Wednesday, November 5, 2014

TD Ameritrade scion and Nebraska governor-elect says he will fight to keep state's ban on gay marriage

Via KETV:
     [Peter] Ricketts said he's also looking for a fresh face to take over another troubled state agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
     But there are a couple of things you'll see Ricketts fighting to protect, including Nebraska's ban on gay marriage.
     "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and more importantly, so do the folks of Nebraska," Ricketts said.
McCoy (left) and Peter Ricketts
     In 2008, Ricketts was the biggest contributor to state senator Beau McCoy's election to the Nebraska Unicameral. In 2012, McCoy tried to block LGBT fairness amendments in Lincoln and Omaha with a state law prohibiting such local ordinances.
     Ricketts' sister, co-owner with her brothers and father of the Chicago Cubs, is gay and serves on the National Leadership Council of Lambda Legal.
     Ricketts kept virtually mute about gay marriage before his election and included no information about his stand on the issue on his website.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

John Oliver explains, in stark terms, why mid-term elections and voting are important

The U.S. Congress may be do-nothing because of Tea Party obstructionism, but state legislatures have passed 24,000 bills this session and 1 in 4 state legislators belongs to ALEC, the Koch Bros.-funded clearinghouse for "model" legislation drawn up by corporations to enlarge their rights and diminish yours.

22 states, including Nebraska, have adopted new voting restrictions since 2010

From the Brennan Center for Justice:
Nebraska:
New restriction(s) in place: Reduced early voting period.
Effective date: In effect for first time in major election in 2014.
Background: In 2013, state lawmakers reduced the early voting period from a minimum of 35 days to no more than 30 days. Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is technically nonpartisan, but it is generally controlled by Republicans. The measure was signed by a GOP governor.

#DudesGreetingDudes mocks proposition that catcalling women isn't offensive

Nina Bahadur of the Huffington Post:
Blogger and comedian Elon James White brilliantly asked over the weekend why, if catcalling is as non-sexual, unthreatening or even complimentary as some have claimed, why don't men do it to other men?
Pat Downs of WGNtv shows he was way ahead of the curve on this in a video posted to YouTube in 2009:



Gay panic in Lake Wobegone

Keillor
Before uttering the word "shit" on the air in a joke mocking atheists this weekend, Garrison Keillor delivered a Halloween gift to LGBTs — a snide paean to gay panic (at the 34:47 mark here) during one of his special joke shows:
Well Jim and John had to share a room one night in a hotel.
Jim said "I snore so bad I doubt you'll sleep that well."
And John kissed him on the cheek. He said "Sweetheart, it's alright."
Jim went and sat in a chair and he stayed awake all night.
In 2007, Keillor apologized for being "misunderstood" in a monologue containing the following:
     And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.
     The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.
     Keillor's Lake Wobegone is a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, all the children are above average and all the gays are virtually invisible, just like in a Ken Burns documentary (where gay baseball stars and gay jazz legends stay hermetically sealed for eternity in their closets.)
     In Time magazine, Keillor once described Minnestoa Gov. Jesse Ventura, a conservative who has been far friendlier in public to gay people than Keillor has ever been, as a "great big honking bullet-headed shovel-faced mutha who talks in a steroid growl."
     Maybe. But Keillor has never stepped up to the plate and gone to bat for gay people as forcefully as Jesse Ventura has. (He did publicly oppose the effort to ban gay marriage in Minnesota's constitution, but not until after Jesse Ventura and his wife of 37 years made an ad opposing the referendum.)





Lee Terry stabbed LGBTs in the back for 16 years in House votes. Want to return the favor? Vote today!

Note: If you're gay or your friends are, make sure they know how hostile Lee Terry really is toward LGBTs in the only place where his small-minded enmity counts — on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
     If you use Facebook, put a link to this post on your roof or wall or whatever Facebook uses. Use Google + too.
     Tweet the link. Do as much as possible to make sure Terry gets as few gay votes from gay Republicans as possible. Tell them Brad Ashford used to BE a Republican if you have to (after all, it's true...)


Lee Terry voted against repealing DADT.  He voted against including LGBTs in hate crime legislation. He voted against ENDA, even though it didn't even include transgenders. He voted against allowing the U.S. Attorney General to provide assistance in instances of hate crimes against LGBTs. He voted no on a concurrence vote to repeal DADT. He voted to prohibit the use of federal funds to "contravene" DOMA. Two months later he did it again. In 2006, Terry delivered an asinine speech on the House floor urging support for an equally idiotic Marriage "Protection" amendment.

And while you're at it remember how unsupportive Ben Sasse and Pete Rickets have been of anything that smacks of equitable treatment backed up by the law of LGBTs.
    Chuck Hassebrook and David Domina are much better choices.
    And if you see any of the characters below on your ballot, just say no (but first click the picture to enlarge):


Monday, November 3, 2014

Why Italy's most famous gigolo is suing the state for exploitation of prostitution

Roberto Dulce (Sweet Roy) is working on a book with a psychologist:
     I think I'm the real problem. I mean, I do this job because mentally I have some hatred for women. Maybe I should be psychoanalyzed. I make myself available, but then...
    You say that there's something wrong with you. You hate women. From a practical point of view, aren't you afraid to lose clients?
     Of course. Clearly this book is very dangerous for me.

Roy's fame has also caught the attention of the inland revenue. Prostitution is legal but the profession isn't recognized by the tax department. No tax code means he can't file a return. That hasn't stopped them chasing him for $70,000 in unpaid taxes.
     So now I have a lawsuit against the state because I've sued the state for exploitation of prostitution. Because if they take my money, which I can prove that I have earned with prostitution, you, state, become my partner so you're exploiting me, and that's illegal.
     It's a huge burden. But there's a paradox. I have to pay tax on my assets. I have to pay tax so they calculated income tax and all the other taxes. So I'll end up paying the Church tax as well. So with the "dirty money" I earn from prostitution, I'll pay a priest's wages. That's the paradox. It's absurd.

Friday, October 31, 2014

Peter LaBarbera waves stunningly stupid antigay message outside Regina courthouse while protesting his trespassing charges

In April, Barbera and fellow antigay activist Bill Whatcott were asked to leave the University of Regina for contravening the U of R’s respectful workplace policy in their demonstration against "homosexualism."
     We at AKSARBENT find his sign far more interesting than his predictable insistence that he is being victimized by Big Gay or Liberal Academics or Political Correctness or whatever.
     The placard, "Nature discriminates against homosexuality," demonstrates why he should probably be barred from institutions of higher learning simply for spreading stupidity.
     Barbera is so dull that his arid, rock-strewn mind seems not to have noticed that homosexuality is maintained by nature in hundreds of species despite the glaring fact that it is the trait least likely to be passed on through reproduction.
    Example: 7-9% of domestic Bighorn rams will have nothing to do with ewes, to the eternal consternation of ranchers. This incidence of homosexuality crops up in generation after generation — in fact, homosexuality is more prevalent in male sheep than in male humans.
     Obviously, rather than discriminating against homosexuality, nature is working overtime to preserve the condition (despite — or perhaps because — of its serious reproduction handicap) a fact Barbera is either too vacuous to notice or too dishonest to acknowledge.
     Perhaps Barbera thinks that sheep homosexuality is learned behavior passed on by queer rams at secret pasture meetings or wild-and-woolly gays-only sheep meadows or during ruminant raves in the highlands.

WTF HRC?

From the press release announcing the appointment of Drew Heckman as HRC's first-ever Nebraska field organizer:
      LGBT people also actively participate in their faith communities and are raising families. HRC’s survey reveals 66 percent of those surveyed ages 18-25 intend to have children one day and 31 percent are people of faith. In addition, according to a 2010 Census study by the Williams Institute, Nebraska has one of the highest rates of same-sex couples raising children of any state in the country.
      “Faith and strong families are essential values in the lives of LGBT people,” said HRC Faith and Religion associate director Joseph Ward. “This survey clearly shows LGBT Nebraskans and their families actively participate in their churches.”
     What HRC's survey clearly shows is that 69% of gay people in Nebraska are NOT very — or at all — religious. And don't get AKSARBENT started on HRC's buy-in of the "people of faith" rubric. Atheists and Agnostics are also people of faith — in science not mythology.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop dead (Part VIII)

In May of 2010, Terry voted against House Amendment 672, a bill to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, after a review by the military.

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop dead (Part VII)

In April of 2009, Terry voted against HR 1913, which
  • Expands definition of a hate crime to include felonies motivated by prejudice based on national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity of the victim (Secs. 3, 6).
  • Allows federal law enforcement to assist state, local, or tribal governments in the investigation or prosecution of any hate crime (Sec. 3).
  • Establishes grants for state, local, or tribal enforcement of hate crime laws (Secs. 3, 4).

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop dead (Part VI)

In November of 2007, Lee Terry voted against HR 3685, the Sexual Orientation Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which would have amended the federal Civil Rights Act to prohibit employers from discriminating on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation.

Lee Terry to LGBTs: drop dead (Part V)

In May of 2007, Terry voted against passage of HR 1592, which amended the federal definition of a hate crime to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
Highlights:
  • Allows the Attorney General to provide assistance for the criminal investigation of crimes that are considered a felony and are motivated by prejudice based on the perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim (Sec. 3).
  • Requires that anyone who commits a crime due to actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability can be sentenced to no more than 10 years, unless kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, attempted aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill is involved (Sec. 6).

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop dead (Part IV)

In December of 2010, Lee Terry voted "no" on a concurrence vote (HR 2965) to concur with House amendments and pass a bill repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Lee Terry to LGBTs: drop dead (Part III)

In May of 2012, Terry voted "yea" on House Amendment 1096, which was an amendment to HR 5326, and prohibited the use of federal funds appropriated by the bill to contravene the Defense of Marriage Act.

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop Dead (Part II)

In July of 2012 Terry voted "yea" on House Amendment 1416, which passed the U.S. House and which, as an amendment to HR 5856, barred the use of funds appropriated by the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2013 from being used to contravene the Defense of Marriage Act.

Lee Terry to LGBTs: Drop Dead (Part I)

Below is Lee Terry's 206 speech against marriage equality, delivered from the floor of the U.S. House. Today 32 states allow or will shortly allow (due to recent court decisions,) marriage equality:
      Mr. TERRY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.J. Res. 88, the Marriage Protection Amendment.
      Last Friday, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Nebraska constitutional amendment protecting marriage between one man and one woman, and affirming the legal protections and benefits reserved to this fundamental union. The amendment was approved by an overwhelming 70 percent majority in 2000.
      Nationwide, 45 states have defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman or expressly prohibited same-sex marriage. Twenty states approved constitutional amendments upholding marriage; six states will vote on an amendment in November; and eight states are considering sending constitutional amendments to voters in 2006 or 2008. The 16 states that approved constitutional amendments since 2004 did so by an average 72 percent voter majority.
      Even voters in Massachusetts--the first state to have its supreme court unilaterally declare same-sex marriage as constitutional--may have the opportunity to uphold marriage. The state's high court ruled last week that legislative efforts to put a same-sex marriage ban on the 2008 ballot could move forward. Recent court rulings in New York, Tennessee and Georgia have also upheld marriage rights.
      The Federal Marriage Protection Amendment under consideration today would prohibit any governmental entity--whether in the legislative, executive or judicial branch at all levels of government--from altering the definition of marriage. It does not discriminate against homosexuals; it upholds and recognizes the importance of marriage between a man and a woman for the well-being of children and society at large.
      Mr. Speaker, the American people want the Marriage Protection Amendment to be approved. Their will is clearly reflected through the overwhelming majorities voting for marriage protection initiatives in the states. We have a responsibility to children and families nationwide to send a clear message today that marriage will be upheld and protected. We also have a sacred duty to future generations to preserve marriage as the fundamental building block of society.
      I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting H.J. Res. 88 today.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
http://thomas.loc.gov

Jon Stewart welcomes a new advertiser to the daily show: Koch Industries


Bakers supermarket owners bully radio stations into pulling gun control ads

From Shannon Watts' piece in today's Huffington Post, entitled The Message Kroger Doesn't Want You To Hear. Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America:
     This week, Kroger executives and investors met in Cincinnati and I was there, along with dozens of Moms Demand Action volunteers from neighboring states, to make it as easy as possible for Kroger leadership to meet with us on an issue that women and mothers care about more than anything: the safety of our families. Rather than agree to a meeting, Kroger bullied radio stations into pulling our ads highlighting the absurdity of their gun policy (you can listen to the ads here and here). And this week, Kroger bussed its investors out of the hotel where they were planning to meet and to an alternate location — probably to avoid the rally of mothers and customers we had organized to spark a conversation with them.
     Evidently Kroger is growing uncomfortable with their gun policy, and frankly, they should be. Kroger is siding with gun extremists, rather than mothers, gun violence survivors, and the majority of Kroger shoppers, who support ending open carry in Kroger stores.

Filthy rich Apple CEO officially outs himself

Tim Cook (2011 compensation: $378,000,000) just came out in an editorial published in Bloomberg Business Week, but GAWKER has been on his case about the gay thing since at least 2008.
I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
If you're an LGBT youth struggling with your sexuality, don't think for a moment that you too can't someday become wildly successful and personally wealthy by overcharging millions of customers for RAM. YES YOU CAN!!!!

Antigay NE Rep. Lee Terry endorsed by serial killer he exploited in a Willie Horton-style attack ad

KMTV and KETV are reporting that at a hearing yesterday to determine his mental status, Nikko Jenkins shouted "Hey you guys, vote for Lee Terry! Best Republican ever!"
     GOP and Terry (HRC rating: 0%)  Willie Horton-style ads (see below) are blaming Ashford for Jenkins' early "good time" release, but prison officials ignored several infractions by Jenkins when they decided to set him free. In fact, Nebraska's lame-duck GOP governor, Dave Heineman is currently embroiled in a huge scandal exposed by the Omaha World-Herald involving "miscalculations" in which the Nebraska Department of Corrections released hundreds of felons too early from Nebraska prisons, currently at about 156% of capacity.
     The Omaha World-Herald has endorsed Brad Ashford and has excoriated ads supporting Terry (@LeeTerryNE) which have exploited Jenkin's killings:
  • Ashford traveled the country to study successful juvenile justice programs and then did the heavy lifting last year to pass juvenile justice reforms. Those well-crafted reforms could do more than any good-time change to protect Nebraskans from a future Nikko Jenkins, who entered the child welfare and juvenile justice systems at an early age.
  • Terry’s fellow Republicans are the majority in the officially nonpartisan Legislature and have been for a long time. Gov. Dave Heineman, who has held office for nearly 10 years, is a Republican. If the good-time law needed changing, why didn’t they act sooner? At best, this is a bipartisan failure.
  • Heineman in 2014 did advocate requiring inmates to earn their extra time off with good behavior. However, in 2011, his Corrections Department supported a bill to award additional good time to cut criminals’ sentences faster and ease prison crowding. Heineman signed it into law.
  • Jenkins, while imprisoned, begged for mental health help. He threatened to harm people when released. Prison administrators did little to try to keep from releasing him.


GOP using sloppy software called 'Crosscheck,' touted by KS Sec'y of State Kris Kobach, to brazenly bar voters surnamed 'Jackson,' 'Garcia' and 'Kim'

Source
Jamie Bouie of Slate reports on a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera exposing a shameless GOP initiative to suppress votes in the forthcoming election:
     Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.
      The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Live video of legislative hearing: Dept. of Correctional Services Special Investigative Committee; Gov. Heineman's testimony

The hearing is over so the feed has ended.

Woman takes a 10-hour stroll around NYC, is photographed being harassed 108 times



WaPo's Gail Sullivan did a piece on a video made last August by Hollaback, an anti-street harassment group in which Shoshana B. Roberts was harassed 108 times — "by her definition."
Clad in jeans and a black T-shirt, Roberts walked around New York for 10 hours following filmmaker Rob Bliss, who had a camera hidden in his backpack.
     What AKSARBENT found even more interesting were the videos recommended by Google after the sexual harassment video ended. They included the two dubious selections encircled below ("Sugar" and "Sweeter Than Candy On A Stick") as well as a Dr. Dre video in the lower right corner.
     If you enjoyed the video you just watched about the objectivization of a women, how about some desert, if you know what our YouTube bots mean?

Stephen Colbert is forced by new words formed by Louie Gohmert's mouth to once again ridicule the idiotic Texas representative

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert again excoriates the dumbest man in the U.S. Congress, elected by Texans living in Lufkin-Nacogdoches, Longview-Marshall and Tyler.
     "I'm with you, sir. People have said to me, 'Steven you've got to understand, you don't even know your history; you're dumb, you're dense, you're a mental midget with the IQ of a butter dish whose mind is a black hole that sucks all surrounding thought into it in an infinite singularity of pure stupidity. Stephen, I'm surprised you can ever dress yourself. I bet you have to rub peanut butter inside your lips to remember to open your mouth to breathe. I have never met and I hope to never meet again a man so pervasively, astoundingly, unyieldingly ignorant.'
    To which I say, 'Well, then you haven't met Louie Gohmert!' "

How Frank Schubert lied to Charlotte, NC TV station about NOM anti-gay marriage ad attacking Kay Hagan

Here's the agreement Frank Schubert submitted to WBTV, Charlotte, NC:

And here's the "noncandidate" ad, which explicitly asks viewers to vote for Tom Tillis and not for Kay Hagan, and which WBTV ran anyway:



KETV will pocket almost $57 a second for letting Lee Terry trash talk Brad Ashford on your airwaves during Saturday's NU game

Less agency commission, of course. Mudslinging has been very, very good to local TV stations, which now report HOW good due to new FCC regulations. (We thought Omaha was exempt but either the population is bigger than we thought or area TV stations are being more transparent than they need to, which we don't believe for a second.)
     Just thirty seconds of Lee Terry bad-mouthing Brad Ashford during next Saturday's NU football game will cost TransCanada's 2nd District pet a cool $1,700. The "K" in KETV obviously stands for "KaChing."




Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Archbishop attacks Jesuit University for granting benefits to same sex spouses

Add caption
KETV's excellent and comprehensive report is here. Creighton's benefits committee decision was unanimous.
    The Omaha World-Herald quoted Creighton University President, Rev. Timothy Lannon as saying that offering health benefits to same-sex spouses doesn’t mean the university supports those marriages.
The archbishop disagreed, saying that condoning same-sex marriage is “precisely the message the university is giving” with the policy change it announced Monday.
     Omaha's Archdiocese brazenly flouts civil law under the rubric of "religious liberty" with apparent impunity.

Bait and Switch? Gay exec recruited to small NE town, then axed after abuse by coworkers, townspeople

Lila Shapiro of the Huffington Post relates the economic devastation of a Massachusetts retail product manager who was recruited by "an outdoor sporting-goods company" hq'd in a small Nebraska town.
     In February 2012, Paul, who is 59 years old and asked that his real name be withheld out of fear that using it would further damage his career, got an attractive and lucrative offer from an outdoor sporting-goods company for a job in product development and sourcing, a field he has been in for about 30 years...
     There was just one hitch. The job meant that he, his husband Peter and their teenage son James, who also asked that their real names be withheld, would have to leave Massachusetts and move to a small town in Nebraska, a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage and has no laws that restrict employers from firing an employee just because he is gay.
     Paul did not hide his sexual orientation in the interviewing process...
     The recruiter was not troubled by this revelation, Paul said. He told Paul that "we are a very affirming company."
     ...The problems began soon after they moved in. First, the company denied health insurance to Peter after initially promising to take care of him. Then there were the homophobic jokes in meetings -- and the company's indifference to Paul's complaints. Someone began sending Paul anonymous emails at his company address, daring him to step out into the parking lot. Finally, the company decided to do something about it. His boss called Paul into his office and fired him.
     The piece says Paul, whose family includes a husband and son, is now out $124,000 or 70% of their liquid savings, having been compelled to sell their property quickly, at a steep loss and having had to abandon Peter's spouse's antique/art shop in town
     ....Colleagues at the sporting goods company made snide jokes about what gays did on camping trips. Paul mentioned an incident where one of his son's football teammates announced in front of the other players that James had two dads. Paul recalled what his son said then: "Yeah, I have two dads, that's common in Massachusetts." "Well, it's not common here," the teammate replied.
     One day, after losing his job, Paul heard from the company's lawyer, who asked him the same question that his boss had already raised. "'What did you think was going to happen in this community?'" Paul recalls the lawyer saying. "'We're a Republican town, we're a conservative town and we're a Christian town.'"
The piece didn't name the firm in question, but apparently did not need to as hundreds of commenters on the HuffingtonPost story seem to have had no trouble deciding who the sporting goods retailer is:





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