Monroe Anderson

The ins and outs of McCain's change agents

   

     John McCain’s change agents are way more interesting—although not as real or competent—than Barack Obama’s. There’s Rick Davis, who is apparently a closet reformer, but publicly a big time lobbyist.  In performing the delicate dance of having it both ways, Davis, who has re-fashioned his boss and himself as true reformers, was claiming to have kicked his old lobbying ways, while his firm was being paid $15,000 a month—or $345,000 in total, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.
    And, of course, there’s Gov. Sarah Palin, the mouse-hunting mom, who rejects earmarks when she’s not pursuing them.
    But here’s the McCain connection that may be the most revealing:  Mark Buse.
    According to People.com’s Michelangelo Signorile, Buse, McCain’s senate chief of staff, is gay.
    You might want to think of Buse as Superman gay in that he’s socially out of the closet but professionally still disguised as Clark Kent. Or, maybe Dracula works better as a metaphor—straight by day, gay at night.
    It makes no difference to me.  I think it’s a bad idea to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation because I believe that most folks are born with straight or gay tendencies, just like some are born right-handed and others left-handed.
    My problem with McCain is that like a lot of black preachers, he’s been a practicing hypocrite. There are hundreds of black ministers that will deliver an homophobic sermon right after their blatantly gay choir director, following a chorus of amens, has signaled to his singers to take a seat. Similarly, McCain has hired gays on his staff but has campaigned in support of anti-gay marriage amendments and for the continuation of the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy.
    On her blog, Pam’s Houseblend, Pam Spaulding explodes the ins and outs of McCain’s hypocrisy and the reaction of the Log Cabin Republicans. Here is some of what she wrote:

LCR chides 'gay left' for discussing John McCain's gay chief of staff
by: Pam Spaulding

The fainting couch is needed for Scott Tucker over at BlogCabin. He's worked up over the reporting by Michelangelo Signorile and Mike Rogers about John McCain's professionally closeted Senate chief of staff Mark Buse and the hypocrisy it represents, given the Republican nominee's public anti-gay position on every major issue related to LGBT rights. (BTW, Mike Signorile has audio of an interview by Lisa Keen with yet another former Buse boyfriend who has gone on the record.)

The title of the post sums up the dilemma of the Log Cabin Republicans --  "The Politics of Personal Destruction at its Worst."

         Mark Buse has been openly gay for years and has acknowledged as      much.  So the notion that he has been "outed" is simply false.  But secondly-and this is the bigger point-this political stunt by Mike Rogers just proves what Log Cabin has been saying for years.  John McCain is an inclusive Republican who hires the best people, regardless of sexual orientation.

Then what is the "personal destruction" you are talking about? If Buse is out, then discussing the fact that Mark Buse is gay shouldn't be of any consequence -- unless there is something wrong with being out of the closet to the Republican base.

Isn't that the real problem here? If John McCain is personally inclusive, why can he not be so as a candidate? McCain might consider Buse a family friend and not fire him for being gay, but what about the young gay person working at a DQ with an anti-gay boss -- he has no protections from getting axed if that boss learns of his employee's orientation. It's not inclusion when it only means the people in your inner circle.

To read the rest of Spaulding's post, click here.

Before Obama was Obama

   

   

      This is a radio interview with Barack Obama before he was the Barack Obama we now know and are following. This interview ran on March 15, 2004 on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's outlet for National Public Radio.

      At the time, Obama was a relatively unknown state senator, running against several better-known Illinois Democrats for the party's nomination for the seat U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican, announced that he was vacating. During the interview on Chicago Public Radio's 848 show, host Steve Edwards thoroughly questions Sen. Obama on a laundry list of national issues.

      It's fascinating to hear what Obama had to say then and compare it with what he has to say now on immigration, the environment, farm policy, federal spending, if he's too elistist--for regular black folks, health, gays and lesbians, "the dumb" war in Iraq, the Patriot Act and his basketball skills. There are a couple of places in the interview where Obama admits that he's open to further investigating his position but, by and large, his positions then are his positions now.

     I'd love to hear comparable interviews from John McCain when he was running for the Republican nomination in 2000 or Sarah Palin when she was running for governor of Alaska a couple of years ago. The archival interview on Chicago Public Radio's blog lasts 23:30. Click here for a listen.

    

You can this one and others I've posted on Huffingtonpost.com.

McCain's foul talk express

   

    John McCain regrettably recognized that Barack Obama, in his "dollar bill" reference that no previous presidents looked like a black man, had played the race card.
    McCain should know.
    It's a deck that he's dealt, apparently more than once. And, when the presumptive Republican party presidential nominee wasn't dealing the race card, he was dealing the sexist card or the homophobe card. Or, on one occasion, the "my wife's a cunt" card.
        At least that's what Doug Thompson reports on the Capitol Hill Blue blog. Thompson says that he and the former Vietnam War prisoner used to drink together at  Bullfeathers, a popular Capitol Hill watering hole. He says that McCain would tell jokes while matching hangers-on drink by drink.
    Under the heading, "McCain: racist, bigot & homophobe," this what Thompson wrote:

John McCain, a member of the House of Representatives in the mid-1980s, often held court at a table near the bar at Bullfeathers, a popular Capitol Hill watering hole, telling jokes and matching hangers-on drink by drink.

As a Capitol Hill chief of staff, I often drank at Bullfeathers and was invited to join the throng at McCain's table one evening. A few minutes listening to the racism, bigotry and homophobia of the Arizona Congressman told me all I needed to know.

McCain loved to tell jokes about lesbians, blacks, Hispanics and the Vietnamese community that occupied a large section of Arlington County, Virginia, just south of the District of Columbia.

Of course, McCain didn't use polite language in the jokes: He used names like "fags" or "queers" or "dykes" or "niggers" or "spics" or "wetbacks" or "gooks."

A typical McCain joke (overheard at Bullfeathers):

Two dykes are talking at a bar and one leaves. As she walks toward the door, the other watches her leave and says out loud: "God, I've love to eat her out."

Two men are standing near by and one turns to the other and says: "I'd like to do the same. Guess that makes me a dyke."

    Cindy McCain, the candidate's uber-rich wife, is apparently all-too-familiar with his mindset, notes Thompson.

Even his wife is not immune. Writes Cliff Schecter in his book, The Real John McCain:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

To read the rest of Thompson's report, click on the click here to go to the Capitol Hill Blue blog.

Jesse Helms is dead--Let's bury American racism with him

   

    Arch conservative and rabid race baiter, Jesse Helms, died, ironically, on Independence Day. 
    For most of the 86 years he spent on this earth, Helms devoted way too much of his time and energy preventing African Americans from experiencing the freedom and independence that he, along with other Euro-Americans, took for granted.       
   In 1950, Helms became an unofficial researcher for United States Senate candidate Willis Smith, a conservative Democratic lawyer. While working on the primary campaign against Frank Porter Graham, Helms had a hand in creating an ad that read, "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."
    When not being outright racist, the five-term North Carolina senator was about as negative as he could get. Not only did he oppose civil rights, he opposed gay rights. Not only was he against communism, he also opposed a woman’s right to choose. Helms was against school busing and opposed giving up the Panama Canal.
    "There was plenty to stand up and say 'No!' to during my first term in the U.S. Senate," Helms wrote in his memoir, Here's Where I Stand.
    By the end of his first term, Helms had earned the moniker “Senator No.” He relished the label, even though it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

    "If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond...."

    Before running for the Senate, Helms was a conservative commentator on WRAL-TV. This is what he had to say about America’s greatest civil rights leader and the SCLC:  "Dr. King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior."
    Helms also called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress."
    A conservative icon, Helms defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt—who is African American—in his last two runs for Senate in 1990 and 1996, by running racially loaded campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumpling up a job application, with these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."   
    Helms will be remembered, noted Kerry Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University, “for the strong racist streak that articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns.”   
    If there is such a place as hell, then Helms will be fist bumping while hanging out in the deepest, most segregated corner with another one of the right-wing's iconic bigots, Strom Thurmond, who died five years ago. Although both racial dinosaurs are gone, unfortunately, their hate-filled beliefs have been passed down from one generation to the next.
    Just go to some of the right-wing blogs where you will see the pack mule mentality that was wrong-headed and outdated when Jesse and Strom were just good old country boys. The blogs, written by hand-me-down haters in this millennium, perpetuate all that is ugly and ignorant in what passes for conservative thought.
    There’s Tightrope, for one example, a blog where “it’s not illegal to be white, yet,” which features four pages of nigger jokes and sells white power t-shirts on the side.
    Fortunately, the nation former Dixiecrats Helms and Thurmond cherished, and the blog mob on Tightrope pines for, is slowly but surely becoming a bad American memory. 
    And Barack Obama’s swearing in on January 20 as the nation’s new leader will be the clearest signal yet that the twisted convictions of Helms and his ilk are those that belong to a dying breed.

AIDS epidemic still chalking up young black men

    For young black men, the AIDS epidemic hasn't gone anywhere. In fact, it's coming on strong. The cover story of this week's Gay City News reports that for black gays 24 and under, there has been a 60 percent rise in the disease in a four-year period.

    Here's the beginning of the Gay City News article:

An Epidemic Unabated

By: DUNCAN OSBORNE

04/17/2008

 

For Black Gays 24 and Under, 60 Percent Rise in Four Years

Leaning back in a chair, his arms crossed above his head, Justin D. Walker spoke easily about his life. The 24-year-old paused to sip some water and occasionally stood to look at a computer screen displaying slides from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Using data from 33 states, one slide showed that new HIV or AIDS diagnoses among African-American gay and bisexual men aged 13 to 24 went from just under 1,000 cases in 2001 to more than 1,600 in 2005. Walker is one of those statistics. He learned he was positive at 20.

"I know that my future is altered," he said toward the end of a 90-minute interview. "One of the things that I've always wanted to do was have a family. I know that is not impossible, but it will be hard to do."

New HIV or AIDS diagnoses among white or Latino men who have sex with men in that age group also increased over that time, but the cases among whites hit roughly 600 in 2005 and there were about 500 cases among Latinos in that year.

During that same period, new diagnoses among gay and bisexual men aged 35 to 44 went from over 6,000 to roughly 6,500, cases among 25- to 34-year-olds went from 5,000 to 5,500, and cases among 45- to 54-year-olds went from roughly 2,500 to more than 3,000.

The 13- to 24-year-olds account for just four percent of all male AIDS cases, according to one CDC estimate, but that anyone in that age group is getting infected is shocking.

"It's a very serious problem when the very young are becoming infected and it's increasingly so," said Dr. M. Monica Sweeney, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control in the New York City health department.

City data show that 3,596 13- to 24-year-olds first received an HIV diagnosis from 2001 to 2006. Sixty-six percent, or 2,388 cases, of those diagnoses were in men and, among the men, 68 percent, or 1,633 cases, were gay or bisexual men. Fifty-two percent of all the young men were African-American and 34 percent were Latino.

    To read the rest of the Gay City News article click here.

    One reason for AIDS not abating among young Africa Americans may be that while the face of AIDS is now black, the funding to fight disease still goes to white organizations. Here's the op-ed page Chicago Sun-Times column I wrote about it nearly two years ago.

Those most affected by AIDS don't control research dollars

Chicago Sun-Times
By Monroe Anderson
June 11, 2006

When AIDS was first diagnosed 25 years ago, it wore a gay, white male face. Today that face is black and poor. Africa, which has slightly more than one-tenth of the world's population, accounts for nearly two-thirds of those living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

In the United States, the numbers for African Americans are devastating just the same. Blacks make up slightly more than 12 percent of the population, but account for more than 70 percent of all new HIV infections and more than half of all AIDS diagnoses.

In Illinois, African Americans are affected by HIV/AIDS more than any other group. Though African Americans make up 15 percent of the state's population, in 2004 they accounted for more than half of the reported HIV cases. Among all women who reported HIV infection last year, 70 percent were African American, and between both sexes, 46 percent were African American. Chicago's South and West Sides are home to most of the state's blacks who are living with the virus.

This being the case, logic might dictate that the money follow the numbers. But life isn't logical or fair, and that's not how the funding fared. Those who command the lion's share of the money, and dictate how the disease will be treated, prevented and fought, are reflecting the old face of AIDS -- not the new.

Over the years, AIDS has become big business. Treatment costs $1,200 to $3,600 a month per person. The old heads fight for funds so they can continue to do what they do and maybe more. Take Howard Brown Health Center. Boasting an annual budget of $12,420,000, the Midwest's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organization is so flush with funding that it has set up an HIV testing program in China. Across town, the Let's Talk, Let's Test Foundation, a black AIDS awareness organization on the South Side, scrapes by on an annual budget that is exactly $12 million less.

"Funding doesn't traditionally go to black organizations in the same amount it does to other communities," asserts Lloyd M. Kelly, executive director of the foundation. "We have got to be included in the decision-making process."

With the potent combination of a voice and a multimillion-dollar budget at stake, do-gooding is a habit that's hard to kick. But no matter how good-willed, white organizations don't do as well on Chicago's South or West sides as they do on the North because they aren't as familiar with the black community. A while back, the Howard Brown center considered coming to the South Side before meeting resistance from black organizations suspicious that it was setting up stakes not as missionaries but as mercenaries.

The health center's services might have been useful because many African Americans still won't face the facts about the AIDS epidemic. "The black community is socially conservative," explains Rae Lewis-Thornton, who says AIDS still has a negative connotation among African Americans that "leaves us paralyzed."

You get AIDS "because of your behavior," she said. And, that behavior -- intravenous drug use, gay sex, unprotected sex -- is not acceptable to middle-class, morally right African Americans. "The stigma that's attached to the disease is killing us."

For the past 13 years, Lewis-Thornton, who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, has been speaking out against that stigma. At the peak in 1993, she was speaking three to five times a week. Those engagements are now three to five a month. But after years of basically ignoring the problem, the mainstream black organizations are now beginning to make an about-face. Next month she keynotes at the NAACP's 97th Annual Convention.

This latter-day move by the venerable civil rights organization just might be the saving grace. An in-your-face approach will address the AIDS epidemic in the black community much more effectively than playing peek-a-boo.