A Week After WikiLeaks Alerts the World to North Koreans’ Sale of Missiles to Iran, the Whistleblowing Web Site’s Founder — Now an International Fugitive — Vows to Make Public Entire Cache of Top-Secret Files Completely Uncensored if He’s Arrested; Human-Rights Groups Fear Exposure By WikiLeaks Endangers Safety of Their Activists in Countries With Repressive Regimes

ACTING LIKE A CORNERED ANIMAL? — One week after WikiLeaks revealed to the world that North Korea sold 19 intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to Iran and that China has become “fed up” with its increasingly belligerent longtime ally, the Web site’s founder, Julian Assange, has “gone rogue” and is threatening to unleash its entire cache of of top-secret U.S. government documents if he is arrested over their publication. WikiLeaks is also coming under fire from an unlikely source: Human-rights organizations, who fear that the safety of their activists in countries with oppressive regimes has been compromised by the Web site’s disclosures. (Image courtesy Online USA News)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, December 7, 2010)
(Updated 8:00 a.m. EST Tuesday, December 7, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

One week after the controversial whistleblowing Web site WikiLeaks made pubic secret U.S. diplomatic cables revealing that North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads — and that the Chinese have become “fed up” with their longtime ally’s increasing belligerence — the site’s founder has gone completely rogue.

Founder Julian Assange — now an international fugitive wanted in Sweden on unrelated sexual-assault charges — threatened to unleash what he called the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb: The release of WikiLeaks’ entire cache of top-secret U.S. government files, totally uncensored if he’s arrested by authorities, The Globe and Mail of Toronto reported Monday.

The cache, contained in an encrypted 1.3-gigabyte file that WikiLeaks distributed last summer through file-sharing services, include the full, uncensored versions of every top-secret U.S. document — both diplomatic and military — the site has obtained, the newspaper reported. The documents include the names of U.S. military personnel, intelligence operatives and their confidential contacts — precisely the kind of sensitive information that Washington warns would endanger their lives if disclosed.

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ASSANGE ARRESTED IN LONDON; WIKILEAKS BACKS OFF FROM RELEASING FILES

LONDON — British police arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Tuesday morning on a European warrant issued by Swedish authorities — but WikiLeaks backed off from releasing an encrypted file containing the full, uncensored versions of its entire cache of secret U.S. documents, as Assange had threatened to have done upon his arrest.

Assange was was due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrate’s Court later in the day, London’s Metropolitan Police said. the 39-year-old Australian had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables online last month.

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HUMAN-RIGHTS GROUPS WARN ASSANGE DISCLOSURES ENDANGER THEIR OVERSEAS ACTIVISTS

If Assange is arrested and he makes good on his threat to unlock the documents cache, U.S. government operatives won’t be the only ones in danger. Several prominent human-rights organizations have voiced alarm that the safety of their activists in countries with repressive governments were also in danger as a result of WikiLeaks’ disclosures.

Two of those organizations, the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights First, warned that WikiLeaks would be making “a grave mistake” if it published the names of human-rights advocates and organizations operating overseas whose work is supported by the U.S. government.

Elisa Massimo, president and CEO of HRF, in a letter to Assange issued several days before WikiLeaks made public more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables, warned that “publishing the names of individuals or organizations from repressive or authoritarian countries — such as Iran, China, Russia, Cuba etc. — is extremely reckless as it will increase their risk of persecution, imprisonment and violence.

“We support freedom of expression and greater transparency in government,” Massimo wrote in her letter, dated November 29 and posted on the HRF Web site. “Yet, in releasing the information in the circumstances we describe above, the very real dangers to the health and well-being of human-rights activists would outweigh the benefits.”

STATE DEPARTMENT REPORTEDLY OFFERING PROTECTION TO ‘OUTED’ RIGHTS WORKERS

Meanwhile, the State Department reportedly has offered to provide protection to human-rights workers whose identities already were exposed by WikiLeaks — including evacuation from the countries they were working in.

“We have great concern,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was quoted as saying by Inter-Press Service on Thursday.

IPS, citing an earlier report by CNN, quoted Crowley as saying that “There are clearly sources identified in these documents, particularly in authoritarian states, that have talked to us and we believe the release of these cables definitely puts real lives at risk. We have taken steps, in anticipation of this release.”

ASSANGE THREAT AMOUNTS TO ‘INTERNET BLACKMAIL’ AND MAKES MOCKERY OF ONLINE JOURNALISM

The file — which already has been downloaded by thousands, and possibly millions, of Web users around the world — is protected by a hacker-proof 256-bit encryption key. Mark Stephens, an attorney representing Assanage, told The Globe and Mail that if his client were to be arrested on the sexual-assault charges he faces in Sweden or on espionage charges he might face in the U.S., he would release the encryption key, giving Web users around the world full access to the documents contained in the file.

Assange calls the file — which he called the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb — his “insurance policy” against arrest.

Others would call it “blackmail” — which is, in the opinion of this column, exactly what it is. One week after this column praised WikiLeaks for performing “a vitally needed public service” for alerting the world to North Korea’s sale of nuclear-capable missiles to Iran, its founder has, for all intents and purposes, destroyed whatever credibility WikiLeaks had by resorting to blackmail to avoid arrest.

WikiLeaks proclaims on its “About Us” page that it is “a not-for-profit media organization” and that its goal “is to bring important news and information to the public.” But what news organization would threaten to publish an entire cache of highly sensitive government documents with complete disregard to the potential danger posed to people either directly working for or having close ties with the government?

No responsible news organization, journalist or blogger would be that reckless. Make no mistake: Julian Assange is not a journalist. His rogue actions make a mockery of journalism and undermines the very media WikiLeaks claims to be — especially the new and rising cyber news media, from giants such as The Huffington Post to blogging sites such as this one.

Many journalists have gone to jail rather than reveal their confidential sources of their investigations of government wrongdoing. No responsible journalist is going to risk his or her reputation — not to mention his or her job — by stooping to blackmail to get the story out.

Imagine if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who, more than 35 years ago, uncovered the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, had resorted to blackmail to get to the bottom of the story, the Post would have fired them both.

WIKILEAKS POSTS LISTS OF SITES U.S. CONSIDERS VITAL TO ITS SECURITY

As if to demonstrate that Assange means business with his threat to open up the entire document cache, WikiLeaks on Monday published yet another secret U.S. diplomatic cable — one that includes a list of places both inside and outside the U.S. that Washington considers vital to national security.

The list includes industrial complexes, research facilities, oil and gas pipelines, ports, undersea telecommunications cables and other sites — including dams — that Crowley said “gives a group like al-Qaida a targeting list” of places to attack.

Reaction in Britain was just as condemnatory. “It’s a gift to any terrorist [group] trying to work out what are the ways in which it can damage the United States,” Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the British Parliament, told CNN.

LATEST DISCLOSURE FOLLOWS INCREASING FINANCIAL, TECHNICAL PRESSURE ON WIKILEAKS

Wikileaks’ latest publication of secret U.S. government documents comes as the site is coming under mounting financial — and technical — pressure. In Switzerland, the bank PostFinance closed Assange’s account — costing him and WikiLeaks about 100,000 euros, or $144,000 — citing a lack of proof that Assange maintains a residence in Switzerland.

Assange, according to the bank, listed his residence as being in Geneva, the country’s commercial capital, but found his statement to be false. “Mr. Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance,” the bank said in a statement.

PostFinance — the bank of the Swiss post office — becomes the second major source of WikiLeaks’ finances to pull out. Last week, PayPal.com, citing violations of its terms of service, cut off WikiLeaks, just days after its main Web host, EveryDNS, pulled the plug, citing repeated cyberattacks against WikiLeaks that threatened to paralyze the server.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks announced Monday that its supporters had set up more than 300 mirror sites to carry its content, to thwart any attempts to shut it down, with a goal to have 500 mirror sites in all.

“WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack,” the site said in a statement. “In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet, we need your help.”

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Diplomatic Cables Based on U.S. Intelligence Reports — Published by Whistleblower Web Site WikiLeaks — Reveal North Koreans Sold 19 Nuclear-Capable IRBM Missiles to Iran Capable of Striking Targets Throughout Europe and in Russia; Documents Show Arab States Called for Attack on Iran’s Nuke Facilities — China Admits It’s Fed Up With North Korea’s Belligerence, Wants Peninsula Reunified Under Seoul’s Control

FOR ONCE, WIKILEAKS PERFORMS A VITAL WORLD PUBLIC SERVICE — Contrary to demands by Representative Peter King (R- New York) that the whistleblower Web site WikliLeaks be “designated a foreign terrorist organization” for making public thousands of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables, the Web site should be honored for performing a vital public service to the world by revealing that North Korea sold 19 nuclear-capable R-27 missiles — such as these on display in a recent military parade in Pyongyang — to Iran, giving Tehran the potential to fire them at targets throughout Europe and even toward the Russian capital, Moscow. The documents, if accurate, show that Iran and North Korea pose a far greater threat to world peace and stability than previously thought. (Photo: Yonhap News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)
(Updated 11:15 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Memo to Representative Peter King (R-New York):

Shut the hell up!

The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee — who will take over as chairman in January — called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to designate the site “a foreign terrorist organization,’ in reaction to its posting on Sunday of more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

“This is extremely damaging to U.S. troops, U.S. interests and U.S. intelligence,” King told Fox News on Monday. “They [WikiLeaks] are engaged in terrorist activity. What they’re doing is clearly aiding and abetting terrorist groups. Either we’re serious about this or we’re not,” adding that putting the Web site on the State Department’s list of known foreign terrorist organizations would enable the U.S. to shut down WikiLeaks by seizing its assets and to stop other entities — including news media outlets — from cooperating with it.

Excuse us, Congressman King, but since when is it “aiding and abetting terrorist groups” to expose the fact that Iran and North Korea pose a dangerous threat to world peace — a threat much more dangerous than previously thought — to the point that even China is reportedly “fed up” with North Korea’s belligerence?

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CHINA CONFIRMS IT WANTS KOREAN PENINSULA REUNIFIED UNDER SEOUL’S CONTROL, ADMITS ‘FRUSTRATION’ WITH PYONGYANG

The officials admitted to a sense of frustration in Beijing over North Korea’s recent actions, including its nuclear and missile tests – which China opposed – and last week’s lethal artillery bombardment of a South Korean island.
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Instead of prosecuting Assange and attempting to shut down WikiLeaks — which, by the way, would clearly violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees under the First Amendment of a free and unfettered news and information media — WikiLeaks should be honored for performing, for once, a vital public service by alerting the world to the mounting threat to world peace and stability posed by Tehran and Pyongyang — a danger that has been building since 2003 and is now approaching a dangerous flashpoint on the Korean Peninsula.

The whistleblower site made public what the State Department should have told the world months ago: That North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range R-27 ballistic missiles — missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and, when fired from Iran, could strike cities throughout Europe.

Even the Russian capital Moscow could potentially be threatened by nuclear-armed Iranian IRBMs, the U.S. diplomatic cables show, based on intelligence reports. That revelation comes just four months after relations between Russia and Iran began to deteriorate over Iran’s nuclear program.

MISSILE THREAT TO EUROPE, RUSSIA DETAILED IN U.S. MEETINGS WITH RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

According to the cables obtained by WikiLeaks — accounts of which were published Sunday by The New York Times — top Russian officials were alerted to the Iranian missile threat in February during a meeting in Moscow with a U.S. delegation led by Vann Van Diepen, a top official of the State Department’s nuclear nonproliferation division.

Van Diepen, while working in his previous capacity as a national intelligence officer, “played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity,” according to the Times account of the cables.

Iran’s acquisition of the North Korean-built R-27 missiles — which, ironically, were originally designed by the Russians during the Soviet era — gives Tehran the capability of striking cities throughout Europe and that even Moscow lies within the missiles’ striking range, the cables show.

The U.S. delegation warned their Russian counterparts that the missiles, which have an advanced propulsion system that the North Koreans developed, would bring Iran closer to developing its own arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at a time when the two former Cold War adversaries reached a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate — aimed at further reducing the U.S. and Russia’s ICBM stockpiles.

CABLES REVEAL GROWING WORLDWIDE ALARM OVER IRANIAN NUKE PROGRAMS

The nuclear development program of Iran been the source of increasing alarm by the United States for the past half-decade. Now, it appears, the alarm has spread worldwide — nowhere more so than in the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is so worried about Iran’s nuclear program that he repeatedly called on the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive strike and destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities — as the Israelis did to Iraq’s nuclear plant in a 1981 air strike, according to an account of the cables published Sunday by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

And Saudi Arabia isn’t alone, according to the cables. They reveal that Arab governments are just as suspicious as the U.S., Israel and the European Union are that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. One cable recorded King Abdullah as having “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”

According to Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the king, in an April 2008 meeting in Riyadh with General David Petraeus, then the commander of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, told him to “cut off the head of the snake,” referring to Iran’s nuclear program, the Guardian reported in its account of the cables.

ARAB COUNTRIES DEMAND ACTION AGAINST IRAN’S NUKE FACILITIES, CABLES SAY

Other Arab countries, notably Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, referred to Iran as “evil”, an “existential threat” and a power that “is going to take us to war,” according to the cables. Jordan and Bahrain have even gone so far as to openly demand that Iran’s nuclear program “be stopped by any means necessary” — including military action.

The Arab countries’ demand for action against Iran marks a dramatic departure from widely-held perceptions that to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities would have triggered a much wider war in the Middle East, with Tehran likely to retaliate with a massive missile strike against Israel.

For its part, Israel let it be known to American officials in June 2009 that it was prepared, if necessary, to “go it alone” and attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unilaterally, according to the Guardian account of the cables. They quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable,” beyond which any military action “would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”

According to Barak’s timetable, that window will close at the end of this year.

Iran lashed out at the WikiLeaks disclosures Monday, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissing the leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign by the U.S. against his country. “We don’t think this information was leaked,” Ahmadinejad said during a televised news conference in Tehran. “We think it was organized to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Ahmadinejad insisted to reporters that Arab nations’ demand for action against Iran’s nuclear program would have no impact on his country’s relations with them. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said.

CABLES REVEAL CHINA ‘FED UP’ WITH ‘SPOILED CHILD’ NORTH KOREA’S BELLIGERENCE

Disclosure of North Korea’s sale of the R-27 missiles to Iran could not have come at a more sensitive time, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached a crisis stage after North Korea launched an artillery barrage on a South Korean island, killing four South Korean civilians and bringing the peninsula to the brink of war.

Among a second cache of U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks on Monday include a bombshell revelation that China, North Korea’s longtime ally, is “fed up” with the increasingly belligerent regime in Pyongyang, with senior Chinese officials quoted as derisively branding North Korea “a spoiled child.”

While Beijing publicly has refused to condemn Pyongyang for its November 23 attack on the South Korean island of Yeongyeong and has called for a resumption of the six-party nuclear talks, the cables reveal China’s mounting private frustration with North Korea in the four years since Pyongyang’s provocative underground nuclear tests and test firings of its long-range Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles.

In a February 17 cable, South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Chun Yung-woo, told Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, that senior Chinese officials told him that Beijing “is fed up with the North Korean regime’s behavior and would not oppose” the unification of the Korean peninsula under South Korean control.

S. KOREAN OFFICIAL; N. KOREA ‘ALREADY COLLAPSING’

Chun, who heads the South Korean delegation to the six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, said China “would not be able to stop North Korea’s collapse” following the death of its ailing, 68-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-il, according to the cable. The North, Chun said, “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically [within] two to three years” after Kim’s death — despite Pyongyang’s apparent grooming of the dictator’s 27-yer-old son, Kim Jong-un, to take over.

Chun dismissed South Korean media reports that Chinese companies had agreed to pump $10 billion into the North’s economy, the cable said. “Beijing had ‘no will’ to use its modest economic leverage to force a change in Pyongyang’s policies,” Chun said.

In a sign of the deteriorating relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, the cable quotes Chun as saying that North Korea has a low regard for Wu Dawei, China’s deputy foreign minister and chief representative at the six-party nuclear talks, with the North Koreans characterizing him as “the most incompetent official in China.”

For his part, Wu is quoted in an April 2009 cable as telling U.S. officials that Pyongyang was behaving like “a spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention by carrying out its missile tests — which severely jangled nerves in Japan, where the government in Tokyo regarded the tests as a direct threat to Japan’s national security.

Another sign of tension between the two countries has been a series of violent incidents along the Chinese-North Korean border — the most highly publicized of which was the deadly shooting in July by North Korean border guards of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth.

The four Chinese were shot on the North Korean side of the border, after North Korean guards suspected them of “crossing the border for trade activities,” according to Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. Beijing filed a formal diplomatic protest to Pyongyang over the incident.

WHY WIKILEAKS: LACK OF FEDERAL ‘SHIELD LAW’ TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS’ SOURCES

Congressman King and other politicians, in their condemnation of WikiLeaks, have forgotten the reason why WikiLeaks came into being in the first place: The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to review federal court rulings ordering two investigative reporters to reveal their confidential sources.

It has been a longstanding practice of investigative journalists uncovering corruption in and wrongdoing by the government and private entities to keep the identities of confidential sources secret to protect them from retaliation for their disclosures. The Valerie Plame affair undermined that practice, prompting many sources to remain silent, out of fear of discovery and retribution.

Courts ordered then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and then-Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to reveal their sources for information about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in apparent retaliation for the public challenge by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to the credibility of the Bush administration’s claim of an alleged Iraqi stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.

WIKILEAKS ‘CREATED TO PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS’

As Peter Scheer, a journalist and practicing attorney who is also executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, writes in a November 16 blog posting on the coalition’s Web site, “WikiLeaks emerged as a technological solution to this hole in the fabric of legal rules implementing the First Amendment’s free press and free speech guarantees.”

WikiLeaks is designed “to foil subpoenas or other assertions of judicial power,” Scheer wrote. “Because the Web site is not tied to any single real-world venue and apparently was built with layers of redundancy, court injunctions issued against WikiLeaks, whether directed to its Internet service providers (ISPs), its lawyers or other entities, are unlikely to disable it.”

More important, Scheer wrote, “WikiLeaks claims to use technology that erases the fingerprints of sources, rendering leaked documents untraceable. By contrast, the same documents leaked to a newspaper, such as The Washington Post, whether by means of e-mail, ‘cloud’-based Internet services or other electronic communications, would be vulnerable to interception and tracing.

“Even if the documents, instead, were hand-delivered to the Post, its reporter could be subpoenaed and forced to testify,” Scheer added.

It is a both a tragedy and a disgrace that it took a Web site such as WikiLeaks to alert the world to the dangers to world peace and security that Iran and North Korea pose — a job that the mainstream media should have done but has been intimidated by the court rulings in the Plame case into not doing.

WikiLeaks should not be prosecuted for that. It should instead be given a great deal of thanks for performing a vitally needed public service.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Republican Leadership Faces a Crisis as It Prepares to Take Control of House in January: Congress Must Vote on Raising the Nation’s ‘Credit-Card Limit’ by Spring, But Newly-Elected Tea Party Hard-Liners Vow They Won’t Support Raising Debt Limit — Raising the Threat of a Government Default That Could Set Off Another Financial-Market Meltdown, Plunging the U.S. Economy Into a Free Fall

AFTER ROUTING DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICAN RIFT BLOWS WIDE OPEN — Less than three weeks after routing the Democrats in the midterm elections, Republicans already are in the throes of a major rift that threatens to destroy party unity. Newly-elected Tea Party-backed Republicans are causing a huge headache for the GOP leadership by vowing not to vote to raise the national debt ceiling — which Congress must vote on by next spring. Essentially the nation’s de facto credit-card limit, the debt ceiling is due to max out by that time. If Congress fails to act, the government would legally default on paying its debts — forcing the government to shut down and setting off chaos in the financial markets that could plunge the U.S. economy into a free fall. (Photo: Steve Bloom/Barcroft Media)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 23, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

WASHINGTON — As the nation prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, the euphoria and boldness expressed by Republicans in the three weeks since they routed the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives in January already has given way to bitter internal feuding as the GOP leadership confronts having to make a decision by next spring on raising the nation’s de facto credit-card limit.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, who will take over as speaker from Democrat Nancy Pelosi, said Thursday that the GOP-controlled House will have to act on the national debt ceiling, now set at $14.3 trillion. The actual national debt now stands at $13.87 trillion and is expected to hit the ceiling by next spring.

But the speaker-to-be already is facing an open revolt by newly-elected Tea Party-backed hard-liners, many of whom have vowed to vote against raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that voters gave them a clear mandate to reduce government spending and that raising the debt limit would only encourage more spending.

TEA PARTY-BACKED REPUBLICANS WANT SPENDING CUTS FIRST

Representative-elect Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that “The [debt ceiling] vote will garner a lot of attention and provoke a lot of pain and anxiety, but there are consequences to all votes. The question is, when are we going to stop the way we are going? I think we have to stop it now.”

And Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” November 7 that he would vote against raising the debt ceiling, “unless it’s combined with some path to balancing our budget, returning to 2008 spending levels,” and repealing the health-care reform law passed by Congress last spring without a single Republican vote.

“We have got to demonstrate that we have the resolve to cut spending,” DeMint said. “We cannot allow that to go through the Congress without showing the American people that we are going to balance the budget, and we’re not going to continue to raise the debt in America.”

FAILURE TO RAISE DEBT CEILING WOULD TRIGGER ECONOMIC CHAOS

But Boehner, in a series of closed-door meetings with Republican freshmen, bluntly warned the Tea Party-backed firebrands that Congress has little choice but to raise the debt limit. “I’ve made it pretty clear to them . . . that Congress is going to have to deal with this,” Boehner said in a Thursday news conference. “We’re going to have to deal with it as adults. Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations and we have obligations on our part.”

Failure to raise the debt ceiling would force the government to default on paying its bills and shut down. A default would, in turn, trigger severe economic shock waves, damaging, if not destroying, the nation’s credit rating.

Interest rates would soar dramatically, making it all but impossible for individuals or businesses to obtain or maintain credit. Foreign investors — who, according to the Treasury Department, now hold more than $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities — would be prompted not to buy any more, causing the dollar to plummet in value against other currencies and triggering chaos in world financial markets.

That, in turn, would cripple the already-struggling U.S. economy, throwing millions more Americans out of work.

COBURN AIDE: ‘ECONOMY IS GOING TO COLLAPSE’

Those dire predictions don’t appear to faze Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma). According to Coburn spokesman John Hart, “We know the American economy is going to collapse, so why don’t we start the hard work of cutting spending now? We’re already in a crisis, and the time to reduce spending is immediately.”

Hart told The Washington Times last Sunday that Coburn was prepared to tie up the debt-ceiling measure unless it’s accompanied by major spending cuts. “He’s willing to block it, to put a hold on it, to use all procedural tools available, to ensure Congress reduces spending,” Hart said.

Other newly-elected Republican firebrands weren’t swayed by Boehner’s warning, either. Representatives-elect Kristi Noem of South Dakota, >Tim Scott of South Carolina, Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, Steven Stivers of Ohio and Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania all insisted to Boehner that they will vote against raising the debt limit.

Ribble called raising the debt limit “unconscionable” and “insane.” Stivers denounced it as “a reckless desire to spend money we don’t have, and borrow money we can’t afford to pay back.” Barletta compared the national debt to slavery, denouncing both congress and President Obama of “spending our country into servitude.”

FOR TEA PARTY FRESHMEN, A DIFFICULT TRANSITION FROM CAMPAIGNING TO GOVERNING

Boehner faced a difficult task in convening the freshmen on the need to raise the debt ceiling from the start, as many of the freshmen made the national debt and government spending the top-priority issues in their campaigns to unseat Democratic incumbents — and they’re in no mood to do anything to increase the debt further.

At the same time, however, the debt-ceiling vote poses a stark challenge for many of the newly-elected lawmakers to make the transition from campaigning to actually governing.

“A lot of these Tea Party Republicans made a lot of sweeping pronouncements on the campaign trail about cutting government spending and reducing the debt,” said a Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But once they’re sworn into office, they’re going to get a hard dose of fiscal reality and they’ll be forced to do things they swore on the campaign trail they would never do.”

WILL OBAMA, DEMOCRATS HANG TOUGH ON BUSH TAX CUTS?

With the Tea Party Republican freshmen likely to insist on deep spending cuts as the price for their support to raise the national debt ceiling, will the Democrats be equally insistent that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans expire as scheduled at the end of the year as the price for their support for spending cuts?

While Republicans have sounded the mantra of tax cuts for more than 30 years, an 18-member bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to find ways to reduce the more than $1 trillion federal budget deficit made it clear that spending cuts alone cannot close the deficit — it has grown far too large for that.

In their 50-page preliminary report, released November 10, commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Allan Simpson conclude that a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and revisions to existing government programs and departments — as well as a revision of the tax code — are necessary to create more sustainable budgets.

Whether Democrats like it or not, spending must be decreased to reduce the deficit. But whether Republicans like it or not, taxes must be increased to close the deficit as well — and since neither the poor nor the middle class can afford to bear the burden of higher taxes, they must be increased on those who can most afford to bear the burden: The wealthiest one percent of Americans.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Iowa Voters Tossed Out Three Justices of the State Supreme Court Solely Because They Declared Unconstitutional a State Law That Barred Gay and Lesbian Couples From Marrying; Vote Sends a Clear Message That Anti-Gay Bias Trumps Gays’ Constitutional Rights — and Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Protecting the the Rights of Other Minorities

A VICTORY FOR HOMOPHOBIA — Three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples form marrying were tossed out of office on November 2 solely because of that decision. Never mind the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision that no state can deliberately exclude gays and lesbians from the constitutional rights and freedoms enjoyed by everyone else. The vote sets a dangerous precedent that state judges can be tossed out of office by the whims of a fickle electorate for protecting the constitutional rights of all minorities, not just gays and lesbians. (Image courtesy KCBS-TV, Los Angeles)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 16, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Here we go again.

In yet another state, the voters sent a clear and unmistakable message on November 2: That gay and lesbian couples have no constitutional right to marry — regardless of what the courts say to the contrary.

That message came loud and clear when voters in Iowa ousted three justices of the state Supreme Court who participated in Varnum v. Brien, the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples from marrying.

Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Associate Justices David Baker and Michael Streit were all denied reconfirmation with roughly 54 percent voters saying “no” and 46 percent saying “yes.”

Under Iowa law, the governor appoints justices to the state Supreme Court, with the assistance of a judicial selection committee. Each justice, however, is subject to a retention election five years after his or her appointment.

Under normal circumstances, a Supreme Court justice does not remain on the bench if he or she is accepting bribes or has become incompetent or is simply not doing his or her job. But the circumstances in which Justices Ternus, Baker and Steit were ousted were anything but normal.

JUSTICES WERE DUTY-BOUND TO UPHOLD RIGHTS GUARANTEED BY IOWA CONSTITUTION

The justices, acting on an appeal of a lower court decision, ruled unanimously on April 3, 2009 that the state law defining marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman violated the equal-protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

Article I, Section 6 of the Iowa Constitution states quite explicitly that “All laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation; the [Iowa] General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

The court also rejected civil unions, declaring that “A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our Constitution.”

The justices made it clear they were duty-bound by their oath of office to uphold the Iowa Constitution — and the rights of individuals that it guarantees. “Our responsibility . . . is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.”

APPEAL TO U.S. COURTS DEEMED ‘TOO RISKY’ IN FACE OF FEDERAL LAWSUITS AGAINST PROP. 8, DOMA

Yet despite the clear and unmistakable language of the Iowa Constitution’s equal-protection clause, opponents of same-gender marriage adamantly refused to accept the court’s decision — and vowed an all-out campaign to reimpose the ban.

An appeal to the federal courts was not in the cards, since the justices based their ruling on the Iowa Constitution and — in the absence of a direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution — the federal courts lacked the jurisdiction to intervene.

An appeal also carried with it a high risk of losing, as California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 — which amended the California Constitution to ban same-gender marriage — is presently under challenge in federal court on the grounds that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

There are also at least four lawsuits now pending in the federal courts — two of them filed just last week — challenging the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which denies federal recognition of same-gender marriages that are legal in six states and the District of Columbia and bars federal spousal benefits to legally married gay and lesbian couples.

RIGHT-WING ANTI-GAY GROUPS FROM OUTSIDE IOWA TARGET JUSTICES

Instead of filing an appeal, opponents of same-gender marriage launched a drive to oust the justices solely because of their ruling in the Varnum case, rallying voters to lash out against an interpretation of the state Constitution that was deeply unpopular with conservatives.

In the process, Iowa Constitution itself — that the justices were duty-bound to uphold — came under attack.

The right-wing National Organization for Marriage and other anti-gay groups from outside the state launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to oust Chief Justice Ternus and Associate Justices Baker and Streit, whose five-year terms were up for retention votes.

The campaign quickly became a cause celebre for the Religious Right, whose utter contempt toward the idea of two men or two women who love each other getting married is so strong that they’ve taken a Constitution-be-damned attitude in an all-out jihad to make marriage the exclusive province of opposite-gender couples.

Not only did they target the justices for ouster, they also campaigned hard to get conservative, anti-gay Republicans elected to the Iowa Legislature, with the ultimate goal of amending the Iowa Constitution to restrict marriage to opposite-gender couples. In the end, the Republicans took control of the Iowa House, but the Democrats kept control of the Iowa Senate, making passage of a marriage amendment to the state constitution — a very cumbersome and difficult process to begin with — highly unlikely.

OUSTER VOTE SETS DANGEROUS PRECEDENT FOR PROTECTING RIGHTS OF ALL MINORITIES

While the removal of the three Iowa Supreme Court justices over their ruling in the Varnum case cannot, on its own, overturn the decision, it nonetheless sets a dangerous precedent for the protection of the constitutional rights of not only gays, but of all minorities at the state level. Imagine if there had been retention votes to oust the judges a generation ago had they declared that a ban on interracial marriages was unconstitutional — as the California Supreme Court did in Perez v. Sharp nearly 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court did so in 1967.

Unlike federal judges, who are appointed for life and can be removed only by impeachment by Congress for clear malfeasance and/or crimes, state judges are subject to retention votes by the electorate and county and municipal judges are directly elected to the bench. This raises the specter of undue political influence that can run directly counter to judges’ sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of their home state.

The Iowa retention vote also raises the specter of state judges across the country being targeted for ouster for daring to uphold the constitutional rights of anyone — let alone gays and lesbians. It sends an unmistakable message to any judges who might be inclined to rule in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution, but inconsistent with the vagaries of popular opinion.

This is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision thatno state can deliberately deny to its gay and lesbian residents the constitutional and civil rights enjoyed by everyone else, solely because they are gay.

In that case, the high court struck down an amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have prevented the Legislature or any city, town or county in the state from passing legislation to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. “The amendment imposes a special disability upon [gay and lesbian] persons alone,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court. “Homosexuals are forbidden [under the amendment] the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint. . .This the state cannot do.”

DO GAYS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO MARRY? RECENT COURT PRECEDENTS STRONGLY SUGGEST YES

While the question of whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment is one that has yet to be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, past rulings by the nation’s highest tribunal strongly suggest — and this column strongly asserts — that they do.

The freedom of two single, mature adults who deeply love one another to marry is a freedom that the U.S. Supreme Court declared more than four decades ago is guaranteed by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, when the justices, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down laws in 16 states — all of them in the South — that barred interracial couples from marrying.

Writing for the court, then-Chief Justice Earl Warren declared, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry — or not marry — a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.”

Gay and lesbian couples, in the opinion of this column, effectively earned to right to marry when the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, fully decriminalized same-gender sexual relations in 2003 by striking down the last remaining anti-sodomy laws on the books in 13 states.

Although the court’s six-justice majority made it clear that its decision in the Lawrence did not directly address the issue of same-gender marriage, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissenting opinion, wrote that the ruling cast into doubt the constitutionality of laws that outlaw same-gender marriage.

“If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct,” Scalia wrote, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution?’ Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.”

Between past precedents in Loving, Romer and Lawrence and the pending challenges in federal court to California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and DOMA, it’s only a matter of time when the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word on whether gay and lesbian couples have the same Fourteenth Amendment constitutional right to marry that interracial and interfaith couples have.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Congratulations, Voters: You Swept Out the Last Remaining Republican Moderates in the GOP Primaries and Democratic Moderates in Last Week’s Elections — Leaving Both Parties in Congress Totally Dominated by Hard-Line Ideologues of Both the Right (GOP) and the Left (Dems). Bipartisan Cooperation? Forget About It!

WELCOME TO GRIDLOCK CITY, AMERICA — You were warned in last week’s column not to vote to return control of Congress to the Republicans, but you wouldn’t listen. Now that you’ve turned over control of the House to the GOP, you’ve guaranteed that the next two years will see nothing but total ideological warfare on Capitol Hill, for the Democrats you swept out of office were mostly moderate-to-conservative Democrats — replaced by conservative Republicans — including several hard-line Tea Party ideologues — and leaving behind a Democratic caucus dominated by liberals determined not to be intimidated by the so-called “Red Wave.” Congratulations, America — You’ve now got a Congress that you said for months you didn’t want: A Congress completely dominated by unrepentant ideologues of both the left and the right, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian. (Image courtesy Wikipedia.org)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 9, 2010)

Dear Readers:

Congratulations, America. You did the exact opposite of what Guest Columnist Russell King strongly urged you not to do last Tuesday.

Now, for the next two years, you’re going to have to suffer the consequences.

For months, you’ve told pollsters that you were sick and tired of the partisan wrangling in Washington. Yet when you went to the polls — in both the primaries and in last week’s general election — you elected what is destined to be the most ideologically polarized Congress in American history since the Civil War — the 150th anniversary of which, ironically, is next year.

In the Republican primaries, you defeated one moderate Republican after another, going instead with conservatives, many of them backed by the Tea Party movement. In last Tuesday’s election, you swept out one moderate-to-conservative Democrat after another, going instead with even more conservative Republicans.

ONE AFTER ANOTHER, MODERATES OF BOTH PARTIES GET SWEPT OUT BY FIREBRANDS

Indeed,, instead of ending the partisan gridlock, you, the electorate, did the exact opposite, voting in a Congress with a near-total absence of moderates of either party — especially in the House — guaranteeing that the hyper-partisanship you so thoroughly despise will only intensify, as both parties become even more ideologically rigid than before, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian.

Of the 49 Democrats you tossed out of the House, 24 of them were moderate-to-conservative “Blue Dogs,” including Mike Arcuri of New York, Baron Hill of Indiana, Jim Marshall of Georgia, Glenn Nye of Virginia, John Salazar of Colorado and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota.

In the Senate, the most prominent “Blue Dog” who lost was Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas — who barely survived a fierce primary challenge from party liberals angered by her opposition to a government-run “public option” as part of the health-care reform law passed last May.

Among Republicans, one moderate after another found themselves swept away by a right-wing tsunami driven by the Tea Party movement in the GOP primaries. Among the moderates who got thrown under the Tea Party bus: Mike Castle of Delaware, Charlie Crist of Florida, Trey Grayson of Kentucky, Bob Bennett of Utah, Rick Lazio of New York and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

(Murkowski, however, may well have gained sweet revenge for her primary defeat by beating her Tea Party-backed opponent, Joe Miller, in last week’s general election as an independent write-in candidate. Murkowski’s win, if confirmed, would be a bitter blow to former Governor Sarah Palin, who ousted Murkowski’s father, Frank, as governor in 2006 and strongly supported Miller.)

But by far the biggest loser of all was Republican-turned-Democrat Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He abandoned the GOP when it became clear that he would lose in the primary to conservative former Representative Pat Toomey — only to lose the Democratic primary to liberal-backed Representative Joe Sestak. In the end, though, Toomey narrowly defeated Sestak, 51 percent to 49 percent.

RESULT: GOP MORE RIGHT-WING THAN EVER; DEMS MORE LEFT-WING THAN EVER

Left standing on Capitol Hill after the “Red Tsunami” is a Republican caucus that is the most right-wing in its history and a Democratic caucus that is equally the most left-wing in its history.

Within days after the election, Republican leaders — and their Tea Party allies — made it abundantly clear that they’re in no mood for compromise. Senator-elect Rand Paul told ABC News on Sunday that compromise with the Democrats — or even with his own party’s leadership — was out of the question.

“We’re coming,” Paul said. “We’re — we’re proud. We’re strong. We’re loud. And we’re going to co-opt. And, in fact, I think we’re already shaping the debate.”

House Democratic leaders, however, aren’t about to roll over and play dead. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who will lose the speakership to GOP House leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), declared Friday that she was in the running for House minority leader. In a letter to fellow House Democrats, Pelosi vowed to fight to preserve her party’s legislative achievements — especially the health-care reform law that Republicans have vowed to repeal.

“Our work is far from finished,” Pelosi wrote. “As a result of Tuesday’s election, the role of Democrats in the 112th Congress will change, but our commitment to serving the American people will not. We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back.”

Pelosi has reason to strike a defiant tone: Her congressional district is one of the bluest in the country. While the outgoing speaker has only a 30 percent job-approval rating in national polls, she won a record 13th term in her overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco district with 80 percent of the vote, breaking the record set by her predecessor, the late Phillip Burton.

She also has the numbers on her side: Although several moderate-to-conservative House Democrats are likely to oppose Pelosi, they’re now badly outnumbered by the liberals, thanks to the loss of nearly half of the House Democrats’ conservative caucus in the election.

For his part, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell sharply defended his comments that his party’s top priority in the next two years will be to ensure that President Obama becomes a one-term president. “Some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” McConnell said Thursday in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

“But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things,” McConnell asserted.

IT ISN’T ALL BAD: WORST OF TEA PARTY EXTREMISTS — AND A LIBERAL FIREBRAND — GOT THE BOOT

However, to your credit, voters, you did say “no” to several hard-line right-wing Tea Party-backed extremists who proved to be an embarrassment to the GOP and incurred the wrath of Latino voters angry at their anti-immigrant, anti-Latino campaigns, including Sharron Angle of Nevada and Tom Tancredo of Colorado.

And, also to your credit, you resoundingly rejected the totally off-the-wall campaigns of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Carl Paladino of New York — both of whom clearly demonstrated that they were unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate and the New York governor’s office, respectively.

In Florida, you threw out a left-wing firebrand, Democrat Alan Grayson, voting in a Republican with, ironically, one of the most famous names in American history: Daniel Webster.

And in Kentucky, you said “no” to Democrat Jack Conway after Conway made the foolish mistake of mocking his GOP opponent Rand Paul’s religious faith — or lack thereof — in his now-infamous “Aqua Buddha” TV campaign ad, which angered conservative Christians in a deeply conservative state.

Frankly, this column is surprised that Conway’s ad didn’t also anger practitioners of Buddhism — the world’s fourth largest religion, with 360 million adherents worldwide — who could rightly accuse Conway of mocking their faith.

SENATE FACES TOTAL PARALYSIS AS BOTH PARTIES CAN NOW FILIBUSTER BILLS

But with the Democrats now more firmly under liberal control with the ouster of so many “Blue Dogs” — and under tremendous pressure from liberal activists and public-sector labor unions not to give in on health-care reform — a knock-down, drag-out ideological war is almost certain.

Republicans have vowed to repeal the health-care reform law passed by Congress without a single GOP vote. But the repeal effort is almost certain to fail, with Obama wielding his veto stamp and Republicans fully aware they lack the two-thirds majority required to override.

A repeal bill is unlikely reach the president’s desk anyway; with the Senate still under Democratic control, Senate Republicans lack the 60 votes required to choke off an expected Democratic filibuster. Indeed, with neither party able to choke off each other’s filibusters, the Senate could fall into total paralysis.

GRIDLOCK COULD PROVE DANGEROUS AS DEBT-CEILING VOTE NEARS

This could prove extremely dangerous next year, when Congress will be required by law to vote on raising the national debt ceiling. Essentially the nation’s credit-card limit, the debt ceiling, now set $14.3 trillion, could max out as early as next spring.

The national debt is now estimated at $13.7 trillion. If Congress fails to raise the limit, the government would legally default on its debts, destroying the nation’s credit rating and causing a panic on Wall Street that would make the Meltdown of 2008 seem tame by comparison.

Already, there is a bitter debate among Republicans over what to do about the debt ceiling, with some newly-elected Tea Party hard-liners vowing to vote no. GOP national chairman Michael Steele declared that his party won’t approve any debt-limit increase. “We are not going to compromise on raising more debt. We are not going to compromise on raising the debt ceiling,” Steele said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on the Sunday before the election.

But soon-to-be Speaker Boehner warned that failure to raise the debt limit is not a viable option. “Increasing the debt limit allows our government to meet its obligations,” Boehner told ABC News, “and I think that there are multiple options for how you deal with it. But for our [GOP] team, I think we’re going to have to demonstrate that we’ve got to have reductions in spending. The government’s spending more than what we bring in. We can’t afford it.”

PARTY POLARIZATION SEEPING DOWN TO STATE LEVEL

Under these circumstances, do you really expect the hard-line ideologues of the right and the left who now control both major parties to find common ground and compromise — especially since they’re already sounding white-hot belligerent rhetoric? If you do, we have a bridge in Brooklyn that we want to sell you.

The really bad news is that the ideological polarization in Congress is seeping down to the state level, as state after state is seeing one party or the other take total control of both the legislatures and the governor’s offices — essentially bifurcating the nation into red states and blue states and leaving moderate voters out in the cold.

While much of the country was swept in a tsunami of Republican red, The Northeast and the West Coast, particularly California, have become fortresses of Democratic blue. Democrats swept all but one of the nine statewide offices in California for the first time in the state’s history and tightened their control of both houses of the legislature — as well as both U.S. Senate seats and the majority of the state’s congressional delegation.

In Vermont, Democrat Peter Shumlin, a champion of a state-run “single-payer” health-care system, was elected governor and Democrats retained their overwhelming majorities in both houses of the Vermont legislature. Connecticut will have a Democrat as governor for the first time in 20 years as Dan Malloy narrowly defeated Republican Tom Foley.

For all the bemoaning and bewailing by voters about the partisan polarization of the two major parties, the results of the 2010 elections clearly show that, to the contrary, America is a more deeply polarized nation now than at any time since the Civil War — and perhaps in all of American history.

Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview broadcast on “NBC Nightly News” in September, said that the country has become “astonishingly” polarized to a degree that he’s never seen before. “President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen,” Carter said, “even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the War between the States,” as most Southerners, including Carter, refer to the Civil War.

For those who complain bitterly about the poisoned partisan atmosphere in the nation’s capital, it may already be too late to do anything to bring a halt to it.
Which is why the next two years could prove to be America’s worst political nightmare.

Sincerely,
Skeeter Sanders
Editor & Publisher
The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2010, Skeeter sanders. all rights reserved.

An Open Letter to Conservative Americans: This Is the Same Bunch of Republicans Who Caused Our Economic Meltdown in the First Place and Have Embarked on a Disgusting Campaign of Stoking Irrational Fears of People of Color, Muslims, Gays and Anyone Else Who Isn’t a So-Called ‘Red-Blooded Patriotic American” — If You Vote to Put These Paranoiacs Back in Charge of Congress, You Will Send Our Country Plunging Down the Toilet

ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO VOTE FOR A BUNCH OF REPUBLICAN FEARMONGERERS AND HYPOCRITES? — Today is Election Day and the time has come once and for all to end the denial: If you plan to vote to put the Republicans back in charge of Congress, then you’re going to condemn America to at least two years of total political chaos, for the Republican Party of 2010 is farther to the right — and loaded with more out-and-out fearmongering demagogues and paranoiacs — than at any other time in its 146-year history, according to an “open letter to conservative Americans” by guest commentator Russell King. (Cartoon by David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, November 2, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: Today is Election Day in the United States. As millions of voters across America cast their ballots in this midterm congressional and state election, polls show many races for Congress too close to call, with party control of both the House and Senate hanging in the balance. In a commentary first posted on his own blog, Russ’ Filtered News, in March, Russell King, a Wisconsin-based blogger and lobbyist for progressive causes, wrote a lengthy “Open Letter to Conservative Americans” that lays bare the case against voting for the Republicans in today’s election. The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is republishing King’s article — with his permission, even though it is not copyrighted — in a last-ditch effort to persuade voters to not make a grave mistake with their ballot. – Skeeter Sanders, Editor & Publisher

By RUSSELL KING

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice and fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/communo-fascism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the Republican Party — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.

Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:

A LONG RECORD OF GOP HYPOCRISIES

You cannot flip out — and threaten impeachment — when Democrats use a preliminary procedure (deem and pass) that your party used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You cannot vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more!

You cannot fight against your own ideas just because a Democratic president endorses your proposal.

You cannot call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own idea.

Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Guantanamo? You cannot have it both ways.

REPUBLICANS KINGS OF CORPORATE WELFARE EVEN AS THEY BLAST RUNAWAY SPENDING

You cannot carry on about the evils of government spending, when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts!

You cannot refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Democrats because they didn’t meet with you.

You cannot rail against the president using TelePrompTers while using TelePrompTers yourselves. Repeatedly.

You cannot rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

You cannot be for immigration reform, then be against it. You cannot enjoy socialized medicine, while condemning it.

A DOUBLE STANDARD IN BLACK AND WHITE

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same. George W. Bush did it. Gerald Ford did it.

You cannot complain that the president hasn’t closed Guantanamo, yet campaign to keep it open.

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when white presidents did the same. Bush did it. Richard Nixon did it. Even Dwight Eisenhower did it. You didn’t utter a peep when Bushheld hands — and even kissed on the mouth — leaders of countries that are not on “kissing terms” with the U.S.

You cannot complain that the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “Underwear Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Obama when Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Bush — and you remained silent (And, no, Newt Gingrich, Reid is not a U.S. citizen either, so there’s no difference.).

You cannot attack a Democratic president for not publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about his Republican predecessor, who waited six days to comment on an eerily similar incident (and even then, he didn’t issue a condemnation). The Obama administration did so the day of the event.

You cannot throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Guantanamo prisoners who later helped plan the failed Christmas Day underwear bombing, when, in fact, only one former Guantanamo detainee — released by Bush — helped to plan the failed attack.

You cannot condemn those blaming the Republican former president for an attempted terror attack on his watch — then blame the Democratic incumbent president for an attempted terror attack on his.

You cannot mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of President Bush for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of President Obama and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

HEALTH-CARE HYPOCRISY

You cannot cry that the health care bill is too long, and then cry that it’s too short.

You cannot support theindividual mandate for health insurance, and then call it unconstitutional when Democrats adopt it and then campaign against your own idea.

You cannot demand television coverage, and then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.

You cannot praise criminal trials in U.S. courts for terror suspects under a Republican president, and then call them “treasonous” under a Democratic president.

You cannot propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Democrats put your own ideas in a bill.

You cannot be both pro-choice and anti-choice on abortion.

You cannot condemn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes, when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You cannot condemn criticism of the president when U.S. troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president yourselves when U.S. troops are in harm’s way — the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

You cannot be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

You cannot block debate in the Senate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of “open debate.”

A REPUBLICAN DOUBLE STANDARD EVEN IN EXPRESSIONS OF HOMOPHOBIA

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010.

This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN (Are you reading this, Carl Paladino?).

Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution (Are you reading this, Jeff Gannon?)

This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too (Are you reading this, Ted Haggard?).

When you chair the House Committee on Missing and Exploited Children, you cannot send sexually explicit e-mails to 16-year-old boys — which is illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well (Are you reading this, Mark Foley?).

HAVE YOU REALLY FORGOTTEN GOP’S SORRY RECORD WHILE IN POWER?

You cannot criticize Democrats for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Democrats Democrats have done more in one year than you did in 16.

You cannot decry “name-calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile at that (Remember Joe Wilson?).

You cannot spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare.

You cannot praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.

You cannot vote for extending unemployment benefits under a Republican president, then vote against extending them under a Democratic president. Either you support unemployment benefits or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

You cannot call the reconciliation process in the Senate “out of bounds” when you used it repeatedly.

You cannot spend taxpayer money on ads against spending taxpayer money.

You cannot condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Democratic bill, when the mandates were a Republican idea.

You cannot demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, then ignore them when they don’t.

You cannot whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s first black national chairman admits you’ve been doing it for decades.

You cannot portray yourself as fighting terroristswhen you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You cannot complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional; others are made proudly.

This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You cannot question the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.

SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES — AND MORAL HYPOCRITES

You cannot preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you:

# take nude hot-tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money);

# cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world;

# cheat with a staffer’s wife and pay them off with a new job;

# pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife or just enjoying an old-fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife;

# try to have gay sex in a public toilet;

# authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information;

# seek, look at or have sex with children;

# replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother.

FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, YOU’VE GOT TO KICK THESE OFF-THE-WALL LOSERS TO THE CURB

You really need to disassociate with those among you who:

# assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money;”

# say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” taking cues from Lenin. Lenin died nearly 40 years before the president was born;

# ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Democrat says it;

# liken political opponents to murderers, rapists and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head” or call then “un-American;”

# say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy;”

# equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with “terrorism;”

# smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;

# say that the president wants to “annihilate us;”

# compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot, the9/11 terrorist attacks, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators (And, by the way, it’s also not Armageddon, either);

# equate our disease-fighting stem-cell research program with “what the Nazis did;”

# call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, an “an unconscionable abuse of power,” a “violation of the presidential oath” or “the end of representative government”. . .

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bold-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grown-up agenda based on your values and your vision for America.

We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms.

We need you.

Sincerely,
Russell King

# # #

(This article, although not copyrighted, is republished with the permission of the author and was edited for length. The full-length version of this article can be found on King’s Web site Russ’ Filtered News.)

# # #

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

With Latest Polls Showing a Tightening of Scores of Midterm Contests, Republicans Have Failed to Take Into Account the Growing Numbers of Non-White, Heavily Democratic-Leaning Voters While the GOP Is Becoming What the Democrats Were as Recently as the 1950s: An Almost Lily-White, Southern-Dominated Party

REPUBLICANS TURNING INTO THE NEW DIXIECRATS — Regardless of how Republicans fare in next week’s midterm elections, the party faces a crisis of long-term survival as the nation’s population becomes more and more racially and ethnically diverse. By continuing with the infamous “Southern Strategy” hatched by Richard Nixon’s campaign more than 40 years ago that alienated blacks and is now driving away Latinos, the GOP is turning into an almost all-white, Southern-dominated party, even as the white proportion of the U.S. population is shrinking, according to the Census Bureau. Unless the GOP expands its appeal to non-white voters, it will inevitably fall into permanent minority status by mid-century, if not sooner. (Image courtesy Photobucket.com)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 26, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

For months now, the Republicans and just about every media pundit across the country have been virtually crowing about how the GOP will take over both houses of Congress in next week’s midterm elections.

Historically, with the notable exception of the post-9/11 election of 2002 — when the dominant issue was national security and the “war on terror” — the party in control of the White House has suffered losses in every midterm congressional election since 1934.

But according to the latest round of pre-election polls, many key races have tightened — some rather dramatically — and are now rated too close to call.

It now appears that the Democrats are within striking distance of at least blunting the GOP advance — if not keeping control of Congress — which could make for a very long election night next Tuesday.

Powering the Democrats’ late surge is a massive get-out-the-vote effort by the party aimed at African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-white voters who are comprising an ever-growing segment of the electorate, as well as by exploiting a growing disgust among moderate voters with an unprecedented multi-million-dollar blitz of highly negative — and in many cases, outright inflammatory — TV and radio ads by “independent” groups on behalf of GOP candidates.

President Obama himself has embarked on a cross-country blitz of his own, becoming the “campaigner-in-chief” exhorting the millions of young people who voted for him in 2008 to vote to preserve the Democrats’ congressional majority in 2010.

The contests for the House and Senate aren’t the only races where there is a last-minute Democratic surge. Several contests for governor are showing the Democratic candidate coming from behind to either surge into the lead or turn the race into a neck-and-neck contest — and in one state in particular (New York), the Democrat is on track to bury his GOP opponent in an overwhelming landslide.

ADS URGING LATINOS IN NEVADA NOT TO VOTE TRACED TO GOP OPERATIVE

Adding to the late Democratic surge is a backlash by Latinos against what they regard as an anti-Latino assault by Republicans and their conservative allies.

In Nevada, a series of Spanish-language TV and radio ads urging Latinos not to vote in protest of Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform has been met with open derision by Latino community leaders. The ads were paid for by an organization that calls itself “Latinos for Reform” — which was quickly exposed as being led by Robert de Posada, a conservative pundit and a former Republican Party official.

“Don’t vote this November,” an announcer on the ad says in Spanish. “This is the only way to send them a clear message. You can no longer take us for granted.”

De Posada fiercely defended the ads, insisting that “We’re saying to people, you need to look at the record of the candidates and understand that in a civic engagement situation, you have the options of not necessarily voting. You should not be told you have no option but to support the lesser of two evils.”

SPANISH-LANGUAGE TV NETWORKS REJECT THE SPOTS

Both of the nation’s two major Spanish-language TV networks, Univision and Telemundo, have refused to broadcast the ads, with Univision saying they run directly counter to the network’s own non-partisan public-service campaign encouraging Latinos to participate in the electoral process. The network also yanked the radio spot from its Las Vegas station within hours after it went on the air.

“Univision will not be running any spots from Latinos for Reform related to voting,” a network spokesman said in a statement. “It is also important to clarify that while Mr. Robert de Posada has on occasion provided political commentary on Univision, representing one of various points of views, he is not in any way affiliated with Univision. Univision prides itself on promoting civic engagement and our extensive national campaigns encourage Hispanics to vote.”

Within hours of Univision’s decision, its rival, NBC-owned Telemundo, told the Associated Press that it, too, would not broadcast the spots. De Posada’s group had planned to run the ads in Nevada, Florida, California, Texas and Colorado from now through election eve, but was forced to scuttle the plan after Univision and Telemundo gave the ads the thumbs-down.

De Posada told ABC News that although he has halted purchasing airtime for the ads, he intended to push forward with the spots on the Internet, including YouTube. He also plans to file a complaint against Univision and Telemundo with the Federal Election Commission.

Under current law, TV and radio stations cannot edit or refuse political ads paid for by candidates’ campaigns, but they are free to accept or reject ads by outside groups.

‘DON’T VOTE’ ADS ‘OVERT ATTEMPT AT SUPPRESSING LATINO VOTE,’ SAYS LULAC

The ads were roundly condemned by Latino community leaders and even by some Republican candidates. In a statement issued last Tuesday, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, branded the ads “cynical” and an overt attempt at suppressing Latino voter turnout.

“This is overt voter suppression, and it’s ugly,” said LULAC President Margaret Moran. “It is precisely because of this latest voter suppression tactic that Latino voters should vote.”

President Obama also slammed the ads during a roundtable with reporters from Spanish-language media. “I think it is terrible,” he said. “It is a cynical political ploy to try to drive Latino votes to benefit a Republican candidate in Nevada who would never vote for immigration reform.”

The campaign of Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle condemned de Posada’s ads — but only after her Democratic opponent, incumbent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, blasted her for not denouncing the ads sooner.

“No ad should ever discourage voters from voting or expressing their opinions at the ballot box,” Angle’s spokesman Jarrod Agen said in a statement to ABC News.

The Angle campaign issued its statement a day after Reid, speaking on the campus of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, ripped into Angle’s initial silence on the matter. “Can you think of anything less patriotic and more un-American?” Reid asked a group of students after casting an early ballot. “It’s the American thing to do — to vote. How can she [Angle] possibly not speak out against what they’ve done?”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF GOP STILL FOLLOWING NIXON’S ‘SOUTHERN STRATEGY’

The episode is but the latest in what this column asserted back in April is the GOP’s wholesale writing off of the Latino vote — a continuation of the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” that alienated African-Americans more than 40 years ago — driving both voter blocs firmly into the Democratic column.

But the GOP is writing off non-white voters at its own peril, for the strategy is also transforming the Republican Party into what the Democratic Party used to be before the 1960s: An overwhelmingly white and deeply conservative party whose voting base is most heavily concentrated in the Deep South and Rocky Mountain West.

There are some who argue that today’s GOP is turning into “the New Dixiecrats,” a reference to the conservative Southern whites who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948 in protest of the party adopting a civil rights plank at its national convention and later formed the segregationist States’ Rights Party, better known as the “Dixiecrats,” who ran with Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate.

FLYING UNDER THE RADAR: THE BROWNING OF AMERICA’S POPULATION

Amid all the heat of the 2010 election campaign, one fundamental factor that is likely to have a determining effect on next week’s vote — and every election thereafter — has been flying under the media radar: The changing demographic face of the American electorate.

In his inaugural address, President Obama referred to America’s changing face when he said, “Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans . . . What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

Even before Obama’s election, the shift was already becoming evident: America is becoming browner, as non-white Americans become a greater and greater proportion of the U.S. population and white Americans conversely contract toward losing their majority status by mid-century, according to the Census Bureau.

Already, the white proportion of the U.S. population has fallen from 75.7 percent in 1990 to 71.6 percent in 2000, the Census Bureau reports. With the results of the 2010 Census still to be made public, the bureau estimates that the white proportion has fallen further to 65.8 percent today — barely a two-thirds majority — and projects it will shrink to barely 60 percent 15 years from now.

NON-WHITES ALREADY EXCEED 40 PERCENT OF NATION’S UNDER-18 YOUTH POPULATION

Already, non-whites comprise more than 40 percent of the youth population of America under 18 years of age, according demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution. And they comprise an outright majority of the youth population in eight states: Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas.

In Hawaii, the president’s native state, non-whites are an outright majority of the state’s total population, with Japanese-Americans alone comprising 52 percent of the state’s residents. Frey projects that non-whites will become the majority of the youth population nationwide within the next decade.

“[Latinos] accounted for 50 percent of national population growth since 2000, compared with 14 percent for Asians, 13 percent for blacks, and 17 percent for whites,” Frey reports, adding that while the white U.S. population is projected to fall into minority status by 2042, its preschool population is likely to fall to that status by the end of this decade.

Meanwhile, the U.S. population as a whole is getting older, as the 78-million-strong Baby Boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — are inexorably approaching senior citizenship. But the older the age group, the whiter is gets; an overwhelming 80 percent of senior citizens are white, Frey reports.

These twin developments will inevitably create a serious cultural — and political — gap between the older and younger generations that Frey predicts will be much wider than the cultural war between the Baby Boomers and their World War II “GI Generation” parents in the 1960s.

GOP IS BLANCHING WHILE AMERICA TURNS MORE COLORFUL

Nowhere is the widening gap between mostly-white older America and multiracial younger America more evident than in the political sphere. The 2008 election revealed just how stark the divide is, with young voters — especially non-white and racially-mixed young people — strongly preferring Obama, and older voters — especially white seniors — breaking solidly for Republican John McCain.

Throughout the 2008 campaign, rallies for the Democratic candidates drew substantially multiracial crowds, while turnout at rallies for GOP candidates were almost exclusively white, including a town hall-style meeting for McCain and several rallies for then-GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in which several attendees openly expressed racist or anti-Muslim viewpoints about Obama.

‘BLANCHING’ OF GOP ACCELERATES WITH RISE OF TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

That pattern has since accelerated with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which has proven to be a major force to be reckoned with inside the GOP. Demographic surveys found that the Tea Party movement is virtually devoid of participation in it by non-whites.

Likewise have been this year’s Republican primaries. In state after state, the results found that turnout was overwhelmingly — in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters, as African-Americans continued to shun the GOP in droves, and Latino turnout nosedived to record-low levels — the latter the clearest sign yet of a backlash by Latino voters — even conservative Cuban-Americans in South Florida — against Republicans over the volatile issue of immigration.

As non-white Americans become a greater and greater proportion of the nation’s population and electorate, the GOP is facing a stark choice: Either expand its electoral appeal to non-white voters, or else find itself relegated permanently to minority-party status — or even electoral oblivion, replaced by a new party — within the next 20 years.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

New Poll Shows Cuomo Skyrocketing to an Commanding 35-Point Lead and Cruising Toward Biggest Landslide Victory in N.Y. Gubernatorial Race Since His Father’s 1986 Re-Election; Only 11 Percent of Voters Have Favorable View of Paladino and Solid 59 Percent Majority Say Tea Party-Backed Republican is Unfit to Serve as Governor

NEW YORKERS TO PALADINO: “WE’LL TAKE YOU OUT, BUDDY!” — Those now-infamous words shouted by Carl Paladino (left), the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for New York governor, in a heated clash with a reporter on September 30 might become his political epitaph, as Paladino’s poll numbers have plunged dramatically since his Tony Soprano impersonation and a series of anti-gay remarks so inflammatory that his openly gay nephew publicly rebuked him and the rest of the Paladino family forced the candidate to issue an apology. His Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo (right) has skyrocketed to a commanding 35-point lead, according to a New York Times poll published Monday, just a week before next Tuesday’s election, with a solid 59 percent majority of likely voters saying Paladino is unfit to be governor. (Photos: Getty Images)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 19, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

PLATTSBURGH, New York — With just two weeks to go before the Empire State’s voters cast their ballots, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Cuomo has rocketed to a commanding 35-point lead over his Tea Party-backed Republican rival, Carl Paladino, according to a new poll released Monday — with an astonishingly large majority of respondents saying that Paladino’s “angry,” “bigoted” and “obnoxious” personality makes him unfit to be governor.

The poll by The New York Times showed the state attorney general holding a better than two-to-one lead over Paladino, 59 percent to 24 percent, a gain of four points since a Quinnipiac College poll released on October 8. Meanwhile, support for the multimillionaire Buffalo businessman plunged 10 points from the 34 percent Paladino garnered in the Quinnipiac survey.

If Cuomo’s huge lead remains intact by election day, he would be on track to score the greatest landslide victory in a New York gubernatorial election in the state’s history — topping the 33-point landslide of his father, Mario Cuomo, who buried his GOP opponent, Andrew O’Rourke, 64 percent to 32 percent, to win a second term in 1986.

Paladino’s standing with voters — already damaged by his highly-publicized confrontation on September 30 with a reporter in which Paladino, acting like a Mafia boss, threatened, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” — plunged into a free fall after he made a series a highly inflammatory anti-gay remarks, including a speech on October 9 at a conservative Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn in which the candidate said that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.”

SURVEY FINDS A SOLID MAJORITY JUDGING PALADINO UNFIT TO BE GOVERNOR

The Times poll, conducted Sunday through Friday of last week, found an astonishing 59 percent of respondents saying that Paladino does not have the temperament that makes him fit to serve as the state’s chief executive, and that 55 percent said the millionaire Buffalo real estate developer has neither the political nor governmental experience required for the office. More tellingly, 43 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Paladino, while only 11 percent viewed him favorably.

Poll respondents, when asked what came to mind the most about Paladino when his name was mentioned, answered with a variety of highly negative descriptions of him, including “angry” — by his own admission, Paladino said he was “mad as hell” — “bigoted” for his anti-gay diatribes and “obnoxious” for his confrontation with New York Post reporter Fred Dicker.

TEA PARTY-BACKED REPUBLICAN RAN NEARLY EVEN WITH CUOMO IN SEPTEMBER

In a September 22 Quinnipiac College poll, Cuomo led Paladino by only six points, 49 percent to 43 percent, powered at the time by solid support among Republicans (83 percent) and independents (49 percent). A separate poll by Survey USA released the same day showed Cuomo leading 49 percent to 40 percent.

But on September 30, Paladino sank the already-heated campaign to succeed outgoing Governor David Paterson into the gutter when he accused Cuomo, a divorced father of three, of cheating on his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, without furnishing a shred of proof to back him up.

Later that same day, Paladino came unglued — in full view of TV news cameras.

When challenged by Dicker, the Post’s state news editor and Albany bureau chief, to provide evidence to back up his accusations against Cuomo, Paladino accused the reporter of working for the Cuomo campaign and, acting as though he were Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey organized-crime boss in the acclaimed television series, “The Sopranos,” warned Dicker, “I’ll take you out, buddy!”

The equally tough-talking Dicker, the dean of the Albany press corps, demanded to know how Paladino would “take him out” — widely interpreted as a threat of bodily harm. Paladino then replied, “Watch!” before he was hustled away by his aides while an indignant Dicker shot back, “Are you threatening me?”.

In fact, it was Kennedy who was cheating on Cuomo, not the other way around. Kennedy was having an affair with Bruce Colley, a New York restaurateur and socialite. Colley confirmed the affair in 2003 just days after Cuomo and Kennedy announced they were ending their marriage. Paladino ultimately retracted his claim against Cuomo, admitting that he had no proof.

(Paladino’s clash with Dicker ultimately cost him the editorial support of the arch-conservative Post, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The tabloid on Monday endorsed Cuomo, branding Paladino “undisciplined, unfocused and untrustworthy — that is, fundamentally unqualified for the office he seeks.”)

PALADINO IGNITES FIRESTORM WITH ANTI-GAY TIRADES

Support for Paladino already was declining when, on October 8, the Republican went on the attack against gays, telling an ultraconservative Hasidic Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.”

Paladino made clear his opposition to same-gender marriage, telling congregants at another Brooklyn synagogue, “I oppose the homosexual agenda, whether they call it marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Marriage is between a man and a woman!”

The timing of Paladino’s anti-gay remarks, amidst a rash of suicides of young people — including a New Jersey college student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge — who were bullied for being gay or perceived as gay and just two days after the vicious beating and sodomizing of two teen-agers by a Bronx street gang in a rampage of anti-gay violence, ignited a firestorm of outrage from across the political spectrum.

Undaunted, Paladino took aim at New York’s annual Gay Pride Parade two days later, when, appearing on the “Imus in the Morning” radio show, said, “I don’t think I’d be proud to take my child to a gay pride parade where you have these men in Speedos and otherwise naked grinding against each other up in the back of a truck. I think it’s disgusting.”

Less than an hour later, on NBC’s “Today” show, Paladino repeated his remarks, saying that “children should not be exposed to that [homosexuality] at a young age. They don’t understand this. It’s a very difficult thing. And exposing them to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade — and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one — but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other. It’s just a terrible thing. Why would you bring your children to that?”

HOMOPHOBIC RANTS INFURIATE PALADINO’S OPENLY GAY NEPHEW

The candidate’s homophobic rants drew a sharp public rebuke from his nephew, Jeff Hannon, who is openly gay. In an interview with the Post, the 23-year-old Hannon, who worked for the Paladino campaign until his uncle’s anti-gay tirades, said that he personally was “very offended” by his uncle’s remarks and abruptly quit the campaign. He hasn’t shown up at Paladino headquarters in Buffalo for more than a week.

The newspaper quoted a Paladino campaign staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying Wednesday that other campaign workers were concerned for Hannon’s whereabouts, particularly in the wake of the recent suicides. “Everybody was talking about it today. They are worried about him,” said the staffer. “They think he’s upset.”

So, apparently, was the rest of the Paladino family as well. Numerous press reports said that the family demanded that the candidate issue a public apology — which he did in a written statement last Tuesday. “I sincerely apologize for any comment that may have offended the gay and lesbian community or their family members,” the Paladono statement said. “Any reference to branding an entire community based on a small representation of them is wrong.”

Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, confirmed that the candidate’s family has pressured him to apologize, out of concern for Hannon. “Carl felt the sting of this directly through his family and thought through his response with many inputs,” said Caputo.

The candidate’s apology, however, cost him the support of the far-right ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Yehuda Levin, whose anti-gay views are only slightly to the left of the gay-hating extremist Kansas cult leader, Fred Phelps.

“Mazel tov,” Levin told reporters after Paladino’s mea culpa, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We’ll have a coming-out party. But when he came to me three days ago, he didn’t know that? I find this to be condescending.”

Paladino might have a problem with the Gay Pride parade, but he apparently doesn’t have a problem with lesbians, according to the Web site WNYMedia.net, which published on Wednesday another set of X-rated e-mails purportedly sent by Paladino to his friends. The images include a photo of two lesbians in flagrante delicto, with a one-word comment: “Awesome.”

PALADINO WAS LANDLORD TO TWO BUFFALO-AREA GAY BARS

The Tea Party-backed GOP nominee’s anti-gay outbursts were made even more bizarre when the New York Daily News disclosed Wednesday that Paladino was the landlord to two Buffalo-area gay bars from 2004 to 2006 — one of which was co-owned and managed by his son, William Paladino.

A review of liquor license records by the newspaper found that the younger Paladino co-owned and operated Cobalt, a nightclub in downtown Buffalo housed in one of many buildings owned by his father from May 2004 through July 2006. A 2005 review of Cobalt in the Buffalo News described the nightspot as “Way Gay,” noting, “The queens, the techno, the cocktails, the kind of gyration normally confined to Manhattan was in full flaming force at Cobalt.”

But in late 2005, the younger Paladino abruptly renamed the club Tantra and converted it to a straight nightclub — retaining all the straight bartenders and firing all the gay staff, according to a gay former bartender, Kevin Van Wagner, who told the Daily News, “The way that they did it was really horrible. They told us we were no longer going to be a gay bar, that we [gay bartenders] were no longer going to have jobs.”

William Paladino is now a top executive of his father’s Buffalo-based Ellicott Development Company, a property management, leasing and real estate development firm.

The other gay nightspot, Buddies II, which is still operating, was housed in another Paladino-owned building in 2005 and 2006, according to liquor license records. The bar it described itself as a “bar where anyone and everyone is welcome [and] prejudices are left at the door.”

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Amid Rash of Suicides of Youths Who Suffered Anti-Gay Bullying, N.Y. Gang of ‘Ultra-Macho’ Thugs Go on Homophobic Rampage in Bronx Borough, Brutally Beating and Sodomizing Gay Teenager With Baseball Bat and Forcing His Partner to Burn Him With Cigarettes; While Officials Condemn Attacks, ‘Boss’ Paladino Condemns Gays

SIX FACES OF MACHISMO-FUELED ANTI-GAY HATE — Six members of a Bronx street gang were taken into custody by New York City police Friday after they allegedly went on a rampage of hate-filled violence against gays, in which a 17-year-old gay youth was brutally beaten and sodomized with a baseball bat and his teen-aged partner was forced to burn him with cigarettes. The gang then allegedly attacked and sodomized with a plunger handle another teenager whom they perceived to be gay. The rampage came amid a rash of deaths of other teens who killed themselves after enduring relentless anti-gay harassment. (Photos: Vic Nicastro/New York Daily News)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 12, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

NEW YORK — Monday, October 11, was not only Columbus Day in the United States and Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

It was also National Coming Out Day, an internationally observed civil awareness day for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people (LGBTs) to let their families, friends and colleagues know who they are — commonly referred to as “coming out of the closet” — and to talk about what it means to be LGBT in a heterosexual-dominated world.

The day is observed by members of the LGBT communities and their supporters on October 11 every year (Today, October 12, in the United Kingdom). But this year, National Coming Out Day has been overshadowed by the recent deaths of at least six teenagers who were driven to suicide after they were relentlessly bullied for being gay or for being perceived as gay.

The suicides include the highly publicized death of Tyler Clementi, 18, a first-year Rutgers University student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after learning that a sexual encounter he had with another male student in his dorm room was secretly broadcast live on the Internet.

Adding to the pall is news of an “ultra-macho” New York City street gang, driven by an extreme hatred of gays, going on a homophobic rampage in the Bronx borough on Friday, brutally beating and sodomizing a 17-year-old gay youth with a baseball bat and forcing his teen-aged partner to burn him with cigarettes.

The gang attacked and sodomized a second teenager with the handle of a toilet plunger, then beat up and robbed an adult male before they were apprehended by police. The fourth victim turned out to be the older brother of one of the youths who were attacked, police said.

GANG MEMBERS REPORTEDLY LAUGHED, BRAGGED ABOUT ATTACKS WHILE IN JAIL

The suspects showed no remorse while they were locked up over the weekend, the New York Daily News reported Monday. In fact, the suspects considered it amusing that they were being branded “degenerate monsters” by the New York media, according to a cellmate at the Bronx House of Detention.

“They thought it was funny — one of them was laughing,” the cellmate told the Daily News.

The witness, who was identified only by his first name, Danny, was in jail on an unrelated charge of marijuana possession. “He was saying ‘I’ll take five years.’ They were all joking around like it was funny,” he said. “They had no fear.”

The rampage was swiftly condemned by city officials. “These suspects employed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, odds which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters. “This was not part of an initiation. This was a reaction to the fact that [the victims] had engaged in homosexual activity.”

“These attacks are appalling and are even more despicable because the victims were clearly targeted in acts of hate simply because they are gay,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said. Mayor Michael Bloomberg branded the rampage “an act of pure evil.”

The rampage occurred less than a week after police arrested two suspects for allegedly pummeling a gay man inside the landmark Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village — the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement — and a third suspect in connection with the beating of three other gay men in Manhattan’s heavily gay Chelsea district.

WHILE OTHER POLITICIANS CONDEMN ATTACKS, ‘BOSS’ PALADINO CONDEMNS GAYS

But as the latest round of homophobic violence was roundly condemned by public officials, one New York politician chose instead to condemn gays.

Tea Party-backed Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino — who made nationwide headlines September 30 with his Tony Soprano-like confrontation with a reporter in which he threatened, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” — went on the attack against gays, telling a Hasidic Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.”

Paladino made clear his opposition to same-gender marriage, telling congregants at another Brooklyn synagogue, “I oppose the homosexual agenda, whether they call it marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Marriage is between a man and a woman!”

In a slam at Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, Paladino added, “Tell your people that I am the religious-values candidate and my opponent is the ultra-liberal, socialist social extremist that he is!”

RUTGERS STUDENT’S SUICIDE RESULT OF ANTI-GAY ‘CYBER-BULLYING?’

The rash of violent anti-gay assaults in New York and elsewhere comes against the backdrop of a disturbing increase in suicides among teenagers who have been the targets of relentless bullying because they were gay or were perceived to be gay.

In the highly publicized New Jersey case of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, two other Rutgers University students, identified as Dharun Ravi — a roommate of Clementi — and Molly Wei, were charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy after allegedly placing a Web camera in Clementi’s room on September 19 and broadcasting Clementi’s sexual encounter live on the Internet without his or his partner’s knowledge, according to a written statement by Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan.

Under New Jersey law, it is a crime to collect or view images depicting nudity or sexual contact involving another individual without that person’s knowledge or consent, and to transmit or distribute such images. If convicted, Ravi and Wei could face up to five years in prison. Authorities are still investigating whether Ravi and Wei can be held accountable for Clementi’s death.

A Twitter page allegedly operated by Ravi — now offline — contains tweets in which Ravi claims credit for broadcasting Clementi’s sexual encounter on the Internet. “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Molly’s room and turned on my Webcam,” Ravi allegedly wrote. “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay!”

OTHER TEEN SUICIDES CAUSED BY ANTI-GAY BULLYING

Clementi’s death is the sixth known suicide of a teenager in recent months as a result of being “outed” or having endured relentless anti-gay harassment or intimidation. Among the other deaths:

# Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old Tehachapi, California boy who hanged himself from a tree in his back yard after years of being bullied. He died in a local hospital September 28 after nine days on life support. Police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself. “Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears,” Police Chief Jeff Kermode said. “They had never expected an outcome such as this.”

# Asher Brown, a 13-year-old Houston eighth-grader who shot himself in the head September 23 after enduring what his mother and stepfather say was constant harassment from four other students at his middle school. Asher, his family said, was “bullied to death” — accused of being gay, some of his tormentors performed mock gay sex acts on him in his physical education class.

# Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old Greensburg, Indiana high school student, who hanged himself September 9 in a barn at his grandmother’s home. Friends say that he had been tormented for years. “He was threatened to get beat up every day,” a close friend and classmate of Billy said. “Sometimes in classes, kids would act like they were going to punch him and stuff and push him. Some people at school called him names,” the classmate said, saying most of those names were anti-gay epithets.

# Zac Harrington, a 19-year-old Norman, Oklahoma man who killed himself October 4 after attending a City Council meeting in which he endured anti-gay invectives from opponents of a resolution recognizing October as LGBT History Month. The resolution passed by a 7 to 1 vote — but not before Harrington heard opponents voice claims that gays would try to “infiltrate” the school system and flatly reject the notion that gay and lesbian couples had a civil and constitutional right to marry, while others invoked religious approbations against homosexuality.

CELEBRITIES SPEAK OUT, LAUNCH ANTI-BULLYING CAMPAIGN

The rash in teen suicides has prompted a slew of celebrities — including Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil McGraw, Kathy Griffin, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and others — to speak out and launch a campaign to stop the bullying and further youth suicides.

Cooper, appearing on DeGeneres’ talk show “Ellen,” lashed out at the use of anti-gay slurs and epithets — taking direct aim at actor Vince Vaughn’s upcoming movie, “The Dilemma,” in which Vaughn’s character proclaims, “Ladies and gentleman, electric cars are gay.”

“I just find those words, those terms — we’ve got to do something to make those words unacceptable, ’cause those words are hurting kids,” Cooper said. “Someone else I talked to recently said that the words people use and the things people say about other kids online, it enters into their internal dialogue. . . I think we need to really focus on what language we’re using and how we’re treating these kids.”

For her part, Griffin — who for the last several years has appeared with Cooper on CNN’s New Year’s Eve special — is donating all proceeds of her December 16 comedy show in Los Angeles to The Trevor Project, an organization focused on suicide prevention among LGBT youth.

For some celebrities, including DeGeneres, gossip blogger Perez Hilton, “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy and advice columnist Dan Savage, the campaign is deeply personal: They have first-hand experience with having been bullied during their own youth for being gay.

Having once been a closeted gay teen in an all-boys high school, Hilton told ABC News that he’s “wholeheartedly committed” to the cause. “What’s really powerful is to admit and acknowledge that we’ve all been bullies,” he said. “I’ve been a bully, I can still be a bully on my Website. The point is to not be a bully to the point where someone is going to want to kill themselves — threatening violence, calling them homophobic names repeatedly.”

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

In New York, Carl Paladino Acts Like a Mob Boss by Threatening to ‘Take Out’ Reporter; In California, Meg Whitman Is Exposed as Hypocrite on Volatile Issue of Employing Illegal Immigrants; In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell Is Caught Lying on Her Job Resumes

GOP CANDIDATE FOR N.Y. GOVERNOR THE TONY SOPRANO OF POLITICS? — From the day he won the his party’s nomination, Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino (left) made good on his promise that the campaign to become New York’s next governor — already nasty — would get a lot nastier: Not only has he accused his Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo, of infidelity, but in an extraordinary confrontation captured by TV cameras, the Tea Party-backed GOP nominee acted like the fictional New Jersey Mob boss Tony Soprano (right) when he made a threat against Fred Dicker, state news editor of the New York Post, telling Dicker, “I’ll take you out, buddy!” When the equally tough-talking Dicker asked him how he’d “take me out,” Paladino replied, “Watch!” (Photos courtesy Buffalo News and HBO)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 5, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

With just a month to go before the November 2 midterm elections, the campaign has been jolted by a series of controversies involving Republican candidates, in what appears to be a repeat of the scandal-plagued GOP campaign of 2006.

In quick succession over the past week, Carl Paladino, the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for governor of New York, made headlines for hurling lurid accusations against his Democratic rival, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, accusing him of infidelity after Paladino acknowledged his own extramarital affair — and threatening to “take out” a reporter who challenged him to provide evidence.

On the other side of the country, Meg Whitman, the GOP nominee for governor of California, suddenly became embroiled in a scandal when her former housekeeper, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, sued Whitman for anti-Latino discrimination and her attorney accused Whitman — who has talked tough on the campaign trail about employers who hire illegal immigrants — of rank hypocrisy.

And in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate running for Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat — already plagued by one controversy after another over her past history as a Christian Right activist — was caught having lied about her education on her job resumes.

PALADINO ACTS LIKE MOB BOSS — IN FULL VIEW OF TV NEWS CAMERAS

Paladino took the campaign for New York governor into the gutter on Wednesday when he accused Cuomo of having “paramours” — only hours after he told a reporter for WNYW-TV, the Fox station in New York City, that the already-nasty race would get a lot nastier. “I don’t mind being nasty, okay?” Paladino told the station.

“Has anybody asked Andrew Cuomo about his paramours?” Paladino asked in an interview with Politico.com, referring to Cuomo’s 13-year marriage to his former wife, Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

“When he was married — or asked him why his wife left him or threw him out of the house? Has anybody ever done that?” Paladino — who admitted having an extramarital affair of his own a decade ago that produced a daughter — demanded.

But, in fact, it was Kennedy who was having an extramarital affair — with Bruce Colley, a New York restaurateur and socialite. Colley confirmed the affair in 2003 just days after Cuomo and Kennedy announced they were ending their marriage.

Challenged by a New York Post reporter to provide evidence to back up his accusations against Cuomo, Paladino — in full view of television news cameras — accused the reporter of working for the Cuomo campaign and, acting as though he were Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey crime boss in the acclaimed television series, “The Sopranos,” warned the reporter, “I’ll take you out, buddy!”

When the equally tough-talking Fred Dicker, state news editor of the Post and the dean of the Albany press corps, demanded to know how Paladino would “take him out” — widely interpreted as a threat of bodily harm — Paladino replied, “Watch!” before he was hustled away by his aides while an indignant Dicker shot back, “Are you threatening me?”.

Paladino admitted the following day — after his confrontation with Dicker made front-page headlines across the state — that he had no proof of Cuomo’s alleged infidelities, acknowledging that he made the accusation out of frustration with questions about his own affair.

CUOMO STRIKES BACK AT PALADINO — HARD

For his part, Cuomo said Friday that Paladino’s claims that he was unfaithful to Kennedy was “hurtful” and “destructive” to his three children. “Now he says it was a baseless accusation,” an angry Cuomo told reporters during a campaign stop inthe New York City borough of Staten Island.

The Cuomo campaign struck back hard with a blistering TV ad that accused Paladino, a Buffalo-area real estate developer, of having “given almost a half-million dollars to politicians and who gets insider deals from Albany.”

The ad claimed that Paladino “got a 1.4 million-dollar tax break to create jobs, but his official filings show that only one job was created.” and blasted the Tea Party-backed Republican as “a welfare king who got rich by milking New York taxpayers.”

PATERSON, PALADINO CAMP IN ANGRY WAR OF WORDS

Meanwhile, Governor David Paterson denounced Paladino as “unfit for public service” at a business breakfast, citing a series of pornographic and racially offensive e-mails Paladino sent to friends before launching his gubernatorial campaign six months ago. One of those e-mails included an image of President Obama dressed as a pimp and First Lady Michelle Obama dressed as a prostitute.

Paterson, who shared the dais with his predecessors, George Pataki and Elliot Spitzer, said he understood the anger over taxes and government excess that is powering the Tea Party movement, but that such anger should not feed the “shrill and . . . pedestrian antics of individuals who are unqualified to hold office at all, let alone be governor or United States senator.”

Paladino’s campaign spokesman Michael Caputo blasted back at Paterson, calling the governor, who is legally blind, “addled” — a derogatory term for a person with attention deficit disorder, or ADD, which Paterson does not have — and pointing out that Paterson was investigated for taking free tickets to the World Series and for getting involved in a domestic-violence case against a top aide who subsequently resigned.

“Nearly all New Yorkers are counting down the days until he stops embarrassing this state,” Caputo said.

WHITMAN ROCKED BY SCANDAL OVER HIRING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT HOUSEKEEPER

In California, the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who spent months on the campaign trail talking tough against employers who hire illegal immigrants, was rocked to its core Wednesday by Whitman’s bombshell admission that the billionaire former eBay CEO and her doctor-husband had themselves employed an illegal immigrant as their housekeeper.

Whitman insisted that she didn’t know that her nanny and housekeeper of nine years, Nicky Diaz Santillan, was an illegal immigrant until the housekeeper acknowledged her undocumented status last year, to which Whitman said she responded by firing her.

But Diaz, in a emotional press conference in Los Angeles with her attorney Gloria Allred, told reporters that Whitman was dismissive when Diaz asked for her assistance in obtaining legal immigrant status and told her upon her dismissal, “From now on, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.”

Whitman “treated me like a piece of garbage,” a tearful Diaz said. “She treated me as if I were not a human being.”

Allred said that the Social Security Administration had alerted Whitman and her husband, Dr. Griffith Harsh, back in 2003with a latter notifying them that Diaz’ Social Security number did not match the number the agency had in its database — which, the attorney said, should have served as a “red flag” about Diaz’ legal status.

Whitman hotly denied ever receiving such notification, and a campaign spokesman blamed Diaz. “Nicky handled all of the mail into and out of the house,” Whitman spokesman Andrea Jones Rivera said.

But almost immediately after Whitman’s denial, Allred produced a copy of the Social Security Administration’s letter, dated April 2003, in which the agency informed Whitman and Harsh that, “We can’t put these earnings on the employee’s Social Security record until the name and Social Security number you reported agree with our records.”

The copy of the letter included a handwritten note addressed to Diaz that read, “Nicky please check this. Thanks.” Allred said the handwriting was that of Harsh, which the attorney said proved that, at the very least, Harsh knew that there was a problem with Diaz’ status with the Social Security Administration. Harsh acknowledged that the handwriting on the letter was likely his, but said that he has no memory of receiving the letter.

The revelation about Diaz came only a day after Whitman and her Democratic opponent, former Governor and current state Attorney General Jerry Brown, clashed over immigration in their first televised debate, with Whitman saying she “wouldn’t support a path to legalization” for illegal immigrants and that “we have to secure the borders” and called for the imposition of tougher sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

The fallout from the Whitman scandal was swift. A conservative political action committee issued a statement Thursday demanding the arrest of both Whitman and Diaz for “numerous immigration and employment law violations.”

William Gheen, president of the right-wing Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (ALIPAC) demanded that Diaz “be charged and deported” and that Whitman “face the existing penalties under current U.S. law as well.”

IN DELAWARE, O’DONNELL CAUGHT HAVING LIED ABOUT HER EDUCATION ON JOB RESUMES

Ever since she scored a stunning upset victory in the September 14 Delaware Republican Senate primary over former Representative Mike Castle, Tea Party-backed nominee Christine O’Donnell has endured one embarrassing revelation after another, primarily video clips of controversial remarks on social issues stemming from her past role as an arch-conservative social activist with ties to the Religious Right.

O’Donnell, who first gained national exposure in the mid-1980s as a spokeswoman for conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Concerned Women for America, had been dogged by her statements on masturbation, the use of condoms, the fight against AIDS, the role of women in the military, and even witchcraft.

But now, O’Donnell has come under fire for apparently having made false statements about her education on her job resumes.

Oxford University in Britain and Claremont Graduate University in California both denied O’Donnell was a student in their institutions, contrary to statements on her resumes that she was a student at the two schools.

Rod Leveque, a spokesman for GCU, issued a statement to TalkingPointsMemo.com declaring flatly that “Claremont Graduate University has no student or education record for an individual named Christine O’Donnell.”

In fact, O’Donnell received a Lincoln Fellowship in 2002 from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank which is not related in any way to Claremont Graduate University.

The university’s denial came just days after it was revealed that O’Donnell falsely listed Oxford University in the educational record portion of her profile page on the professional social network, LinkedIn.com. The page has since been taken down.

Actually, O’Donnell was a student of the Phoenix Institute, a conservative Christian educational organization which rented space on the campus of one of Britain’s two most prestigious universities — home of the world-famous Rhodes Scholarships.

The new controversies come on the heels of earlier questions about O’Donnell’s tenure at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative think tank which O’Donnell sued for gender-based discrimination. O’Donnell’s $6.9 million lawsuit claimed that ISI “violated its promise to allow Miss ODonnell time to take Master’s degree classes at Princeton.”

But O’Donnell’s campaign manager, Matt Moran, later acknowledged in a statement to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine that O’Donnell did not have her Bachelor’s degree at the time she filed her lawsuit and only audited one undergraduate class at Princeton.

NEW CONTROVERSIES AN EERIE ECHO OF SCANDAL-PLAGUED 2006 GOP CAMPAIGN

The sudden eruption of controversies involving Republican candidates in this year’s midterm elections is eerily reminiscent of the scandal-plagued — and ultimately ill-fated — GOP campaign in 2006 to keep control of Congress.

Remember Mark Foley? The Florida Republican congressman resigned in disgrace after revelations that he had sent sexually suggestive e-mails to teen-aged male Capitol Hill pages.

Foley later claimed that he was gay, but sources familiar with Foley told The ‘Skeeter Bites Report that they could not recall Foley ever having had relationships with adult gay men and that, to the contrary, strong evidence emerged elsewhere that the disgraced former congressman had a pedophile, rather than homosexual, orientation.

Then there was Representative Don Sherwood (R-Pennsylvania), who in 2004 allegedly assaulted Cynthia Ore, a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. No criminal charges were ever filed against Sherwood, but Ore later filed a $5.5 million civil lawsuit against Sherwood, accusing him of repeatedly assaulting her during their relationship. On November 8, 2005, Sherwood and Ore ended the lawsuit by reaching a settlement, the terms of which were not released.

The relationship became public only when Veronica Hannevig, who ran against Sherwood on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, distributed copies of the police report to several newspapers and television stations. As in the Foley case, the House Republican leadership knew about Sherwood’s indiscretions, but took no disciplinary action against him. Sherwood subsequently lost his bid for re-election.

The Republican Hall of Shame class of 2006 also includes:

# Then-Representative Jim Gibbons, the 2006 Republican nominee for governor of Nevada, who was dragged into a scandal in which there were allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward a woman on the night of October 13, 2006 — a Friday — and assaulted her outside a Las Vegas restaurant when she refused. Despite what came to be known as the “Friday the 13th scandal,” Gibbons won the election, only to see his tenure as governor plagued by continued controversies. He lost his bid for re-election in the June 9 GOP primary.

# Representative Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who was brought down by the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal. Ney was forced to resign from Congress after he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the scandal. Ney was identified in the guilty pleas of Abramoff, former House Minority Whip Tom DeLay’s deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy, former DeLay press secretary Michael Scanlon and former Ney chief of staff Neil Volz for receiving lavish gifts in exchange for political favors. Ney now hosts a radio talk show in West Virginia.

# The chief of staff of Representative Rodney Alexander (R-Louisiana), whose former page was one of the first to receive inappropriate e-mails from Foley — who was sued by a former member of his staff for sexual harassment. Royal Alexander (no relation) was accused of engaging in “a course of misconduct” toward Elizabeth Scott, who worked as a scheduler for Representative Alexander form 2005 to 2006. including “inappropriate sex-based comments, ogling and touching.” The congressman’s office maintained Scott made her claims in retaliation for having been demoted by Royal Alexander for incompetence. Within months following Royal Alexander’s unsuccessful run for Louisiana Attorney General in 2007, the case was dismissed.

NEW SCANDALS LIKELY TO MAKE GOP’S GOAL OF RETAKING CONGRESS MUCH HARDER

With the new scandals roiling an already volatile campaign, the GOP’s sky-high hopes of retaking Congress have suddenly been thrown into doubt. And the fact that these new controversies have erupted right at the beginning of the all-important final month of the campaign — perhaps the 2010 edition of the long-dreaded “October Surprise” — could not come at a worse time for the Grand Old Party.

But with the electorate still very much in a throw-the-bums-out mood over the continued sour economy, it remains to be seen whether this latest turn of events will translate into a third consecutive anti-Republican backlash at the polls.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.