The Foul Core Of The GOP

If you want to know why many of us have come to feel that the current Republican party is not our cup of tea, consider this anecdote from Joe Klein, sitting in on a focus group of Republicans during last Wednesday night’s debate:

In the next segment–the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants–I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture–specifically, about waterboarding–the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. "I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11," said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

As Kevin says, "Ladies and gentlemen, your Republican base." They loved Romney, apparently. He can give them their torture without any sense that he might be soft on the gays.

Jesse Helms Lives!

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Mark Dybul is the Bush administration’s Global AIDS Coordinator, and an openly gay man, much liked and respected, not least by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. He is also, alas, required to enforce the policies created by Jesse Helms almost two decades ago to hound, stigmatize and discriminate against anyone with HIV who is not an American and wants to visit, travel or immigrate to the US. Unlike every other civilized country, unlike even China, the US still retains 1980s-era policies that treat tourists and visitors with HIV as if they have malaria, barring them from ever coming in the country, or getting waivers that require them to provide invasive details on their health, be monitored by the government, be subject to deportation, and treated more brutally than anyone with any other medical condition. The other countries with the same policy: Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Is that the company America really wants to keep? Is that part of the AIDS legacy the Bush administration wants to leave? Jesse Helms himself eventually disowned the stigma he once placed on people with HIV; and the Bush administration, to its great credit, has done a great deal to help those with AIDS and HIV in Africa and elsewhere. But that makes retaining the Helms discrimination against visitors and tourists and immigrants with HIV that much more egregious. People living with HIV are not public enemies; we are not carrying the equivalent of malaria. And at a time when the crisis of HIV is growing among African-Americans especially, the government’s maintenance of a bitter stigma against the HIV-positive – declaring them in effect a threat to society and worthy of government surveillance – does immense damage to public health efforts trying to persuade people with HIV to feel less shame and access more care. On the eve of World AIDS Day, the Bush administration has now made things even worse: burdening tourists and visitors with HIV with more scrutiny than the average terror suspect. It’s a grotesque waste of resources, and cruel, irrational public policy.

It’s World AIDS Day tomorrow. How depressing that the US should seek to commemmorate it by ratcheting up persecution of people with HIV. We desperately need a repeal of the Jesse Helms law. In the meantime, there is a way to send the government a comment on the new, more draconian regulations. Details of how to help after the jump.

1) Go to www.regulations.gov

2) Click on All Documents with an Open Public Comment Period

3) In the little box that says "page," type in "39".   [Note: this page number may change as comment periods for other regulations close, if this is not the right page, look for the docket number alphabetically, it should be a page or two in front of or behind this one.]

4) Scroll down to Docket USCBP -2007-0084.  (The dockets are listed alphabetically.)  The subheading is Issuance of a Visa and Authorization for Temporary Admission Into the United States for Certain Nonimmigrant Aliens Infected With HIV.

5) Click on the folder icon in the column all the way on the right to submit comments.

Comments may also be submitted via snailmail to Border Security Regulations Branch, Customs and Border Protection, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. (Mint Annex), Washington, DC 20229 and must include the docket, USCBP -2007-0084.

(Photo: by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty.)

Rudy vs Huckabee?

It would be a fascinating race if that’s what it turns out to be. A reader writes:

It is urban vs. rural, lapsed Catholic vs. fundamentalist Protestant, North East v. Deep South. On the issues, it breaks down along those lines. Look at how they stand on trade, taxes, guns, gays, abortion, healthcare.  They both symbolize parts of the GOP that hate each other. After all do you really think guys who work on Wall Street want to hang out with the Values Voters, or vice versa?  If it comes down to these two against each other and it gets nasty that could really divide the party for a long time.

But Huckabee represents the future of Rove’s sectarian, big government party, and Giuliani the conservative past. The only thing keeping Rudy alive, I think, is his authoritarian appeal to the Jacksonian "bomb-em-round-em-up-and-torture-them" wing of the GOP. So the two natural developments of the Bush years – massive spending and untrammeled executive war-power – find their two representatives. And if you’re a traditional conservative, you feel like slashing your wrists.

Christianism Watch

"We love America, please protect it from suicide and self-destruction! … Let a stone, without the assistance of a hand, come off the rock and hit this homosexual idol right on its legs! Let this idol come down to ashes! Let this stone become a mountain and fill the whole Earth… Today we proclaim the death of the culture of death! We proclaim the victory of life! …

You, the Pharaoh of homosexualism – we will not give a hoof, a rusted nail to you! Our houses, our wives, our sons and daughters will go – and you will go bankrupt…

Homosexualism is a global problem and it is only the first wave. After that comes Islamization. If we won’t stop the first wave, then the second wave won’t wait for long," – Alexey Ledyaev, head of the New Generation Church movement, based in Riga, Latvia, with congregations throughout the former Soviet Union, Germany, Israel, Argentina and the U.S.) and one of the co-founders of Watchmen On the Walls, along with Scott Lively, Kenneth Hutcherson, and Vlad Kusakin.

Is Black America Warming To Obama?

I don’t know but here are two straws in the wind:

"I trust him. I think he is talking about a new kind of politics. It’s courageous. Hillary is slick. Democrats are taking us for granted," – Angels Daws of Harlem.

And Juan Williams:

In a nation where a third of the population is now made up of people of color, Mr. Obama is in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial politics. He is asking voters to move with him beyond race and beyond the civil rights movement to a politics of shared values. If black and white voters alike react to Mr. Obama’s values, then he will really have taken the nation into post-racial politics.

Obama himself is counting on Iowa to do the job, even though it has a very small black population. Why? Because one of the biggest obstacles to black support is the widespread sense that a black man can’t get elected in America. If a black man can win the Iowa caucuses, they might just begin to change their minds. And if they do, then South Carolina looks much more promising for the Illinois senator. If I were Clinton, relying – again! – on her husband to gain power, I’d be worried.