Other - Politics & Government - October 2006

2006-10-05 22:26:05 · 4 answers · asked by melissasexy 1

seriously I know its' an old joke but people do change especially
as they grow older.

2006-10-05 22:17:10 · 5 answers · asked by PATRICK D 1

2006-10-05 21:48:25 · 13 answers · asked by kati 1

2006-10-05 20:03:52 · 6 answers · asked by Rena-chan 1

The world has said many of times that Iran is allowed nuclear energy but will only accept it if it another country enriches the uranium for them. If Iran's nuclear ambitions really are for peaceful purposes then why won't they agree to this? Are they hiding something?

When is the world going to realize that talk is cheap, diplomacy is obviously not working here and it's time to enforce sanctions?

2006-10-05 19:42:37 · 8 answers · asked by SGT 3

protest,if ur life is in danger never hesitate to takeup arms,all true indians are with u. is it the right way to fight for our cause?

2006-10-05 19:00:20 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous

2006-10-05 18:20:41 · 28 answers · asked by D 2

when a man is elected president, his wife becomes the first lady, what would a male be?

2006-10-05 17:48:53 · 14 answers · asked by Anonymous

2006-10-05 17:41:30 · 16 answers · asked by Anonymous

With the 48 wars that we are fighting, and the war on drugs, and the war on gay marriage, we cannot afford NASA. Let the EU be the leader in space exploration.

2006-10-05 17:31:58 · 2 answers · asked by cnfrankl 2

I know the usual thing people say is that he wanted King George to be able to read it, but the myth buster people say that's not true, and they're usually right about things... now I don't know what to think. Anybody know the truth?

2006-10-05 16:44:30 · 12 answers · asked by remanneercson 2

2006-10-05 16:32:36 · 7 answers · asked by nikki b 1

Firebrand Larry Kramer says he has the evidence to prove it. Lincoln scholars are holding their fire until they see it. Get ready for the second Civil War.



- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Carol Lloyd


May 3, 1999 | The 28-year-old traveler was tall, with rough hands, a chiseled jaw and unforgettable, deep-set, melancholy eyes. He arrived in town, his worldly possessions in two battered suitcases, and inquired at a general store about buying some bedding. But the price was far beyond his budget. The strikingly handsome 23-year-old merchant took pity on the man and invited him into his own bed, free of charge, which happened to be just upstairs. The traveler inspected the bed and, looking into the merchant's sparkling blue eyes, agreed on the spot. For the next four years the two men shared that bed along with their most private fears and desires.

If this sounds like the opening of a homoerotic dime-store novel whose subsequent scenes feature fiery loins and ecstatic eruptions, hold your panting. The year is 1837, the place Springfield, Ill., and the leading men none other than our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, and his lifelong friend Joshua Speed.

It is a story that historians have told and retold, puzzled over and reinterpreted, dismissed and decorated. Some describe Lincoln's acceptance of Joshua Speed's generous offer as terse and matter-of-fact; others as beaming and emotional. What none of them questions is that Lincoln and Speed's years of living together cemented a friendship unparalleled in its intimacy and tenderness in Lincoln's life. So far, all major historians have stopped short of intimating that Lincoln was ever involved in a romantic affair with a man -- in fact, they explicitly discourage such interpretations.

But Larry Kramer, the 62-year-old gay rights hell-raiser, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter ("Women in Love") and Pulitzer-nominated playwright ("The Normal Heart"), wants to change all that. In February, at a gay and lesbian conference in Madison, Wis., he read a portion of his unfinished book, "The American People" -- which, in the course of describing the history of gays in early America, avers that Lincoln and Speed were not merely bedfellows but lovers.

"There's no question in my mind he was a gay man and a totally gay man," Kramer declares. "It wasn't just a period, but something that went on his whole life."

Like the rumors that Thomas Jefferson had sired the children of his young slave Sally Hemings, questions about Speed and Lincoln's relationship have circulated for years. In "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" (1926), Carl Sandburg wrote that their relationship had "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets," which some have taken as a veiled reference to homosexuality. In 1995, just after Bob Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party, "given that the founder was gay." Novelist Paul Russell, author of "The Gay 100," a ranking of the world's most important gay figures, also investigated the rumors but chose not to include Lincoln, feeling that the case was not strong enough, though he did include questionable figures like Shakespeare and Madonna. In an interview that will appear in a forthcoming anthology called "Sexual Writings by Gore Vidal," Gore Vidal told Kramer some years ago that during the research for the historical novel "Lincoln," Vidal too began to suspect that Lincoln was gay.

Like most of Lincoln's early private life, the story of his friendship with Speed is a murky one -- although not nearly as murky as Lincoln's early liaisons with women. After four years of living in intimate quarters, Speed announced plans to sell the store and return to his home in Kentucky, where his family owned a large plantation. Lincoln, who was notoriously awkward and shy around women, was at the time engaged to a vivacious, if temperamental, society girl named Mary Todd, but as the date of Speed's departure and the marriage approached, Lincoln cracked. He wanted to break the engagement by letter, but at Speed's entreaty, he went to Mary Todd and told her face to face he did not love her. Some argue that Lincoln had fallen in love with another woman. Soon after, Speed departed, leaving Lincoln mired in depression and guilt.

Seven months later Lincoln traveled to Speed's home in Kentucky, where he spent a month being nursed back to health. After that the two men corresponded affectionately for decades, chronicling their most personal internal conflicts -- including their abject fear of marriage, which they ominously refer to in their correspondence (always emphasized) as forebodings. Speed was the first to approach the altar successfully, an ordeal that Lincoln coached him through with tender but not altogether convincing letters of encouragement. It seemed that Speed was on the verge of a premarital meltdown similar to Lincoln's. "If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in anyone present, you are safe, beyond question," Lincoln wrote just after the date of Speed's betrothal, "and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men." Subsequent clandestine letters inquired whether Speed really was "happier or, if you think the term preferable, less miserable." Both men eventually married and had children; they remained close until they had a falling-out in 1855 over the issue of slavery.

2006-10-05 16:29:20 · 6 answers · asked by IM THE GAY GOD ALL FEAR ME 5

There's this speaker, she's a woman and very Republican. She's young(ish) and blonde? What's her name? Anything else you can tell me about her. She's not a politician, just a public speaker.

2006-10-05 16:28:58 · 6 answers · asked by blu moon 2

2006-10-05 16:23:55 · 5 answers · asked by Steve H 1

Freeh was Bill Clinton's FBI director and proved his non-partisan views.

Is she afraid Freeh will investigate the Democrats who sat on this as well as the Republicans who tried to bury it?

2006-10-05 16:19:23 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous

If democrats woke up tomorrow and they were all republicans and all republicans woke up tomorrow and they were all democrats, how would our political system deal with it?

2006-10-05 16:18:53 · 11 answers · asked by jorst 4

I keep seeing some liberals on here bring it up, so I'm wondering how many conservatives on here have read it.
And yes, I have read it. Many times. Actually, it's my favorite book.
Some people on here are trying to say that the Republican party and/or the Bush administration is trying to mirror Ingsoc and the Inner Party. I don't see it, but that's really got nothing to do with the question.
I'm just curious.

2006-10-05 16:11:22 · 10 answers · asked by The_Cricket: Thinking Pink! 7

Why should Canada continue selling MEDICATIONS, LUMBER and OIL (to name a few) to the United States if they're not going to be fair about it? We have a choice here and we can choose not to continue letting them dictate to us, we should be supporting our lumber companies in their civil suite; don't you? We have the resources ... we have the upper hand!!!!!!

2006-10-05 16:04:52 · 16 answers · asked by AJD 3

Is that why he is covering up. Maybe Foley has something on him, as corrupt as the repuglicans are.

2006-10-05 16:00:57 · 10 answers · asked by Anonymous

2006-10-05 15:56:48 · 7 answers · asked by Luke F 3

i need some info for my intro to law class and i need some opinions please help

2006-10-05 15:47:55 · 17 answers · asked by nikki b 1

the feds will do something very bad, like nuke an american city, they will then declare marshall law, fill the concentration camps they have built and haliberton is building RIGHT NOW, and fill them with real americans, declare war on the country in the middle east, they pick. to be the ones that did the dasterdly thing they did themselfs.on there own people. then they will draft you young men and there will be war, death for us all. god bless american may god have mercy on us all.

2006-10-05 15:33:48 · 8 answers · asked by Anonymous

The REpublican has a good idea. The Democrat says "NO WAY"The Democrat has a good idea, the Republican "FORGET IT" SO nothing gets done Lets stop the foolihness & get down to some old fashion governing. If a Dem has a good idea then the Rep should get behind the idea, the same for the Dem when the Rep has a good idea. Together they might make this a wonderful courtry again. Nice idea?

2006-10-05 15:32:49 · 6 answers · asked by BUTCH 5

i know its to have a one world government and such...but why???whats the point of it?

2006-10-05 15:15:38 · 15 answers · asked by alif 1

enter in a poverty state like Latin America.
Accordin to this paper that I read long time ago that was the cause that made Portugal a poor country

2006-10-05 14:55:46 · 9 answers · asked by Pink Panther 5

2006-10-05 14:53:19 · 9 answers · asked by concerned c 1

The US bombed Mecca, what would happen

2006-10-05 14:48:14 · 8 answers · asked by Sammy Hagar 3

I for one do not associate myself with the democratic party in any way, nor am I a liberal. Science is not liberal either. Neither are dozens of professors and experts who also believe 9/11 was an inside job. Are ppl really that brainwahed to believe this is a liberal idea.

2006-10-05 14:38:10 · 24 answers · asked by Luke F 3

Why are we at it again?

I was taught...the reason to study history is so we will not repeat it.

Is this blinded arrogance or what.....?

2006-10-05 14:34:19 · 16 answers · asked by - 2