Repugnican slayer Allred is all right

Associated Press photo

Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred, right, appears with Sharon Bialek at a press conference today in New York City. Bialek, a former employee of the National Restaurant Association, claims that in 1997 then-association head Herman Cain, who now wants to be president of the United States of America, blatantly, physically sexually harassed her and linked her acquiescence to his sexual advances to her employment.

For a Repugnican campaign, a press conference by California attorney Gloria Allred is worse than a visit by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I like Gloria Allred.

Sure, she might be a sleazy lawyer, but the woman gets results.

In September 2010, shortly before California’s 2010 gubernatorial election, Allred held a press conference with a tearful Nicky Diaz Santillan, the former undocumented housekeeper and nanny of billionaire Repugnican gubernatorial candidate Nutmeg Whitman. Megalomaniac Whitman dumped Santillan after nine years of service because Whitman thought that having an undocumented housekeeper would harm her gubernatorial campaign, Allred alleged.

Despite that fact that Megalomaniac spent more than $140 million of her own funds in the gubernatorial race, breaking all previous records for self-funded political campaigns in U.S. history, Nutmeg lost the November 2010 gubernatorial election to her Democratic challenger Jerry Brown by 13 percentage points.

Sure, Nutmeg had other things against her: being a Repugnican in a blue state; spending millions and millions to the point that it was apparent to California’s voters that she was trying to buy the governorship (which was offensive to those of us California voters who have been victims of the post-BushCheneyCorp economy); using her deep, deep pockets to overexpose herself to the voters, who grew tired of All Meg All the Time; and, let’s face it, she’s not only physically unattractive (which shouldn’t matter in a political race, but so often does), but she comes across as wooden and cold.

But Allred was one of the nails in Nutmeg’s political coffin. Allred helped to complete the picture of Nutmeg as another Cruella de Vil, and not only the state’s Latino voters had a problem with Nutmeg’s reported cruel, politically motivated dumping of her long-time housekeeper and nanny, but the state’s anti-brown-skinned-people wingnuts (yes, we have plenty of those here in California) had a problem with the fact that Nutmeg had employed an “illegal” in the first place.

Now, Gloria Allred has polished off Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Herman Cain.

To date we have not one, not two, not three, but four women who have reported that they were sexually harassed by Herman Cain.

At a press conference with Allred in New York City today, Sharon Bialek, a registered Repugnican of the Chicago area, reported that in 1997 she was sexually harassed by Cain, who, she claims, put his hand under her skirt and went for her genitalia. She reported that when she protested, Cain retorted, “You want a job, right?”

We now have a face to put to the allegations of Cain’s serial sexual harassment. It’s not just an abstraction anymore.

Cain cannot politically survive this.

If Bialek were lying, Cain could sue her for defamation. But she probably isn’t, so I don’t expect him to.

Now, as was the case with Nutmeg’s numerous other negatives, Gropegate isn’t Herman Cain’s only problem. His lack of political experience — he’s never held a single elected political office — and his buffoonery (including his abject ignorance of foreign affairs and his penchant for spontaneously breaking out in song), while not a problem for the Repugnican Tea Party fucktards, would have killed him in the general election anyway, had he ever made it that far.

But it’s nice to see the Repugnican Tea Party’s favorite go down in flames early anyway. Rick Perry comes across not only as another George W. Bush, but as a publicly drunken George W. Bush. The “tea party” dipshits are stuck with Mitt Romney, from what I can tell, and I know, I know, that Mike Huckabee flagellates himself frequently for having jumped out of the race so early.

Cain’s destruction — his very apparent self-destruction, let me add — is a victory not only for us wingnut slayers, but for feminists. Sexual. Harassment. Is. Not. OK. And it’s not OK to shame and blame the victims of sexual harassment.

And this phenomenon in which the accused wrongdoers want us to focus on who leaked the wrongdoing instead of focusing upon the wrongdoing itself (which we have seen in the WikiLeaks case as well) — yeah, that fucking shit has to fucking stop, too.

If wrongdoing has taken place, it doesn’t fucking matter who leaked it.

Those who bring wrongdoing to light deserve medals, not scorn or retaliation or punishment. Let’s reserve that for the wrongdoers. 

In the meantime, it’s time for Herman “Black Walnut” Cain to sing his swan song.

Why Maidgate hurts Nutmeg

Blogger’s note: My home computer has been out for more than a week now (I’m in the process of getting it repaired), so my blogging has been light as of late.

Associated Press photo

With Maidgate, billionaire Repugnican Nutmeg Whitman (pictured above with her husband on Thursday at a news conference over Maidgate) most likely has lost the California gubernatorial contest, thank Goddess.

This past week’s big political news in California has been the revelation that billionaire Repugnican gubernatorial candidate Megalomaniac Whitman employed an undocumented Mexican housekeeper for nine years.

This has come as no big shock to me, knowing what I know of Nutmeg Whitman, but this has rocked California.

There have been allegations and excuses aplenty, with Nutmeg, without any proof, ultimately blaming the Jerry Brown campaign, of course* (because Jerry Brown forced Nutmeg to keep an undocumented worker on board for almost a decade, and because Jerry Brown forced the housekeeper to appear at a press conference with her attorney, Gloria Allred, outing herself as being in the nation illegally, you see).

My money is on the probable fact that Megalomaniac long knew, or always knew, of her housekeeper’s citizenship status but that she didn’t care, since she was getting cheap slave labor, and that Megalomaniac fired the housekeeper only once she (Megalo) knew that she was going to run for governor. And my best guess is that billionaire bully Nutmeg had thought that she had her former housekeeper so intimidated that her housekeeper would keep her mouth shut. (I mean, billions of dollars can buy you an awful lot, can’t they?)

There is no argument as to whether or not Megalomaniac Whitman employed a non-citizen as her housekeeper for almost a decade — this is established fact — and the argument now is whether or not Nutmeg knew of her housekeeper’s citizenship status.

But, whether Nutmeg knew of her indentured servant’s citizenship status or not, I can’t see how Maidgate can help Team Nutmeg.

First of all, only a handful of us economically depressed Californians can afford to hire maids or servants, so the fact that Nutmeg is served by maids only underscores the fact that indeed, Nutmeg is not one of us.

Another pundit correctly pointed out that it isn’t flattering to Nutmeg that, from the nag’s own mouth, she would have someone in her close employ for almost a decade but know so little about her. (But, of course, Nutmeg is probably just lying that she didn’t know.)

I watched MSNBC’s pundit Andrea Mitchell and Politico’s pundit Andrew Barr basically assert, from the ivory towers of the East Coast, that Maidgate probably won’t hurt Megalomaniac, but, having lived in the great state of California for 12 years now and knowing something of its politics, I have to advise Mitchell and Barr not to presume to know jack shit about my state from the other side of the continent.

Minimally, Maidgate has thrown Team Nutmeg way off course with just a month until election day on November 2.

Jerry Brown is fairly well known among Californians, except perhaps primarily among the younger ones who aren’t up on their state’s political history, but Nutmeg always has faced a rather uphill battle to get herself known in the state (indeed, she has spent more of her own money than any other candidate for any elected office in U.S. history to get herself known in the state), and offering to take a lie-detector test over Maidgate in the last month of her campaign is not where Team Nutmeg wants to be right now, I assure you.

Team Nutmeg also has needed the Latino vote, and images of Nutmeg’s former housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, crying at a Wednesday news conference called by her lawyer — 

Associated Press photos

— and alleging that Nutmeg and her husband treated her like dirt (which is credible, given the fact that we know that Nutmeg paid off an eBay employee $200 grand for having physically assaulted her) is not the way to get the Latino vote.

I don’t expect Maidgate to cost Nutmeg the already-solid support of her fellow Richie Riches and the white supremacist wingnuts (a.k.a. “tea partiers”). Nutmeg’s fellow billionaires and millionaires see no problem in having maids and servants or in mistreating them, and Nutmeg’s white supremacist followers don’t give a rat’s ass about brown-skinned Latinos.

But billionaires and millionaires and “tea party” dipshits are a minority in California and they aren’t enough to push Nutmeg to victory.

Nutmeg has needed the crucial “swing voters,” the politically retarded dipshits in the middle whose votes can be bought by millions of dollars worth of television commercials — indeed, Nutmeg has been working for months and has been spending tens of millions of dollars to get the crucial votes of these dipshits — and with Maidgate, methinks, she has lost this critical voting bloc.

With California’s gubernatorial election only a month away, it’s pretty safe to call the election for Democrat Jerry Brown.

Buh-bye, Nutmeg.

Thanks for playing.

Too bad that you pissed that more than $120 million down the drain.

P.S. Nutmeg Whitman of course is not the first rich Californian Repugnican politician to have illegally employed non-citizens while blasting non-citizens for political gain. The Los Angeles Times notes:

California too has revisited similar situations time and again. In 1994, the state fought its way through a debate over Proposition 187, the measure that would have denied most taxpayer-financed government services, including schools, to illegal immigrants.

That year, a Senate race between incumbent Dianne Feinstein and Republican challenger Mike Huffington [ex-husband of Arianna Huffington who since has come out of the closet as a gay man] exploded when he was found to have knowingly employed an undocumented nanny. The matter went nuclear because Huffington had argued that he would be tougher than Feinstein on illegal immigrants.

A year later, while preparing to run for president, then-Gov. Pete Wilson was stung by reports that he too had once employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. [Repugnican] Wilson, now the campaign chairman for Whitman, had been the chief proponent of Proposition 187….  

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*Brown’s response to Nutmeg’s blaming him for Maidgate was: “Don’t run for governor if you can’t stand up on your own two feet. You have blamed her [Nicky Diaz Santillan], blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions. But you don’t take [any] accountability [for yourself].”

Tim Tebow nativity story false?

Associated Press photo

CBS will show football star Tim Tebow’s anti-choice ad paid for by the radical-right group Focus on the Family during the Super Bowl, but reportedly has turned down an ad for a gay men’s dating service. Meanwhile, the circumstances of Tebow’s nativity have been called into question. But the most important question of all still remains: When do we get to see him nekkid???

Shit, with all of the controversy surrounding the impending Tim “I’m Sure Glad That My Mama Didn’t Abort Me!” Tebow anti-choice Super Bowl commercial coming up, Focus on the Family could have saved its $2 million-something for the ad, since we all know the story by now.

But is the story true?

According to Wikipedia,

Tebow was born on August 14, 1987, in Manila in the Philippines to Bob and Pam Tebow, who were serving as Christian missionaries at the time.

While pregnant, Pam suffered a life-threatening infection with a pathogenic ameba. Because of the drugs used to rouse her from a coma and to treat her [amebic] dysentery, the fetus experienced a severe placental abruption. Doctors expected a stillbirth and recommended an abortion to protect her life[, but] she carried Timothy to term and both [of them] survived.

That’s a story to warm a wingnut’s cold, cold heart, but apparently the doctors were trying to prevent Pam Tebow’s death. I don’t think that they were hell bent on snuffing out her unborn child.

However, an interesting twist to the Touching Tebow Birth Story is that, according to an article in AlterNet:

In a series of new interviews, the first of which was given to RadarOnline, high-profile attorney Gloria Allred argues that Pam Tebow’s heartwarming story omits a rather significant detail that renders the whole thing suspicious: namely, the fact that abortion was illegal in the Philippines in 1987.

Indeed, abortion has been illegal in the Philippines since the 1930s, even in cases of rape or incest or if the mother’s health is in danger.

According to Radar:

Allred says she believes it an impossible scenario to believe that Philippine doctors would [have] ever suggested abortion as a viable option for Tebow in the first place.

And when you learn that physicians and midwives who perform abortions in the Philippines face six years in prison, and may have their licenses suspended or revoked, and that women who receive abortions — no matter the reason — may be punished with imprisonment for two to six years, it’s easy to see why.

Stay tuned. Hopefully we will learn soon whether the Tebow Nativity Fable is apocryphal or not.

Hell, I’m surprised that Pam Tebow doesn’t just claim that Little Timmy, God’s Gift to Football If Not to Mankind, was an immaculate conception. You know, she was visited by an angel wearing a golden football helmet or something… 

After all, Wikipedia also notes:

All of the Tebow children were home-schooled by [Pam Tebow], who worked to instill the family’s Christian beliefs along the way. In 1996, legislation was passed in Florida allowing home-schooled students to compete in local high school sporting events.

The rest, of course, is history; now all of that home-schooling will pay off as Tiny Tim delivers a misogynist, anti-choice message to the world.

But seriously, that Tim Tebow was home-schooled — wow.

No wonder he wears scriptural references painted on his face like a Jesus-freak drag queen.

I have at least a little bit of sympathy for him now that I didn’t have just hours ago. Given his indoctrinating parents, it appears as though he didn’t have much of a choice except to become a Bible-thumper.