... should hope that they never get on the wrong side of Democrat Dan Savage.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 04, 2006 12:02 PM | Email ThisShould be a fun to see hard left gays like Dan Savage line up to, well, savage a very, very liberal member of the Senate in order to promote the candidacy of one of their own. Democratic party interest group liberalism at its finest.
Posted by: DJ on April 4, 2006 12:35 PMAlthough you got it right there, you're wrong about Thibaudeau. She's about as "progressive" as they come--and that's why the relatively sensible folks who run the Democratic caucus (and who, after all, are doing whatever they can to extend their margin) aren't interested in having her take the lead on health care issues. Single payer and marijuana legalization don't exactly play on the Eastside, you know?
But while Pat may be far outside the state's mainstream (and well within Capitol Hill's), she at least is quiet and mostly helpless. That's why I'm all for Murray winning, because (unlike Pat) he'd be public and bombastic and effective in the Senate--and that's exactly what Republicans like me are hoping for. But it's not what the Senate majority's leaders are looking for, and that's why Murray won't get their support and won't win the primary.
Posted by: DJ on April 4, 2006 01:36 PMAnd remember when Colin Min ran against Judy Nicastro? And the Stranger totally backed Judy, and trashed Min? Judy Nicastro is a gay man, of course.
Sorry, Legast, that won't fly. In 2003 The Stranger endorsed a straight guy, Dick Falkenbury, over a gay guy, Tom Rassmussen. If sexual orientation was all that mattered to us, that wouldn't have happened.
Tom has gone on to be a good city council member, and we endorsed him in the general that year. But you can hardly argue that we favor candidates based on who they sleep with.
Oh, and for the record: there are two gay men on our edit board and six straight folks.
Posted by: Dan Savage on April 4, 2006 04:28 PMThat said, I have a question. What are your personal requisites for the ideal candidate? In other words, what is it about a candidate that motivates you to support or reject him/her?
Thanks for stopping by.
Posted by: ERNurse on April 6, 2006 10:44 AMNewsweek, May 10-17, 2004 reported that unreleased photos "include an
American soldier having sex with a female Iraqi detainee and photos of
American soldiers watching Iraqi guards having sex with juveniles."
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1497
We now know as well, thanks to a piece (The Torturers) by Justin
Raimondo, the fierce libertarian columnist for Antiwar.com, that New
Yorker magazine journalist Seymour Hersh, who first pushed the Abu
Ghraib story into the light of day, is saying more than he's yet
written.
Here is a summary Raimondo got of part of a recent Hersh talk at the
University of Chicago:
"He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the
woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib
pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see EVIL ...' then trailed
off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as
the cameras run' …."
So, we still have on-camera acts of horror against children to look
forward to.
(Is there no irony in the fact that the Bush administration has
managed,
through its war on terrorism, to feed every perverse sexual fantasy it
would otherwise decry? But irony is inconceivable when you're dealing
with planners incapable of recognizing the category of "unintended
consequences.")
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1662
... Among these stories, none is potentially more devastating than the
one that seems to combine those missing "children's prisons" and those
never-to-be-reconstituted "rape rooms." We know that New Yorker
reporter Seymour Hersh is on the trail of the story of the rape and
sodomizing of young, imprisoned Iraqis, by Americans or at least viewed
by and filmed by Americans, in Abu Ghraib and that he plans to write it
up sooner or later. ("The worst is the soundtrack of the boys
shrieking…")
In the meantime, Neil MacKay of the Glasgow Morning Herald in an
investigation (Iraq's Child Prisoners) based on UNICEF documents
writes:
"It's not certain exactly how many children are being held by coalition
forces in Iraq, but a Sunday Herald investigation suggests there are up
to 107. Their names are not known, nor is where they are being kept,
how long they will be held or what has happened to them during their
detention."
In other words, we hold not only "ghost detainees" in our global gulag,
but "ghost children" in our Iraqi detention system. He reports:
"A detention centre for children was established in Baghdad, where
according to ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) a
significant number of children were detained. UNICEF was informed that
the coalition forces were planning to transfer all children in adult
facilities to this ‘specialised' child detention centre. In July
2003,
UNICEF requested a visit to the centre but access was denied."
In the meantime, Rolling Stone magazine has gotten its media hands on
the 106 "annexes" to the Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib that the Pentagon
long held back from Congress. And these, as recounted in an Osha Gray
Davidson piece, The Secret File of Abu Ghraib, make grim reading
indeed,
right down to eyewitness accounts of the sexual abuse of children and,
of course, of adults, stripped, beaten, humiliated and then made to
climb upon one another, forming what were called "dog piles" for
prison-photo ops. This term, unsurprisingly, fits oh so well with the
comments of General Geoffrey Miller, commander of our hell-hole in
Guantanamo ("Gitmo"), who was dispatched by Donald Rumsfeld himself to
get our Iraqi detention system extracting information more efficiently,
and considered efficiency and dogs to be one and the same.