From the daily archives:

Thursday, November 9, 2006

Gates Nomination

by Frank Paynter on November 9, 2006

November 7, 1991
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. President, at the outset of the confirmation hearings, I had serious reservations about the nominee. The confirmation hearings only raised more questions and greater doubts. Questions and doubts about Mr. Gates’ past activities, managerial style, judgment, lapses in memory and analytical abilities. Questions and doubts about his role in the Iran-Contra Affair and in providing military intelligence to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war; and questions and doubts about whether he will be able to remove the ideological blinders reflected in his writings and speeches or whether Mr. Gates is so rooted in the past, that he will not be able to lead the Agency into the post-cold war era. Because of these concerns, I have concluded that Mr. Gates is not the right person for the important job of overseeing our intelligence operations in this New World.
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So this woman from Minneapolis calls…

by Frank Paynter on November 9, 2006

And she says that John D’emilio will be in Madison in February and can I give her any information on that. So I hook her up with the number of a guy who is probably organizing it and I wonder, “What? Am I psychic?” Because I had no clue who D’emilio is, or that he’d written a Bayard Rustin biography, or that he was coming to Madison and I had no clue Chuck had invited him, but that is indeed the case, and I passed the information on to Val, the woman who got my number from a friend in Minneapolis. I must be psychic.

There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers. . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won’t accept fags. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights.
– Bayard Rustin, 1986

More than a handful of states have now passed anti-gay marriage legislation and amendments, Wisconsin being one of them. It’s time for a Bayard Rustin to emerge in support of gays and lesbians. The civil rights struggles, the class struggles aren’t over by any means, and many people of color have a hard time identifying the oppression of gays as morally equivalent to oppression of non-whites, so the movement for equal rights is itself divided, and you gotta know that J. Edgar Hoover, that vicious old queen, is sleeping easy in his tomb knowing that his evil still walks in the world.

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empty-zen-hacker-bodhisattva

November 9, 2006

Has it been five years then? I remember wondering just what this guy RageBoy was going on about. I remember feeling resistant. I remember that I finally overcame my resistance to group things and started trading links with the other EGR list subscribers in January. I still think of myself as [...]

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Wicked as it seems…

November 9, 2006

Thanks to J. Alva for the campaign button and RB (and Keith Richards) for the title slug.
Last night it seemed that the Republicans had discarded the election theft strategy in Virginia. Six years of illegitimate government has more than lined the pockets of the war mongers, the imperialists and the oligarchs. Hopefully they [...]

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