'Ex-Gay' Celebrity Christian Schizzel Comes Out Gay

“Ex-gay” celebrity Christian Schizzel has come out gay, saying that he was manipulated into believing that he was or could be straight.

Schizzel was encouraged to seek help after coming out gay to friends and family at the age of 18. Christian counselors told him that the “cause” of his sexuality was the abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather.

He appeared on several daytime talk shows, including Oprah and Dr. Drew, where he discussed his attempt to change his sexuality from gay to straight.

In 2011, he told Our America host Lisa Ling that being gay wasn't “God's plan for us.”

Schizzel told Religion News Service (RNS) that the therapies he received at the Janet Boynes Ministries and Bachmann & Associates counseling centers damaged him. Boynes has built a career promoting the notion that being gay and Christian is incompatible. Outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann and her husband Marcus Bachmann, who together own Bachmann & Associates, have previously touted Boynes' work.

“Coming out publicly and sharing is important to me because my sexuality has been exploited my whole life by the Christian community, both knowingly and un-knowingly,” Schizzel said.

“When I was trying to be 'straight' I spoke to youth, churches, camps, on television shows and even shot documentaries in hopes of proving my worth to my Christian community and God. I'm coming out this second time as my true self – a gay man – louder than before so we can all learn from the mistakes made and the harmful effects of reparative therapy can be uncovered and so that people who have used my story against other gay people won't have it as a weapon anymore.”

Schizzel said that Boynes reacted badly when he told her that he was gay.

“[W]hen I told her I was gay and no longer going to continue in trying to change my sexuality, she told me to delete her contact information and never speak to her again,” he said.

“In the end,” he added, “my sexuality is a beautiful gift from God, and every day, I have found, I have to make a choice to honor it in the straight man's world.”

Tennessee Drug Tests Welfare Applicants, Discovers Less Than One Percent Use Drugs

In July, Tennessee began a drug testing program for applicants to the state’s welfare program. Since then, just one person has tested positive out of more than 800.

Applicants have to answer three questions about drug use to get benefits, and if they answer yes to any of them, they get referred to urine testing. If the result is positive, they have to complete a treatment plan and then take another test. If the second comes back positive, they get cut off from benefits for six months. Those who refuse to take a drug test in the first place can’t get benefits.

In the month since it began, six people submitted to a drug test and just one tested positive out of the 812 people who applied. Four were turned down for benefits because they refused to participate in drug screening. That means a positive rate of 0.12 percent for those who took part in the screening. That compares to the 8 percent of state residents generally who use illegal drugs.

Despite stereotypes that the poor people who need welfare assistance use drugs at a high rate, other states have had similar results. In Utah, just 12 people tested positive in a year of drug testing applicants. In Florida, 2 percent of applicants failed the tests in 2011 but the state has an 8 percent rate of illegal drug use.

And when Maine’s governor set out to prove that welfare recipients in his state were using their benefits to buy drinks and cigarettes at bars and strip clubs, he turned up next to nothing.

Many other stereotypes about how welfare recipients use their money turn out to be untrue when data is examined. Those who get public assistance spend less than half of what families who aren’t enrolled spend and still put a larger share of those small budgets toward basics like food, housing, and transportation. At the same time, they spend less on luxuries like eating out and entertainment.

Welfare recipients may be spending so much less in part because the benefits have become so meager. Virtually all of them are worth less now than in 1996. And many families who should be eligible aren’t even getting them. In the mid-90s, a little over a quarter of poor families with children didn’t get benefits. In 2012 that number had soared to three-quarters.

Yet a chunk of the program money is being used now to administer these costly drug testing regimes. Utah spent more than $30,000 in the year that turned up just 12 drug users. The purported savings in Florida’s program will be negligible after administrative costs and reimbursements for the drug tests are taken into account. The $1.5 million price tag with just $229,000 in savings for a proposed program in Virginia prompted lawmakers to reject it.

Still, the move has been popular in other states. Eleven of them have enacted drug screening or testing for welfare applicants.

Bachmann Hates That She’s Not Exempt From Obamacare Exchanges Thanks To GOP Amendment!

Michelle Bachmann claimed earlier this week that she had lost her health insurance due to Obamacare. She went on to tell Wolf Blitzer that her husband has specific medical conditions that need to be taken care of. When told she should be thankful that she won’t be denied or discriminated against for pre-existing conditions, Bachman stated “Actually, we were just fine before.”

While rendering herself as another victim of the Affordable Care Act, she admitted to not even checking the website to see if she could find better coverage for her family through the marketplace.

“Are you kidding? I’m not going to waste an hour on that thing,” she said. “I’m waiting until they fix this thing. I’m not going to sit there and frustrate myself for hours and hours.”

But Bachmann failed to mention that she and her republican colleagues are actually responsible for her alleged health insurance cancellation. Members of Congress are obligated to abandon their current employer coverage that is provided by the federal government and purchase a new plan through insurance marketplaces. This is thanks to Republican members of congress who formerly created this policy, known as the Grassley Amendment, in attempts to cause complications for Democratic lawmakers.  It was strictly designed by Bachman’s conservative colleagues of the upper chamber and was passed through congress and made into law.

“We are forced to go on the websites and purchase the health insurance plan from the D.C. health exchange,” Bachmann said.

You can thank your friends for that.

Tea Party Group Raises Millions To Unseat GOP, Then Exposed As Scam

The Tea Party assault on the Republican Party is in full swing… or is it? Earlier this month, the Tea Party Leadership Fund ran an ad attacking the GOP, calling them ‘traitors.’ Following this, they put up this webpage, which is pictured below.

Anti-GOP “Primaries for Traitors Fund” ad by the Tea Party Leadership Fund.

But, in study of the group and its activities, one finds that while they have raised millions, they spent only $52,000 on candidates in the last election cycle, and only $154,172 in total for political activity. Yet, almost all of the money they have raised, has been spent.

Where has the Tea Party Leadership Fund spent all of its money?

Going over the groups federal filings, the group spends most of its money on other organizations, such as DB Capitol Strategies, PLLC, run by Dan Backer. Dan Backer, it turns out, is the Treasurer of the Tea Party Leadership Fund. Over, and over again, the fund is issuing payments to organizations run by the members who run it. In other words, the whole fund is a money making scam put together by con artists exploiting the dim witted.

People are being scammed by those seeking to exploit their rage. The money donated goes into the pockets of those who merely see them as tools, something to be exploited. The people behind the Tea Party Leadership Fund are using what Think Progress has called a “gimmick” to pad their own fortunes. It would almost be ironic if it were not so tragic.

A get-rich scam targeting the impotent rage created by right-wing media.

The money being raised by the Tea Party Leadership Fund will likely never create any impact in the 2014 mid-term races. They will spend a token amount to claim that they have supported some candidates, but the lions share (over 90% based on past expenditures) will go into the pockets of those running the organization.

The organization tapped into the right-wing hysteria generated by organizations such as Fox News. Their message is carefully crafted to ensure maximum impact on the easily misled. They tap into misinformation and deceit, and use that to divorce the gullible from their money.

Donald Trump Sued By NY Attorney General in $40 Million ‘Trump University’ Fraud Case

The very anti-gay, birther conspiracist, perennial presidential candidate, and all around arrogant egomaniac Donald Trump is being sued by the Attorney general of the state of New York in a $40 million lawsuit that accuses the billionaire of fraud over his “Trump University” how-to-get-rich business. A look at a web archive of the Trump University site from 2005 shows courses titled:

Buy Properties Below Market Value (RE251)
Find hidden riches in distressed properties
Make Quick Profits in Any Real Estate Market (RE252)
Buy, fix and sell investment properties
The CEO Success Codes (EN251)
Run Your Business the Trump Way
Fast Forward MBA (MA251)
Learn what they teach in the top business schools
The Trump Way To Wealth (TWTW)
Donald Trump and his hand-picked team of business experts show you the secrets to building wealth in seven audio classes.
Wealth Builder’s Blueprint (HKBWWB)
Donald Trump and his hand-picked team of wealth creation experts teach you the secrets to building wealth and achieving massive financial success.

“Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says many of the 5,000 students who paid up to $35,000 thought they would at least meet Trump but instead all they got was their picture taken in front of a life-size picture of ‘The Apprentice’ TV star,” the AP reports:

Woman Shames Texas Republicans During Testimony Against Draconian Abortion Bill

Louisiana Wastes Tax Money on Creationist School

The Louisiana Department of Education should never have approved New Living Word School in Ruston to take voucher students transferring from public schools. The 122 students attending the church-affiliated school when the state approved it in 2012 for the voucher program were getting most of their instruction via DVD, the principal told the News-Star in Monroe. The school lacked teachers and facilities to handle an influx of new students but was proceeding "on faith," he said at the time.
Even so, the department approved New Living Word for 300 voucher students when Gov. Bobby Jindal persuaded lawmakers last year to offer the program statewide. The actual number at the school ended up being fewer than 100 for 2012-13 -- but that almost doubled the size of the school. And it was still a lot of taxpayer money going to a campus that was so woefully unprepared.
New Living Word didn't last long, though. As of June 28, the school was out of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
But it wasn't the questionable academic setup that was its demise. State Superintendent John White removed it from the voucher program because of reported financial improprieties.
An audit by Postlethwaite & Netterville found the school violated state rules by charging more in tuition and fees for voucher students than for students paying their own way, according to a Department of Education statement. The non-voucher students were getting the benefit of in-kind services that the school used to reduce their tuition costs, the auditors found. That is not allowed under state law.
The school principal denied the accusations in the audit and told the News-Star that New Living Word has been made a scapegoat by the state.
Mr. White argues otherwise. The state will have "zero tolerance for fiscal mismanagement of taxpayer dollars," he said in the department's statement. That is as it should be.
But it is still puzzling why the department didn't do more due diligence before approving the school to take voucher students.
In fact, the process last year for choosing schools for voucher students was backwards. The Department of Education OK'd a list of private and religious schools statewide to take low-income public school students whose schools were graded C, D or F by the state. After that list was compiled, the state came up with academic and other standards for the voucher program.
In 2011, vouchers were used only in Orleans Parish in a pilot program. Even then, there were signs of academic weaknesses in some of the schools. It was no surprise, then, when the 2012-13 academic results for voucher students statewide were unimpressive.
LEAP scores for third- through eighth-graders released in May showed that only 40 percent of voucher students scored at or above grade level. That compares with a statewide average of 69 percent for all students.
Seven schools in Jefferson and Orleans parishes posted such poor results that they are being barred from accepting new voucher students this fall, although they can keep those they already have.
New Living Word's iLEAP scores for third-, fifth- and sixth-graders were substantially lower than their counterparts in Lincoln Parish public schools and the state as a whole, according to the Department of Education report.
Those poor results wouldn't have triggered the school being removed from the voucher program this year, though. A school has to post three years of poor LEAP results before getting sanctioned.
But the audit results accelerated the process. The roughly 150 voucher students that had been enrolled at New Living Word for the fall semester are being immediately transferred to other schools.
That is an inconvenience for those families, but it is better to move the children. If the state had applied acceptable standards to the school last year, the voucher students never would have been there.
Now the state is left trying to get back more than $375,000 in tax dollars that New Living Word overcharged for students in the voucher program. And the public has to wonder why the state didn't guard its money more carefully from the beginning.

Bad News For Limbaugh!

There were lots of headlines about Rush Limbaugh this week.The majority had nothing positive to say about the hate-speaking radio host or his parent company, Clear Channel, run by Bob Pittman and John Sykes. Not a good week for the Rushbo, at all. One headline referred to Limbaugh as a right-wing welfare bum, because he’s having to take  money/gifts/payola from right-wing groups. Given that 95% of Cumulus radio network advertisers want no part of Limbaugh, it makes sense he would need to have other sources to subsidize his smut.

Payola, is indeed, taking place. Heritage Foundation and FreedomWorks (linked to the Tea Party/Koch Bros.) have been paying Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, according to Dick Armey, former FreedomWorks Chairman. Limbaugh and Beck are  taking money to talk up the right-wing agendas unbeknownst to their audiences. Pretty seedy – and it maybe illegal.

Some decades ago there was a shake-up in the music industry. Record execs were using payola to push their music/agendas. A law was passed making it illegal. FCC has specific rules against payola in the broadcast industry. Apparently, Rush Limbaugh’s show is being overlooked. With the new FCC Chairman coming in, maybe the government agency will take a good, long, and hard look into the goings on at Clear Channel.

An FCC rule states:

Any broadcast station employee who has accepted or agreed to accept payment for the airing of program material, and the person making or promising to make the payment, must disclose this information to the station prior to the airing of the program.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the FCC rule turns out to be the ticket for Limbaugh’s demise? And isn’t it ironic? Conservatives are always preaching “Free Market.” Once again, right-wing hypocrisy rears its ugly head.

To help finish the job and get  Rush Limbaugh off public radio: 
Sign: Petition To Clear Channel and 40 Limbaugh Sponsors
Join Boycott-Rush-Limbaughs-Sponsors-to-SHUT-HIM-DOWN
Visit: The StopRush Database

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