It just gets curiousier and couriousier

The Bush Administration gets creepier by the hour. I never thought anyone could outdo the Nixon Administration, but they do so almost daily. Maureen Dowd bitchily tells it best:

Bush's Barberini Faun
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: February 17, 2005

WASHINGTON

I am very impressed with James Guckert, a k a Jeff Gannon.

How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States?
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Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief?

It's hard to believe the White House could hit rock bottom on credibility again, but it has, in a bizarre maelstrom that plays like a dark comedy. How does it credential a man with a double life and a secret past?

"Jeff Gannon" was waved into the press room nearly every day for two years as the conservative correspondent for two political Web sites operated by a wealthy Texas Republican. Scott McClellan often called on the pseudoreporter for softball questions.

Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post yesterday that although Mr. Guckert had denied launching the provocative Web sites - one described him as " 'military, muscular, masculine and discrete' (sic)" - a Web designer in California said "that he had designed a gay escort site for Gannon and had posted naked pictures of Gannon at the client's request."

And The Wilmington News-Journal in Delaware reported that Mr. Guckert was delinquent in $20,700 in personal income tax from 1991 to 1994.

I'm still mystified by this story. I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

In an era when security concerns are paramount, what kind of Secret Service background check did James Guckert get so he could saunter into the West Wing every day under an assumed name while he was doing full-frontal advertising for stud services for $1,200 a weekend? He used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then, once inside, switched to his alter ego, asking questions as Jeff Gannon.

Mr. McClellan shrugged this off to Editor & Publisher magazine, oddly noting, "People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors."

I know the F.B.I. computers don't work, but this is ridiculous. After getting gobsmacked by the louche sagas of Mr. Guckert and Bernard Kerik, the White House vetters should consider adding someone with some blogging experience.

Does the Bush team love everything military so much that even a military-stud Web site is a recommendation?

Or maybe Gannon/Guckert's willingness to shill free for the White House, even on gay issues, was endearing. One of his stories mocked John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform" with the headline "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers.

At last month's press conference, Jeff Gannon asked Mr. Bush how he could work with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality." But Bush officials have divorced themselves from reality.

They flipped TV's in the West Wing and Air Force One to Fox News. They paid conservative columnists handsomely to promote administration programs. Federal agencies distributed packaged "news" video releases with faux anchors so local news outlets would run them. As CNN reported, the Pentagon produces Web sites with "news" articles intended to influence opinion abroad and at home, but you have to look hard for the disclaimer: "Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense." The agencies spent a whopping $88 million spinning reality in 2004, splurging on P.R. contracts.

Even the Nixon White House didn't do anything this creepy. It's worse than hating the press. It's an attempt to reinvent it.

God does have a sense of humor!

. . . and one must marvel at his timing!

From the Associated Press today:

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- The daughter of conservative Republican Alan Keyes referred to herself Monday as a "liberal queer" and urged support for gay and lesbian young people who have been deserted by their families.

Maya Marcel-Keyes, 19, addressed a rally sponsored by the gay-rights group Equality Maryland, saying she was motivated to speak out because of her rocky relationship with her parents and the recent death of a friend who had fallen ill after being thrown out of the house by his family.

Marcel-Keyes told several hundred supporters that her sexuality had created a rift in her relationship with her parents.

"Things just came to a head. Liberal queer plus conservative Republican just doesn't mesh well," she said. "That was making my life a little bit turbulent."

Later, Marcel-Keyes told CNN her parents "were not too pleased" when they learned she was a lesbian, but she said she loves them "very much, and they love me. They can't support my activities."

Her father, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois last year, created a stir in August when he said during an interview that homosexuality was "selfish hedonism" and that Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter was a sinner.

A new year, a new subject but same ole yahoo shit

Bush won. Why would I think the mindset of the country would alter, or even become saner, with the new year?

In Kansas, we are again battling the anti-science yahoos. The freakin' attorney general of the great state of Kansas has even met secretly with the six (of 10) state education board members who support putting "intelligent design" into the science curriculum. He has promised them the state of Kansas will defend their position.

And then in Missouri we have Republican state senators debating at what point does a soul appear in life and whether Adam and Eve were spontaneously generated. Is the mercury content in our drinking water too high? Is this why we as a nation seem to be slipping into a collective insanity?

Read this from this morning's Kansas City Star (abridged):

JEFFERSON CITY — Martie Meador stepped haltingly toward the witness table to tell Missouri senators her view of a proposed ban on research that might cure her multiple sclerosis.

Meador, a mother of four from Warrenton, said the research technique creates a human embryo that is killed when the stem cells are removed. That makes the price of potential new cures too high.

“I do not support the idea that we need to create life and then destroy it in the name of medical research,” Meador said.

She and more than 60 others came to the Capitol last week to share their stories with senators who are considering a bill that would ban a procedure for growing stem cells, the building blocks of all human tissue.

Through that process, scientists hope to discover how to use stem cells to regenerate diseased or injured tissue and find cures for many maladies, from Parkinson's and heart disease to diabetes and spinal injuries.

Testifying against a ban was LaNeal Skinner of Kansas City. Her husband, Gary Skinner, was 49 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which plunged the couple into a three-year spiral of loneliness and despair.

Skinner pleaded with senators to let the research go forward so that future Alzheimer's victims wouldn't suffer the same fate as her husband, who died in 1999.

“The one thing my husband didn't have was hope,” she said. “Please don't take that away from others.”

The women's testimony brought into focus the crucial questions that senators are grappling with as they decide on the proposed ban. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Monday on legislation that would declare a certain type of cutting-edge medical research a felony in Missouri. A similar bill was introduced this week in Kansas.

In evaluating Senate Bill 160, senators also may consider the effect of such a ban on efforts to make Kansas City and St. Louis centers of life science research.

The bill forces senators to weigh the objections of people who say the research kills human beings against the potential benefits to people suffering from a wide range of diseases. In the process, senators must confront questions about when life begins, what makes something human and at what point an embryo has a human soul.

Sen. Chris Koster, a Harrisonville Republican and a former Cass County prosecutor, summed up the conundrum by considering the issue through the eyes of a juror.

“We've been struggling through more than eight hours of testimony about whether this process creates a human being,” Koster said. “How could a juror decide beyond a reasonable doubt that this process cloned a human being?”

The controversy involves a technique known as therapeutic cloning. Researchers take a human egg cell and remove its nucleus. They take the nucleus from an ordinary body cell and transfer it into the hollowed-out egg cell.

The egg cell is stimulated to divide, just as an egg cell does after fertilization by a sperm cell. The cells are placed in a nutrient culture and allowed to develop into a ball of about 300 cells. Inside that ball are the stem cells — the building blocks of every type of cell in the human body — that have yet to differentiate into nerve, muscle, blood or bone cells.

Researchers are trying to discover how to prod the stem cells into becoming the various tissues of the body such as insulin-producing cells for diabetics or new nerve cells for spinal injury patients.

Gov. Matt Blunt said this week that he did not believe the process creates a new human life. Blunt said that if the bill reached his desk, he was likely to veto it. (A REPUBLICAN, BELIEVE IT OR NOT. I SWEAR, IF HE DOES, I MIGHT JUST VOTE FOR HIM NEXT TIME!)



About 40 opponents of the ban said the technique does not create a human life, only a cluster of cells identical to the patient who donated the nucleus. They urged senators not to block the dramatic advances in medical care that the technique might offer.

Bernard Frank of Chesterfield, who has had Parkinson's disease for 13 years, objected to the certainty with which supporters of the ban stated their case.

“I've heard it said that a cluster of cells that sit on the point of a pin is a human being,” Frank said. “No one in this room knows whether it's a human being. But I do know that these are my cells, no one else's. (In this process) they are mixed in a lab and given back to me. It's like taking blood from a patient before surgery.”

Senators probed both the science and the ethical issues surrounding therapeutic cloning. Sen. John Loudon, a St. Louis County Republican, said the question comes down to when life begins. Sen. Jason Crowell, a Cape Girardeau Republican, asked at what point a fertilized egg acquires a soul.


William Neaves, president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, which wants to do embryonic stem cell research, pointed to the writings of Richard McCormick, a Catholic priest considered one of the American church's leading medical ethicists.

McCormick noted that the majority of human eggs fertilized within a woman's body never implant in the uterus. Therefore, the fertilized egg is not a human being until implantation, he concluded.

Because it is not a human being, the cells that result from fertilization could be used in medical research, McCormick wrote. Therapeutic cloning, however, never gets to that point, because the cells that develop are not the product of a sperm and an egg, Neaves said.

Susan Talve, a St. Louis rabbi whose daughter suffers from a congenital heart defect, opposed the ban, saying early stem cell research has the potential to discover ways to grow new heart-muscle cells. The point at which life begins, she said, is unknowable.

“I believe in a world beyond this life,” Talve said. “But I don't really know. It's a matter of faith. Just as we can't know for sure about the end of life, I'm not sure we can know about the beginning of life, either.”

Larry Weber, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, dismissed McCormick's writings as academic musings. The Catholic Church teaches that ensoulment takes place at conception. How that occurs, he said, is unknown.

Others said it was disingenuous to claim that the cells were not a human being, because the same cloning process was used to create Dolly the cloned sheep.

But Sen. Charles Wheeler, a physician and a Kansas City Democrat, said it took the union of an egg and a sperm to create a human. Without a sperm cell, the result of therapeutic cloning is a laboratory product, not a person, he said.

“If there is no sperm in the room, it's not the same as a human being,” Wheeler said.

“I think you're twisting the truth,” he told one witness. “You heard the scientists the other night. There is something divine about the creation of a human by a man and a woman. … Doctors want to take an (ordinary body) cell and use it to create a heart cell. To make that a crime is a crime.”

Wesley Smith, an author who writes on the sanctity of human life, told senators that cloning cells should be banned because all human life has intrinsic moral value.

“Your soul didn't come from your mother and father,” Smith said. “If one believes in a soul, it comes from God.”

Weber agreed, saying Jesus became human without sperm being involved. And Loudon mentioned the creation of Adam and Eve.

“To say that (product of therapeutic cloning) is not human life is to deny the divinity and humanity of Jesus,” Weber said. “God doesn't depend on sexual methods of reproduction.”