Monday, October 9, 2006

You Leave the Country and The GOP goes NUTS!

Wow, you leave the country for a week and so much happens! (My husband and I finally took our long delayed honeymoon and we really couldn't get much information about the US on the only English speaking channel we received.) We did have access to the internet for a few days so I did get to read about and post briefly about the RI marriage decision and Republican Mark Foley's inappropriate emails.

  • Who knew that Lt. Gov. Sherry Healey, oops, I mean Kerry Healey, would not be able to stand on her own merits (does he have any?) and would go so negative so quickly. Before we left she was running ads that said she was tough on crime yet it seems that gun violence and overall crime has increased since she's been in office.
  • It appears that the Republican leadership knew about Mark Foley's inappropriate emails a LONG time ago yet they did nothing to protect the underage youth he was sending emails to.
  • The mother of openly gay general manager of the MBTA Daniel A. Grabauskas, Patricia Grabauskas-Caruso, used her son's name in a fund raising letter for gubernatorial nominee Sherry Healey's running mate Reed Hillman. The Florida resident wrote that her son was a good friend of Hillman and strongly supports him. Of course the Healey campaign says that the letter was "an honest mistake".
  • Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in an interview on Fox News, suggested that current House GOP leaders reacted cautiously to initial reports of Foley's e-mails for fear of being perceived as gay-bashing. Funny, they had no problem verbally bashing gay families when they were trying to put discrimination into the US Constitution! It's obvious that they are now using the "gay bashing" defense because they were caught in a cover up. The issue is about failing to protect underage children from predators.

And some good news:

Wendy Becker and Mary Norton, after 18 years and two children, were finally wed on October 8th in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

BTW, the news about the U.S. which dominated the airwaves in Europe was not about Mark Foley's emails but rather about the Republican coverup of the emails and, of course, the Iraq war. It was a sad reminder that more soldiers have been killed in Iraq than the number the people who died on September 11th, especially since Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11th tragedy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd always heard that Reed Hillman was a raging homophobe. Interesting that Dan's mother supports him.

Have you seen this week's Bay Windows?

In 1989, after negotiations with the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, a group focused on addressing anti-gay hate crimes and making sure that the relationship between the LGBT community and law enforcement is fair, the Massachusetts State Police agreed to end the use of undercover cops in public sex busts. Don Gorton, chair of the Anti-Violence Project, which has been largely inactive since 1999, said in 1989 William McCabe, public safety commissioner and head of the state police, offered assurances that undercover officers would only be used to arrest men having sex at rest areas if other methods to stop them failed, and a Sept. 1989 Boston Globe story confirms this agreement. But in 1997, under Reed Hillman’s leadership as Superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police, troopers reversed course and sent a plainclothes officer into a rest stop in Weston to entrap men looking for sex.