Dear Sir:

I'm writing to urge you to consider blocking in committee the nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN.

In the late summer of 1994, I worked as the subcontracted leader of a US AID project in Kyrgyzstan....

After months of incompetence, poor contract performance, inadequate in-country funding, and a general lack of interest or support in our work from the prime contractor, I was forced to make US AID officials aware of the prime contractor's poor performance....

Within hours of sending a letter to US AID officials outlining my concerns, I met John Bolton, whom the prime contractor hired as legal counsel to represent them to US AID....

Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel -- throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman. For nearly two weeks, while I awaited fresh direction from my company and from US AID, John Bolton hounded me in such an appalling way that I eventually retreated to my hotel room and stayed there. Mr. Bolton, of course, then routinely visited me there to pound on the door and shout threats.

When US AID asked me to return to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in advance of assuming leadership of a project in Kazakstan, I returned to my project to find that John Bolton had proceeded me by two days. Why? To meet with every other AID team leader as well as US foreign-service officials in Bishkek, claiming that I was under investigation for misuse of funds and likely was facing jail time. As US AID can confirm, nothing was further from the truth.

He indicated to key employees of or contractors to State that, based on his discussions with investigatory officials, I was headed for federal prison and, if they refused to cooperate with either him or the prime contractor's replacement team leader, they, too, would find themselves the subjects of federal investigation. As a further aside, he made unconscionable comments about my weight, my wardrobe and, with a couple of team leaders, my sexuality, hinting that I was a lesbian (for the record, I'm not).

When I resurfaced in Kyrgyzstan, I learned that he had done such a convincing job of smearing me that it took me weeks -- with the direct intervention of US AID officials -- to limit the damage.

Dear Microsoft,

You messed with the wrong faggots.

You thought you were avoiding a religious right boycott by suddenly going anti-gay. And you may have thought "hell, the evangelicals boycott us, the gays boycott us - we've got to choose one, and the evangelicals are in power, so let's screw the gays."

But here's something you didn't count on. You messed with the wrong faggots.

We have no intent of launching a boycott. Boycotts are hard to enforce, especially when dealing with a monopoly. And in any case, we're smarter than that. We're the country's top lobbyists, and grassroots activists, and lawyers, and politicos, and bloggers working in both Washingtons (state and DC).

When we fuck back, we don't launch boycotts. When we fuck back, we go for the jugular.

Changing the subject, we understand congratulations is in order. You're planning a 2.2 million square foot expansion of the Microsoft campus in Redmond over the next ten to twenty years. The expansion, we hear, would allow you to hire 10,000 to 20,000 new employees.

Well bully for you. You must be quite excited about that.

We also hear that you're going to need a lot of help - a LOT of help - from the state legislature and the Redmond city council to actually make that expansion work, for highway and road improvements and the like, and that not everybody is real happy about it.

Well, wouldn't it be funny if some really smart faggots decided to use their political expertise to kill any possibility of you getting the legislation and city council approval you need to make that expansion happen? And wouldn't it be even funnier if those same faggots went to your competitors and asked them to finance the entire campaign to kill your expansion?

It'd be pretty hard to hire those extra employees without your expansion, wouldn't it? I'm not saying anyone is going to do that to you. I'm just saying it would be really funny.

Best of luck to you with the legislative session over the next 24 hours.

Yours truly,

One of the faggots you just screwed

Microsoft has been honored for its pioneering work on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community with the annual Corporate Vision Award of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.

A children's charity established by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has been underwritten by several of the nation's largest companies and their executives, including companies that routinely lobby lawmakers on issues before Congress, according to a review of charity records released by the companies and other documents.

AT&T;, the Corrections Corporation of America, Exxon Mobil, Limited Brands and the Southern Company, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates, the Microsoft founder and his wife, and Michael Dell of Dell computers.

Inflation and interest rates are rising, stock values have plunged, a tank of gas induces sticker shock, and for nearly a year, wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living.

Yet in Washington, the political class has been consumed with the death of a brain-damaged woman in Florida, the ethics of the House majority leader, and the fate of the Senate filibuster.

Yet, in Traunstein, some of the town's older residents feel that questions about the Pope's early years remain unanswered. Herta Kaiser, an 83-year-old pensioner recalled that several people in the town hid Jews from the Nazis and helped them to escape to neutral Switzerland. "Traunstein was not all Nazi, it was also a Catholic stronghold," she said.

There is no evidence that the Ratzinger family felt inclined to help the town's few remaining Jews, or the smattering of anti-Nazi resistance fighters who dared to oppose the regime.

Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau concentration camp for being a conscientious objector, recalled: "It was possible to resist and those people set an example for others." She added: "The Ratzingers were young and made different choices."

In 1937, another Traunstein family hid a local anti-Nazi resistance fighter, named Hans Braxenthaler. He had been tortured in Dachau for his opposition to the regime. Frieda Meyer, 82, one of the Ratzinger family's neighbours at the time, said: "When Braxenthaler was betrayed and the Nazis came for him, he shot himself rather than give himself up."

And here's info I haven't read before about Ratzinger's mentor:

Ratzinger's election will also raise questions about the dubious role played by the Catholic Church during the Nazi era. The extent to which leading Catholics felt obliged to reach compromises with the regime is outlined by the stance taken by Ratzinger's mentor, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, one of the Pope's most important early influences.

Documented evidence shows that the cardinal visited Hitler's mountain retreat during the 1930s and was entertained to lunch by the F�hrer in person. During their meeting, Von Faulhaber is on record as telling Hitler that the Church saw him as an "authority chosen by God, to whom we owe respect".

Some mentor. As fallible human beings, I'm sure we can all empathize with the desire to not be harmed. Heck, this is how Naziism and the Holocaust flourished: the price of resisting seemed too high for too many people. But without being flippant or too judgmental, it's hardly crazy to expect a future Pope to do BETTER than most people, to rise above their fears and risk it all for what was so clearly the moral choice. 17 is hardly too young an age for that.

But this doesn't interest me. What DOES interest me is the Pope's attitude towards this painful and indeed shameful past. (It may be understandable, it is certainly defensible, but it is unquestionably a source of pain -- as opposed to the people who bravely resisted and paid the price.) In every quote from his memoir or statements about this time, Pope Benedict XVI explains and defends and rationalizes. I haven't seen any quotes about how this past must pain and sadden him. I'm CERTAIN there must be some at least pro forma statements to that effect. If anyone has an English language version of the memoir or can link to quotes from reputable media where the Pope talks about this defining episode and how it's shaped his worldview, I'd love to see it.

Centrist Andrew Sullivan: "I was trying to explain last night to a non-Catholic just how dumb-struck many reformist Catholics are by the elevation of Ratzinger. And then I found a way to explain. This is the religious equivalent of having had four terms of George W. Bush only to find that his successor as president is Karl Rove. Get it now?"

In a move that angered many of the company's gay employees, the Microsoft Corporation, publicly perceived as the vanguard institution of the new economy, has taken a major political stand in favor of age-old discrimination.

The Stranger has learned that last month the $37-billion Redmond-based software behemoth quietly withdrew its support for House bill 1515, the anti-gay-discrimination bill currently under consideration by the Washington State legislature, after being pressured by the Evangelical Christian pastor of a suburban megachurch.

The pastor, Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, met with a senior Microsoft executive in February and threatened to organize a national boycott of the company's products if it did not change its stance on the legislation, according to gay rights activists and a Microsoft employee who attended a subsequent April 4 meeting where Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, told a group of gay staffers about Hutcherson's threat....

At the April 4 meeting, Smith told members of GLEAM, the gay and lesbian employees group at Microsoft, that the company had switched its official stance to "neutral" on the bill, and took personal responsibility for the decision. He characterized the shift as part of a broader general review of company policy designed to more precisely formulate criteria for determining when Microsoft should involve itself in "social issues," but also disclosed the pressure that had been brought to bear on him by Hutcherson....

That one of the world's best-known corporations, synonymous with cutting-edge workplace innovation, would reverse its stance on such a basic piece of legislation because of threats from one minister seems to be yet another sign of the ongoing reverberations of last November's presidential election, when "moral values" voters were widely - if probably erroneously - perceived to have played the role of kingmaker in ensuring the reelection of President Bush.

"The pastor of a megachurch gets a meeting in two weeks with one of the top executives at one of the world's most powerful corporations. He makes these idle threats and he gets everything he wants," the GLEAM member who reported Smith's comments says. "Microsoft just got taken to the cleaners on this issue."

House Bill 1515 would protect gays and lesbians from discrimination in employment, housing, banking, insurance, and other matters by adding sexual orientation to a state law which already bars discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, marital status, and mental or physical handicap. More than a dozen states currently have similar laws on the books....

The list of high-profile companies that endorsed the bill this year reads like a who's who of the Pacific Northwest corporate world. It includes the Boeing Company, Nike, Coors Brewing, Qwest Communications, Washington Mutual, Hewlett-Packard, Corbis, Battelle Memorial Institute, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., and others. And as late as February 1, Microsoft, which issued a letter in support of the bill last year, appeared poised to do so again....

DeLee Shoemaker, an aide to former Governor Gary Locke who now handles state-level government relations for Microsoft, had issued a letter in support of the bill. "We are going to be providing copies of that letter to the committee," he said. McCurdy spoke too soon. Murray says that beginning on February 7 he began receiving calls from company employees informing him that Hutcherson was pressuring the company to change its position on the bill. Murray eventually contacted Shoemaker. She admitted to him that Microsoft was planning to change its position on the bill. "I told her, 'This is a crisis. It will kill the bill,'" he says. "She said no one will know."....

[A]ccording to Microsoft corporate communications spokesperson Tami Begasse... "Microsoft's position on the bill this year was not the result of "any external factors... In this case there was some apparent confusion surrounding some employees who testified as individual citizens in Olympia in February, and the company felt it was appropriate for the employees to make their roles clear as they were not representing or speaking for the company."

"Microsoft, which issued a letter in support of the bill last year..."

At the April 4 meeting, [Microsoft's general counsel] told members of GLEAM, the gay and lesbian employees group at Microsoft, that the company had switched its official stance to "neutral" on the bill, and took personal responsibility for the decision.

DeLee Shoemaker, an aide to former Governor Gary Locke who now handles state-level government relations for Microsoft, had issued a letter in support of the bill.... She admitted to him that Microsoft was planning to change its position on the bill. "I told her, 'This is a crisis. It will kill the bill,'" he says. "She said no one will know."

Microsoft has been honored for its pioneering work on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community with the annual Corporate Vision Award of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.

Without Voinovich's support, Bolton's nomination faced being bottled up in the committee on a 9-9 tie vote that would not advance it to the full Senate.

They've got a house in rural Texas and a nice home-office setup on Pennsylvania Avenue. But for tax purposes, President Bush and his wife, Laura, claim a Chicago post office box as their "home address."

On the 1040 they signed, which the White House released last week, the listed home address is "Northern Trust Co., P.O. Box 803968, Chicago, IL 60680."

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Tuesday that's because Northern Trust handles the blind trust the couple uses for their holdings since Bush took office.

The state House tentatively approved legislation that would prohibit homosexuals and bisexuals from becoming foster parents.

Legislators voted 81-58 Tuesday to approve the ban in an amendment tacked on to a bill that would revamp the state's Child Protective Services agency. The full bill was tentatively approved 126-16. Final approval was expected Wednesday.

"It is our responsibility to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable children and I don't think we are doing that if we allow a foster parent that is homosexual or bisexual," said Rep. Robert Talton, a Republican, who introduced the amendment.

The bill also would spin off some of Child Protective Services' duties to the private sector, including foster care and case management. Private agencies already manage 75 percent of foster homes in Texas, and the state handles the rest. The bill would turn all of those functions over to private agencies.

"German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.... in the November election, a majority of Catholic voters, who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates, shifted their votes to Republican and eventual winner George W. Bush."

Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive.

There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.

The 4,300-student school recently started requiring staff members and cadets to take a 50-minute religious-tolerance class....

Other critics point to a series of incidents, including:

_The Air Force is investigating a complaint from an atheist cadet who says the school is "systematically biased against any cadet that does not overtly espouse Christianity."

_The official academy newspaper runs a Christmas ad every year praising Jesus and declaring him the only savior. Some 200 academy staff members, including some department heads, signed it. Whittington noted the ad was not published last December.

_The academy commandant, Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, a born-again Christian, said in a statement to cadets in June 2003 that their first responsibility is to their God. He also strongly endorsed National Prayer Day that year. School spokesman Johnny Whitaker said Weida now runs his messages by several other commanders.

_Some officer commission ceremonies were held at off-campus churches. In a letter dated April 6, Weida said the ceremonies would be held on campus from now on.

"[Father Marcial Macie] pushed my hand onto his penis. And I didn't know anything about masturbation," Juan Vaca, who was first abused when he was 11 years old, told ABCNEWS. "And he says, 'You don't know how to do it. Let me show you.' And he gets my penis himself and starts to masturbate me. I was in shock."

Then, four years ago, some of the men tried a last ditch effort, taking the unusual step of filing a lawsuit in the Vatican's secretive court, seeking Macial's excommunication.

Once again they laid out their evidence, but it was another futile effort � an effort the men say was blocked by one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican.

The accusers say Vatican-based Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who heads the Vatican office to safeguard the faith and the morals of the church, quietly made the lawsuit go away and shelved it. There was no investigation and the accusers weren't asked a single question or asked for a statement.

He was appointed by the pope to investigate the entire sex abuse scandal in the church in recent days. But when approached by ABCNEWS in Rome last week with questions of allegations against Maciel, Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped this reporter's hand.

"Come to me when the moment is given," Ratzinger told ABCNEWS, "not yet."

"Cardinal Ratzinger is sheltering Maciel, protecting him," said Berry, who expressed concerns that no response was being given to the allegations against the man charged with sex abuse. "These men knelt and kissed the ring of Cardinal Ratzinger when they filed the case in Rome. And a year-and-a-half later, he takes those accusations and aborts them, just stuffs them."

Nazis (naht-seez, nat-seez)

A German political party of the twentieth century, led by Adolf Hitler. The Nazis controlled Germany from the early 1930s until the end of World War II. The party's full name in English is National Socialist German Workers' party; Nazi is short for its German name. Despite the word socialist in its name, it was a fascist party, requiring from its members supreme devotion to the German government - the Third Reich (see fascism and socialism). The Nazis rose to power by promising the people that Germany, which had been humiliated after World War I, would become powerful again.

The Nazis opposed communism and free intellectual inquiry. Desiring to form a master race that would rule the world, they fought the influence in Germany of peoples not of "pure" descent. Their power was particularly directed at controlling Jews in Germany and in the countries that Germany conquered in war. After depriving Jews of their property and confining them in concentration camps, the Nazis employed the Final Solution of killing them in large numbers; an estimated six million Jews lost their lives (see Holocaust). Also marked for extermination were the mentally and physically handicapped and "enemies of the Reich" such as Slavs, communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, Christians who resisted the government, and defenders of intellectual freedom. The Nazis fought World War II to spread their principles worldwide but were defeated.

"I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offences among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower."

"In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1% of priests are guilty of acts of this type," he said. "The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts.

"Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated, that there is a desire to discredit the Church. It is a logical and well-founded conclusion."

Phil Burress, who helped President George W. Bush win the battleground state of Ohio last November by leading the charge among religious groups to pass a gay- marriage ban, isn't pleased with the president's focus on Social Security.

``How come he's not stumping across America defending marriage?'' said Burress, 63, an evangelical Christian and president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio. ``Marriage is a whole lot more important than Social Security.''....

``We're wising up to the fact that we're very important nine months before an election and we're not very important nine days after that election,'' said Don Wildmon, 67, an ordained minister who is chairman of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi.

There is ``a lot of disappointment'' among those who voted for Bush expecting him to make his primary focus in a second term a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and other social values issues, Wildmon said.

Fewer than a third of CBS respondents said the country was going in the right direction, and 62 percent said it was off on the wrong track -- a much starker contrast than the 42/52 split in February's CBS News/New York Times poll. President Bush's job approval rating inched up one point since March to 44 percent, but his disapproval also climbed to 51 percent from 48 percent.

Seven in 10 said they were uneasy about Bush's approach to Social Security, while a quarter said they were confident. Presidential job approval on individual issues remained relatively consistent with last month's poll, with the exception of his handling of terrorism. That number, which has consistently earned Bush's highest marks, slipped to 53 percent, an 8-point drop since the previous poll.

�It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church�s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

�But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase (No. 10).

8. "What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behavior of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable. What is essential is that the fundamental liberty which characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity be recognized as belonging to the homosexual person as well� (No. 11).

He sends shivers down the spines of liberal Catholics and Catholic thinkers. He's bee been the head of the inquisition in the church, literally. He's called dozens upon hundreds of theologians and priests to the carpet, put a chill through free speech and debate in the church. John Paul's legacy was of spreading democracy in eastern Europe but he quashed it inside the church. Ratzinger was the main instrument for killing free speech in the church. Ratzinger helped quash democracy inside the church, intellectual thought. He believes the church always knows what right, is never wrong.

He's UBER-conservative, he was a bit of a liberal, a moderate, as a young man. But the 1968 student uprisings turned him into an arch uber-conservative, he's like a convert, the worst kind of conservative.

It's as if Karl Rove became president.