mayer for CBSNews.com
(11/8/06). "Many Democrats, for example, are dead set on a new round of
aggressive hearings about everything from pre-war intelligence to homeland
security to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The theater of Grand Congressional
inquisitions is generally an enemy of statesmanship."



It's troubling, to say the least, when people in the journalism profession see
"investigation" and "inquisition" as synonymous. The New
York Times
' Robin Toner (11/8/06), who was exceptional in not seeing her
morning-after analysis as an opportunity to scold the Democratic winners, also
stood out in seeing the exercise of Congress' investigatory powers as normal and
perhaps even beneficial; of the Democratic House leaders, she wrote that
"in many ways, their greatest power will be their ability to investigate,
hold hearings and provide the oversight that they asserted was so lacking in
recent years."



Other journalists couldn't resist using their analysis of the Republicans'
political failings as a chance to get in generic smears of the Democrats.
"The outcome brought an end to the Republican Revolution that began in 1994
but lost its way," wrote Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty for Time.com
(11/8/06), "as the party that came to Washington to cut government spending
and clean up a corrupt institution ran into scandals of its own and found itself
spending like drunken Democrats." Presumably a knowledge of political
history is a job requirement for being a political correspondent at Time;
when Duffy and Tumulty look back on the past 50 years of U.S. administrations,
do they really see it divided into spendthrift Democrats and frugal Republicans?



Suffice it to say that when Newt Gingrich and company swept into power in 1994,
no one in the mainstream media was explaining Democratic losses by saying that
the politicians who came to Washington in 1974 in response to Nixon's corruption
ended up "stealing like Republican crooks."



Tom Brokaw offered a similarly foggy history lesson on election night. "If
the Democrats do very well, will it be a huge philosophical shift? Maybe not,
because a lot of these Democrats ran to the center. They didn't run like they
were running in 1972 again. They ran as more pragmatic public servants this
time."



For the record, the party breakdown of the 93rd Congress (1973-75): 242
Democrats, 192 Republicans.

Feel free to respond to FAIR ( http://us.f345.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=fair@fair.org
)



Monday, November 06, 2006

More GOP High-Jinks

This piece claims it's paid for by the Republican Steele for Senate campaign.
(Click on images for full-sized version):



Did you know that those guys -- Mfume, Curry, and Johnson all endorsed
Michael Steele? Well, except that they didn't.


Yet this is all designed to look like a Democratic Party flyer. And look at
the next page:



Those are all Democrats except for Ehrlich and Steele.


These guys can't win honestly, so they're trying to lie and confuse their way
through the election.

HOMO Haggard


news photo

From bodyworkformen.com



Ex-Gay Prostitute: Haggard Will Probably Emerge To Claim He's Been “Cured” Of
Homosexuality

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The Politics Of Hate


The GOP's dwindling anti-gay parade


Polls show
Americans turning their backs on the divisive politics of homosexuality. Will
hard-liners in the heartland, like Colorado's Marilyn Musgrave, be forced to
follow?

By Michael Scherer



Nov. 03, 2006 In this season of porno-themed political ads and anti-gay
marriage amendments, Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave is, surprisingly, tacking in
a different direction. She no longer wants to talk in public about the
"radical homosexual agenda" and its malicious impact on the American
family. "I am running on a platform of security. Economic security. Border
security. National security," the corn-husk blond Republican announced at
the start of a candidate debate last week in Windsor.


This is a dramatic departure from the Musgrave of old, the Pentecostal mother
of four who came to politics in 1990 as a school committee member determined to
stamp out sex education. As a state legislator in Colorado, she campaigned
constantly against gay marriage and attempted to deny benefits to the same-sex
partners of state employees. In Congress, she has twice served as the chief
sponsor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. "As we face the
issues we're facing today, I don't think there is anything more important than
the marriage issue," she announced, just six weeks ago, at a Washington
conference for values voters. "If we have gay marriage, our religious
liberties are gone."


But in her home district, despite its conservative pedigree, a call to arms
in the culture war no longer plays the way it once did. In recent weeks, she has
backtracked on her Washington comments, saying they were taken out of context.
At the same time, Musgrave's Democratic opponent, Angie Paccione, has gone on
the offensive, despite polls that suggest about 60 percent of the district
supports a constitutional ban on gay marriage. "Marilyn Musgrave is out of
touch," Paccione says in a recent television advertisement: "She said
that her gay-marriage agenda is the most important issue facing the United
States of America … Are you kidding me?"


The reason for this turnabout may signal a transformation of the national
debate over homosexual relationships, which have been a defining issue in recent
election cycles. Across the country, candidates who have built their careers
fighting homosexual rights now find themselves on the losing side of the polls. In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum,
who once compared gay sex to "man-on-dog" relations, appears sure to
lose his campaign for reelection. In Ohio, the polls are equally grim for Ken
Blackwell, a Republican candidate for governor, who once said gay marriage
"defies barnyard logic." In Minnesota, Republican state Sen. Michele
Bachmann, who called gay matrimony a "ticking time bomb" because
"little children would be forced to learn that homosexuality is
normal," is fighting a tight battle for an open Republican seat.


Homosexuality is not the primary issue in any of these races, but it is
notable that all of the candidates have tamped down their anti-gay rhetoric as
the election approaches. "If things go as they look like they might, in the
heartland of America voters are going to reject candidates with extremist
political positions," says Ted Trimpa, a gay political activist and
attorney in Denver who is active in Colorado politics. "What that says to
me is the pendulum has swung, that the luster of using us as a political toy has
passed."


To be sure, the victory against anti-gay politics will be incremental at
best. Eight states are poised to pass constitutional amendments that will ban
gay marriage on Tuesday, and in the South and Midwest, a growing number of
Democratic candidates have come out against gay marriage, most notably Tennessee
Senate contender Harold Ford Jr. But as Musgrave's tight race in Colorado shows,
there are clear crosscurrents that suggest Americans are no longer as interested
in politicians who use homosexuality as a wedge issue. Recently, Dick Armey, the
former GOP House majority leader, was quoted saying the religious right has
become a group of "real nasty bullies" who have distracted from the
conservative cause. A recent study by the Cato Institute argued that libertarian voters, who have sided with the
Republicans in recent years, are increasingly defecting, in part because of the
GOP's focus on social intolerance. "They have cooler feelings towards the
Christian Coalition and warmer feelings towards gays and lesbians than do other
voters," the Cato authors wrote about the libertarian vote, which is strong
in the Rocky Mountain West.


The trend can be clearly seen in Colorado, home to James Dobson's Focus on
the Family, where voters are increasingly turning to the Democratic Party and
away from the divisive politics of homosexuality. "It has sort of worn
itself out for some voters," said John Straayer, a political scientist at
Colorado State University. "I think the Democrats' success is as much
attributable to what the Republicans are doing than to what [Democrats] are
doing themselves."


As in other states, Colorado voters are expected to pass a constitutional
amendment to bar gay marriage on Tuesday. But in a sign of the times, polls
suggest voters might also pass a referendum that will give gays and lesbians all
the domestic partnership rights of heterosexual marriage.


Until recently, Colorado has been a bulwark of socially conservative
Republicanism. In 1992, a majority of Coloradans -- 54 percent -- passed
Amendment 2, a state constitutional change that prohibited laws to protect gays
and lesbians from discrimination. Though courts later threw out the law,
Colorado was dubbed "the hate state" by pundits across the country.
But since then, clear signs of moderation have swept the state. Last year,
Republican Gov. Bill Owens vetoed legislation to protect gays and lesbians
against employment discrimination on the grounds that it duplicated current law.
Still, in his veto letter, he harshly chastised members of his own party who had
likened homosexuality to an "abomination" and pedophilia. "The
discourse fell far short of what I consider to be an acceptable standard worthy
of our great state," Owens wrote. "It was, instead, marked by a coarseness and insensitivity that was simply
wrong."


More recently, retiring Rep. Joel Hefley, a Republican from Colorado Springs,
has refused to endorse his party's candidate to take his seat, in part because
the candidate, Doug Lamborn, and his supporters attacked his primary opponent
for supporting the "homosexual agenda," a tactic Hefley called
"sleazy."


Meanwhile, Democrats have been making dramatic gains in the state by focusing
on economic issues. They have been aided by the third-party campaign spending of
several wealthy liberals, including Pat Stryker, an heir to a medical equipment
fortune, and Tim Gill, an entrepreneur who founded the technology company Quark.


All of these trends have put pressure on Musgrave, who oversees the 4th
Congressional District, most of which has not voted to elect a Democrat to
Congress since the early 1970s. Stretching from the northern Rockies to
Colorado's tumbleweed-strewn southeastern plains, the district is just slightly
smaller than the state of Indiana, including everyone from Western cattle
ranchers to mountain-bound retirees who regularly pass herds of bighorn sheep on
their way to fill their prescriptions. First elected in 2002, Musgrave pulled
through a costly reelection fight in 2004 against Stan Matsunaka, a local
attorney, who began the attack against her for her focus on gay marriage.
"I just kept calling her 'one-trick pony,'" explained Matsunaka.
"We made a lot of headroom saying her heart wasn't in the district."
Liberal and gay-friendly interest groups had also sunk nearly $2 million into
the race, eating into Musgrave's natural advantage. Though President Bush won
the district with 58 percent of the vote, Musgrave scored a far narrower
51-to-45 victory over Matsunaka.


Two years later, she is locked in a tossup race with Paccione, hurt in part
by the national mood that is turning against Republicans -- President Bush's
district approval rating, according to one poll, hovers at 40 percent.
Apparently aware of her vulnerability, Musgrave has run a low-key race,
eschewing media interviews, including a request from Salon, and holding only
occasional public events. Instead of stumping for large crowds, she has relied
on a series of ubiquitous television attack ads paid for by her considerable
$2.9 million campaign war chest and the National Republican Congressional
Committee, which has committed about $1 million. The ads assault Paccione as a
liberal on immigration and taxes, and repeatedly mention the fact that Paccione
once filed for personal bankruptcy in the early 1990s.


Paccione, meanwhile, has run a spirited campaign, funded with nearly $2
million she has raised, that includes daily door-knocking and rallies. A former
professional basketball player, Paccione grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the daughter
of a black mother and an Italian father. At a recent campaign stop in Estes
Park, a mountain community at the western edge of the district, she rallied a
mostly retired audience by demonizing the record of her opponent and President
Bush. "How will Colorado be different in two years?" Paccione asked,
rhetorically. "We won't be embarrassed by our congresswoman."


She spoke while sitting before a large plate-glass window at a local
restaurant that framed the snowcapped mountains and a small pond where mallards
squabbled in the sun. A hundred yards away, a herd of about 50 mountain elk had
taken up residence by the road amid the ponderosa pine. When asked, Paccione
tries to downplay her own opposition to amending the state constitution to ban
same-sex marriage. Yet, she compares the need for domestic partnerships for gays
and lesbians to the 1960s struggle for civil rights: "My mom's black. My
dad is white," she says. "It wasn't until 1967 that it was legal for
them to be married across this land."


Though the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has failed to invest
heavily in the race, Paccione has been aided by two liberal independent groups,
ProgressNow and the deceptively named Coloradans for Life. But the real X-factor
in the race is a Reform Party candidate named Eric Eidsness, a registered
Republican who abandoned an early plan to challenge Musgrave in the primary. In
most polls, Eidsness scores in the mid-to-high single digits, likely dragging
more support away from Paccione than Musgrave. A former naval officer who served
in Vietnam, he presents himself as a common-sense alternative to the two
political parties.


At the Windsor debate, he objected outright to the suggestion that the
federal or state government should pass constitutional amendments to ban gay
marriage. "I will lock and load to fight a federal government [that] will
interfere with my private family decision-making and personal decisions,"
he said, "whether it's two people who have the choice of partners, or the
right of a woman to choose, even though I have a problem with the morality of
abortion." He was expressing a Western ethos, born of the plains and taken
to the mountains, a worldview that an increasing number of Coloradans appear to
embrace. Statewide polling from 2004 to 2006 consistently shows that gay
marriage is among the least important issues facing the state, pulling in just 1
or 2 percent of voters who say it is the most important issue.


When the question came to Musgrave, she was almost sheepish in her answer.
"It will come as no surprise to anyone in the room that I support
traditional marriage, the union of one man and one woman," she said.
"I think that is the ideal environment for children to be raised, and I
think we ought to be very concerned about our children." Though she had
been given a minute to respond, her answer was less than 30 seconds. She ceded
the rest of her time, apparently eager to start talking about something else.





--
By Michael Scherer




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