A Maryland native, Mehlman may be looking toward a challenge to Gov.-elect Martin O'Malley (D) in 2010.

Outgoing NRSC Chair Elizabeth Dole, R-NC, e-mailed out a fundraising appeal to the committee’s “most loyal and generous supporters” today seeking help digging out from under “an avalanche of post-campaign debt.”
...

Dole said she felt the Republicans could “walk away from this election with our heads head high,” despite the fact that they lost both houses to the Democrats, because “we fought hard in all our U.S. Senate races and still managed to keep the Senate extremely close!” (emphasis added)

Several Republicans on K Street said they were also flabbergasted when they received a solicitation for donations to a legal defense fund for a staffer at the center of the page scandal. The e-mail request for money was sent a day after the election when Republicans were still reeling from the losses.

"I am astonished by the audacity of this," one GOP lobbyist remarked in an e-mail. "They didn't even wait a respectful amount of time so that people could get over their grief over last night's results."

Jay Timmons, senior vice president of policy and government at the National Association of Manufacturers and former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent the e-mail, entitled "Kirk Fordham's legal expenses," last Wednesday to several K Street lobbyists, asking them to forward it to others.

Fordham resigned as Reynolds's chief of staff last month. Before moving to Reynolds's office, he had been Foley's chief of staff, and when the page scandal broke, claimed he had tried to warn senior staffers in Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-Ill.) office about Foley's behavior at least a year earlier. Hastert's staffers dispute this, and argument between Fordham's and Hastert's offices over the issue.

Rocky Mountain News: Opinion Columnists: "Today, threats of outing are used as blackmail, and might amount to criminal extortion, depending on the jurisdiction. Last year, Washington, D.C., homosexual blogger Mike Rogers warned that a vote for the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito would result in the outing of a senator. Several weeks ago, Rogers followed through on his blackmail, although the claim was so bereft of evidence that it received little attention from most media, other than Air America's Ed Schultz.

Click to visit NGLTF

"Many major gay rights groups oppose outing, saying it's a personal choice and should remain so. But there is a difference of opinion when it comes to the idea of outing political figures perceived as harming gay interests.

'When someone is in a position of power and they are using that power to hurt gay people ... it's perfectly appropriate that they be outed,' says Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. 'We don't do it, but we have no problem with it.' (emphasis added)

Foreman notes that the type of 'outing' happening these days shows, in one way, that social progress has been made. 'The stigma around being gay is gradually diminishing,' he says. 'At one point it was a huge scandal to say someone was gay.' Now, he says, what fuels 'outings' is something else: 'It's not, 'This person's gay.' It's, 'This person's gay and can you believe what they're doing with their power?'

You may remember some of the work Mike and I did with Florida's governor-elect Charlie Crist. You know, Florida’s newly elected anti-gay Republican Governor... the one who, all evidence seems to indicate, is gay.

So while the search to find 100% concrete evidence continues, I've decided that we as the LGBT community need to keep track of Charlie. Today, I am happy to announce the fabulous game:

Let the games begin!

p.s. The Where's Charlie posts will often be accompanied by news on outing Crist.

Where’s Charlie #1:

Clue: The nation’s oldest LGBT civil rights organization gets down, when it’s cold, here.

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO-Evangelical leader Ted Haggard, who stepped down last week after confessing that he purchased methamphetamines and various services from a male prostitute, revealed Wednesday that he was repeatedly molested by an unnamed Republican congressman in the late 1990s.

A first-ever museum display, 'Against Nature?,' which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.

Larry kept pressing me about this issue, about gays and names. And I thought that well, you know, I'm a political junkie, probably like you are. And so, you know, in my writer's room, this is anything but news. And by the way, I'm not a million percent sure it's true. I mean, I never dated the guy. But I don't feel especially bad about if this happened to a Republican who is very much part and parcel of this administration, which has used gay issues so divisively. It's hugely hypocritical.

First off, let me say thanks for the welcome. It’s been a long journey to get here (2200 miles so far, and another 900 left). Yet, as I sit here in D.C., and ponder whether the last two years have been worth it only one answer pops into mind:

Hellz yes.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but actually you can read all about that in Mike’s post about me. I’ll just skip to some of the more juicy bits.

- Sushi is amazing.
- You can get all your LGBT news here.
- I just came from a conference put on by these guys.
- See this movie.
- I like long walks on the beach and…

That’s enough about me.

For those of you wondering, I am not only in D.C. to have a gay ol’ time, but also to keep the pressure on soon to be former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman. Let’s just say Mike and I will be keeping Ken’s feet to the fire about his anti-gay stratagems and whatever influence the RNC has over the mainstream media’s continuous double standard concerning people’s sexuality.

I hope you all stay tuned here at blogACTIVE. It’ll be worth it.

Oh, and as Margaret Mead once said:

“Never doubt that a group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

Kyle DeVries

It began my first week in college. I saw some typical right-wing nutcases screaming anti-choice rants and weaving signs featuring grotesqueries of fetuses. At first I figured this for a normal day in North Florida. Then I realized not only were these people touting radical anti-choice sentiment they were also praising a man who had murdered abortion doctors. It took me about five minutes to rush to the art center, make a sign that read "support women's right to choose" and rally students around me. Within half an hour we had driven them off campus.

I was hooked instantly.

During the comedian Bill Maher’s appearance on the show Wednesday, he and Mr. King discussed several of the factors contributing to the Democrats’ election victory the day before, among them scandals involving several Republicans, including Representative Mark Foley. Mr. Maher then began to speculate on the sexual orientation of some high-ranking Republican officials, and Mr. King, seeming to forget that he was on the air, asked for names.

The comments were broadcast live, but CNN’s rebroadcast of the show later that evening cut a portion of Mr. Maher’s remarks. In addition, the transcript presented on CNN’s Web site, as well as the one provided to the LexisNexis archiving database, also omits the comments, noting that “a portion of this transcript has been removed.” (A spokeswoman for Nexis said that CNN was responsible for any editing of the transcript.) A video clip from the show available on cnn.com ends right before Mr. King asked Mr. Maher for his opinion about the Mark Foley scandal.

United Press International:
Two sentences that implied Republican Party boss Ken Mehlman is gay were edited out of a segment on the 'Larry King Show' in some U.S. time zones.

The New York Post reported Saturday that comedian Bill Maher made the comment on the CNN show, but that it was edited out in later time zones Wednesday and did not appear later in the show's transcripts.

Maher told King that the Republican Party was 'secretly run by hypocritical gays,' and then later named Mehlman as the specific homosexual individual he was referring to after King egged him on.
...
Mehlman, who resigned from his position Friday after his party's landslide defeat on Election Tuesday, did not return calls to the Post when they sought his response nor did Larry King's spokespeople.

At age fourteen, Matt Hill Comer was on track to become an Eagle Scout, but a run-in with his local Boy Scouts troop over homosexuality took his life in a new direction. Host Frank Stasio speaks to Matt Hill Comer, now a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, about equality, politics and youth activism.

Republican mudslingers digging deep into their anti-gay mud buckets to try to use Pelosi's gay friendliness to scare voters got a very clear message back: What really would have been spooky was leaving the current crop of Republicans in charge of Congress. Two of the most anti-gay Republicans -- Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who compared gay sex to 'man-on-dog' sex, and Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, who tried to strip federal courts of authority over gay marriage -- got the voters' boot.

Then, as if things could not get worse, there was the disgrace of Sheldon’s own friend and colleague, Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado mega-church leader and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an even bigger pillar of Republican support on the Christian right. Sheldon disclosed that he and “a lot” of others knew about Haggard’s homosexuality “for awhile ... but we weren’t sure just how to deal with it.”

Synopsis: When C.J. is gay bashed in the school locker room, then arrested for disorderly conduct because he protests to an administrator about the harassment he has experienced, he decides to fight back by making a video documentary, His project leads him to other rural youth who have suffered anti-gay harassment, and shames the school district into developing an anti-bullying and diversity training program."

We made a promise we swore we'd always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Like soldiers in the winter's night with a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

The panelists, which included Focus chairman James Dobson, Focus vice president of public policy Tom Minnery, Focus analyst Carrie Gordon Earll, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, and FRC former president Gary Bauer, praised Democrats while savaging Republicans.

I just got a cease-and-desist letter from YouTube, see below, regarding my CNN footage I posted. The footage, you'll recall, was from Larry King Live last night in which Bill Maher outed Republican Party chair Ken Mehlman as gay. It seems that CNN has suddenly decided that it no longer wants bloggers, or YouTube, posting any of its video, which is kind of surprising since I always thought we were doing a CNN a favor by constantly touting their network. Apparently I was wrong.

Conservative Christian leader James Dobson accused the Republican Party of abandoning values voters in the midterm elections -- and paying the price by losing control of Congress. 'What did they do with their power?' Dobson said in a statement. 'Very little that values voters care about.'

Finger-pointing abounded in the days after Democrats seized control of Congress after 12 years in the minority. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, issued a statement railing against the Republicans for letting their majorities slip away.

Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R), who came up just short yesterday in his Senate race against Rep. Ben Cardin (D), is mulling a bid for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, according to an informed GOP source.

Steele would not challenge current RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, but chatter among Republican insiders is that Mehlman has made clear for months that he might not return to his current post.

'Chairman Mehlman will be making an announcement regarding his future at the RNC in the coming weeks,' said RNC communication director Brian Jones.