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Support The Military! Unless They Support Gays Serving In The Military

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It’s rather ironic, if you think about it.

The one politically untouchable segment of our country is the military. Presidents and Senators often say they will “defer to the military leaders on the ground” in matters large and small. President Obama took a bit of heat after his State of the Union address because some felt he hadn’t specifically said the words “thank you” to our soldiers. (He used the word gratitude.) Any indication that someone does not support our troops — especially in time of war — is considered close to treason.

And yet, all of a sudden, we have Republican Senators — young and old — railing against our top two military leaders, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, for their testimony Tuesday in front of Carl Levin’s Armed Services Committee hearing on repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

At this point, most have heard Senator John McCain (who has said he would defer to military leaders on DADT repeal — until they started to support repeal) berate Secretary Gates at the hearing. McCain essentially tried to pull rank, when, to his shock, Gates and Mullen both came out fully and personally in support of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” McCain called them “clearly biased” and said, “I’m happy to say we still have a Congress despite your plan to repeal [DADT] by fiat.”

But that same day, U.S. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, Jr. called our nation’s top military brass “political appointees,” as if they were the result of some campaign donation, or, the likes of Bush’s FEMA Director Michael “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” Brown. Hunter, who is a freshman Congressman and immediately succeeded his father in office, in an interview with NPR, said,

Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates are both political appointees. They’re going to be biased. They’re going to say what the administration wants them to say.

Well, I suppose in a way, Representative Hunter is right. After all, Gates and Mullen are “political appointees,” in the strictest sense of the term. Secretary Gates has served the past three Republican presidents, since Reagan. Gates spent twenty-six years at the CIA, including being CIA Director. Admiral Mullen was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President George W. Bush.

But “say what the administration wants them to say?” No way!

(Another irony: Mullen succeeded Peter Pace, who, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in 2007 said, “I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts.” So, in a strange way, we can thank President Bush for some forward movement on repeal. He’s probably furious.)

Hunter continued, saying,

I think the folks who have been in the military that have been in these very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there. And I think that bond is broken if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians.

News flash to all who oppose repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — we’re already in the military. To the tune of an estimated 66,000.

Hunter is really worried. Not kidding. Evidently speaking for the entire military, he continued,

[I]t would frankly make everybody a little bit uneasy to be in these close situations, how you go into combat, you know, the shower situation, the bathroom situation, just, you know, very mundane details – things that we have men and women separated, you know, because we don’t want to have that sexual distraction. That exists for the homosexual aspect of things, too.

Because every LGBTQ soldier, in combat, is thinking of nothing but sex when they’re in the bathroom. Yeah, right. I’ve never served in the military, but I’m pretty sure every soldier — gay or straight — has a lot on their minds, in or out of the bathroom, and I’m pretty sure survival, and just making it through the day, is a lot closer to the top of the list than sex.

And in a typically, supremely bigoted moment — one, honestly I see a lot with folks like Congressman Hunter, and NOM’s Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, who are so blind to their own hatred they say what’s in their heart, not realizing how they make the case against themselves — Hunter has the following conversation with NPR’s Melissa Block:

BLOCK: But Congressman Hunter, wouldn’t you agree that there are gays and lesbians serving in the military right now, they just are not open about their orientation. So the problems that you raise presumably would be problems already. They are in the barracks already. They are in the showers already.

HUNTER: No, but they aren’t open about it, like you just said. It’s like if you want to work for NPR, you don’t go to work and on the first day say, hey, I want everybody to know that I’m gay. You probably don’t care one way or the other as long as they, you know, get their particular job done. I think the military is the same way. That’s why don’t ask, don’t tell works.

Exactly. Folks in the military “probably don’t care one way or the other as long as they, you know, get their particular job done.”

Thank you, Congressman Hunter, for displaying how incredibly ridiculous your argument is, and for displaying your utter lack of understanding of this issue.

Listen to the full NPR interview:

http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=123287737&m=123287724&t=audio

Note: This piece was originally published in The Bilerico Project.

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News

RFK Jr., Embracing Far-Right, Spoke at Fundraiser for Anti-Government Group With J6 Ties

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May 3, 2024

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Over the weekend independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke at a fundraiser for a far-right anti-government group in Erie County, New York – a slice of the country that had a large proportion of residents arrested and charged for crimes related to the January 6 insurrection. Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine denialist, increasingly is embracing the far-right.

“That group, Constitutional Coalition of New York State, has founders who not only have ties to Donald Trump but are also connected to the stop-the-steal movement through their activist network, which includes groups that had a presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” The Daily Beast reported Friday. “It’s yet another instance of Kennedy—who is mounting one of the most well-funded third-party presidential threats in decades—serving as a peculiar bridge between his own anti-establishment movement and Trump’s.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center includes the Constitutional Coalition of New York State (CCNYS) on its page of anti-government groups. Political Research Associates, which detailed the high proportion of January 6 residents arrested and charged, included the Constitutional Coalition of New York State in its February report on “The Rise of the Far Right in Western New York.”

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“If you don’t think the government is lying to you, you’re not paying attention,” Kennedy told attendees at the CCNYS fundraiser, The Buffalo News reports.

“CCNYS founders Nick and Nancie Orticelli are also affiliated with the Watchmen, a nearby militia who Nick has encouraged his social media followers to join. The Watchmen had several members at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and one member, Pete Harding, is still facing charges for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds,” The Daily Beast noted. “Nancie Orticelli has also hosted the Watchmen’s founder, Charles Pellien, on her weekly radio show on several occasions.”

One of Kennedy’s goals in traveling to New York was to get on the ballot for the November presidential election. Various polls show him taking votes from both President Joe Biden and ex-president Donald Trump, but Kennedy currently has only qualified to be on the ballot in three states, Utah, Michigan and Hawaii, the newspaper reported.

But The Washington Post on Thursday reported The American Independent Party of California, which has a history of “far-right ties,” and “backed segregationist and former Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968, nominated Kennedy for president.”

Kennedy “said this week that he has qualified to be on the ballot in California and will accept the nomination of the American Independent Party, which has a history of associating itself with far-right figures and individuals who have expressed racist views.”

Some news reports and RFK Jr. himself say the Trump campaign was actively courting Kennedy, attempting to convince him to consider being the ex-president’s 2024 vice presidential running mate.

“That MAGA dalliance with Kennedy could be coming back to bite the Trump campaign, some Republicans close to the former president worry,” The Daily Beast also reported.

“’They can only blame themselves,’ a Trump-aligned strategist told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations about the risk Kennedy poses, ‘because they cozied up to him and thought it was funny.’”

Watch WIVBTV’s report on Kennedy’s trip to New York below or at this link.

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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17 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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22 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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