Jesse Helms Dead.

[Driven1]

And maybe you can stay home and then weigh in with authority about what happened in your absence.  Hopefully there wont be a registered police log to immediately make you look foolish, although with Driven, one never knows.

lol - i don't have my concealed carry permit yet!!!!     

i sent you a PM stephen - we are trying to meet on Wed., but we can work around your schedule.  let me know.

[RiversideGator]

And maybe you can stay home and then weigh in with authority about what happened in your absence.  Hopefully there wont be a registered police log to immediately make you look foolish, (although with Driven and me, one never knows.)

The text above which you assume to be a police log has never been authenticated.  Also, there have been no statements by the police to indicate that shots were fired.  Until this happens, I do not believe it has been proved that shots were fired.  In any case, no one was injured if shots did occur.

[RiversideGator]

Lincoln Chafee's statement regarding Jesse Helm's Death.

As the Republican Party moves to engineer itself for a post-Bush era, many Americans are reconsidering the definition of conservatism. The sad death of my former colleague Jesse Helms and today's New York Times editorials on Nelson Rockefeller and Dwight Eisenhower offer an opportunity to consider the current state of the GOP. How did the party of Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, become a party so strong in the South? Much of the transformation began in 1964.

As a lifelong Republican now disaffiliated and supporting Barack Obama for president, I still recall that year's GOP convention in San Francisco's Cow Palace. At age 11, I was there with my father, a Rockefeller delegate, when the Republican Party overwhelming nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that our party selected a candidate who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the Senate. In the end, the Arizonan won only six states besides his own: Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina! Goldwater lost the election, but his candidacy sowed the seeds of the new Republican Party of which Jesse Helms would someday be a part.

Helms' legacy is one of strong opposition to women's reproductive freedom, gay rights, foreign aid for diplomacy, public funding for the arts. The priorities Helms pioneered run strong in today's GOP. But I believe the policies Rockefeller and Eisenhower championed represent a truer conservatism.

The new Republican Party, which controlled the executive and legislative branches for much of my time in the Senate, has squandered a surplus, neglected our planet, desecrated our First and Fourth Amendment freedoms, mired us in a costly quagmire in the greater Middle East and augmented the tragic disparity of wealth in America. Who would call these policies conservative?

Eisenhower-Rockefeller conservatism supported a robust middle class and sound environmental stewardship. It also championed personal freedoms and valued investing in educational opportunity for all. But these policies have all but disappeared from Republican politics. Can anyone imagine a modern Republican president warning America of a dangerous "military-industrial complex"?

Since the 1964 election, the definition of conservatism has grown murky and the Republican Party has changed dramatically.

Lincoln Chafee is now lecturing us on conservatism?  That's rich considering he has never been considered a conservative under anyone's definition. 

[RiversideGator]

And now the reductio ad hitlerum argument rears its ugly head.   

[RiversideGator]

According to you, the only true conservatives are liberals such as yourself.  What a farce!

BTW, here is an excellent piece outlining some of Helms' many foreign policy achievements.  I suggest you give it a fair reading:

The Jesse Helms You Should Remember

   
Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan at a 1983 dinner.

By Marc Thiessen
Monday, July 7, 2008; Page A13

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this great man. Consider, for example, The Post's obituary of Helms; here are some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office -- paving the way for today's deployment of America's first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council -- a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire wrote in 1997: "Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment." This weekend, we got our answer.
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What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not because Helms had moved toward the mainstream -- it was because the mainstream moved toward him.

When Helms arrived in Washington in 1973, conservatives were a minority not only in our nation's capital but also within the Republican Party. He often took to the floor as the lonely opposition in 99-to-1 votes. By the time he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1995, Republicans were in the majority in the Senate and conservatives were in control of the Republican Party. And Helms was winning floor votes by wide bipartisan majorities.

What made Helms stand out was his willingness to stand up for his beliefs before they were widely held -- even if it meant challenging those closest to him. In 1985, his dear friend Ronald Reagan was preparing for his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev when a Ukrainian sailor named Miroslav Medvid twice jumped off a Soviet ship into the Mississippi River seeking political asylum. The Soviets insisted that Medvid had accidentally fallen off -- twice. The State Department did not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain -- no matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship's departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then -- and he had the subpoena delivered to the ship's unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina cigarettes.

Despite Helms's efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on Helms's Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape -- that was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in Ukraine.

In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, "the KGB didn't fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They were afraid of something," he said, "and now I know what they were afraid of." They were afraid of Jesse Helms.

President Bush had it right when he said on Friday that "from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: In the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side." This is the Jesse Helms that Miroslav Medvid remembers. Unfortunately, it was not the Jesse Helms written about this weekend.

The writer, the chief White House speechwriter, was Foreign Relations Committee spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms from 1995 to 2001.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070601767.html

[downtownparks]

Tarantos Take on Helms

Jesse Helms, RIP
Supporters called him stalwart; opponents called him rigid. Both sides had a point. Former senator Jesse Helms, who died Friday at 86, was, The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, a hero of the Cold War. He was also a onetime defender of segregation who never repented, and whose public utterances (detailed by reader Chuck Smith in a 2001 letter) suggested he harbored antipathy toward blacks.

Then again, Helms was capable of changing his mind. His view of homosexuality was decidedly old-fashioned, leading him, in the 1980s, to a callousness toward AIDS patients that seems shocking in retrospect. In 1990, Jeanne White, whose 18-year-old son, Ryan, had died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, visited Capitol Hill, "Helms refused to speak to her even after she cornered him in an elevator," POZ, a magazine for AIDS sufferers, reported in 1996. In 1995, the New York Times reported:

Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who has vigorously fought homosexual rights, wants to reduce the amount of Federal money spent on AIDS sufferers, because, he says, it is their "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" that is responsible for their disease.

Yet by February 2002 his view had softened considerably, as the Associated Press reported:

Sen. Jesse Helms said Wednesday he was ashamed he had not done more to fight the worldwide AIDS epidemic and promised to keep it on his agenda until he leaves office next year.
"I have been too lax too long in doing something really significant about AIDS," Helms told hundreds of Christian AIDS activists gathered for a conference in Washington. "I'm not going to lay it aside on my agenda for the remaining months I have" in office.

The following month, a New York Times editorial praised Helms as "an AIDS savior."

Helms's turnabout on AIDS shows that there was more to the man than the stereotype of a rigid ultraconservative. On the other hand, it makes the absence of a similar turnabout on segregation seem more damning, since one cannot simply chalk it up to an undiscriminating stubbornness.

[Driven1]

too little, too late.

Hundreds of thousands of people died of AIDS as a result of his leadership. 

With that much blood on his hands, he should have donated his entire estate to aids research.

A vile and utterly unredeemable man.

you lied i think.  prove that solely because of Jesse Helms' decision(s), "Hundreds of thousands died".  if you can't, you lied. 

and btw, Christ came to die "once for ALL sin".  even if Jesse had killed "hundreds of thousands", wouldn't that be included? 

[downtownparks]

He offended Mosley-Braun??? Well that seals the deal for me!!!

[Driven1]

too little, too late.

Hundreds of thousands of people died of AIDS as a result of his leadership. 

With that much blood on his hands, he should have donated his entire estate to aids research.

A vile and utterly unredeemable man.

you lied i think.  prove that solely because of Jesse Helms' decision(s), "Hundreds of thousands died".  if you can't, you lied. 

and btw, Christ came to die "once for ALL sin".  even if Jesse had killed "hundreds of thousands", wouldn't that be included? 

?

late for the medication much?

try these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_band_played_on

ok - you are showing everyone now.

go to each page.  hit CTRL-F.  type "helms".  nothing on either page.  again, we await proof that Jesse Helms was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. 

i know that we will not get it.  because it is not true.  please stop lying.  pretty please.

[RiversideGator]

So the song "Dixie" is racist now?  You fail to disclose the context of the debate with Moseley-Braun which was, as I recall, about some minor issue regarding the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  Here is what happened to precipitate the singing of Dixie:

In 1993, Moseley-Braun, then a Democratic senator from Illinois, led the fight against renewing a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy that used the Confederate flag as its emblem. Helms had sponsored the measure. It had been a routine request, every 14 years, since 1898.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/10/18/politics/main66856.shtml

Because of Moseley-Braun and others, the design patent was not renewed and the little old ladies of the UDC lost the rights to their own symbol which happened to include the Confederate flag.

[RiversideGator]

Speaking of AIDS funding, which Stephen apparently has a personal interest in, why is it appropriate the AIDS gets more federal dollars for research per infected person than does cancer?  Apparently Helms wasnt too successful here.

[downtownparks]

I know far more people that have died, or have fought cancer than I have who have contracted, let alone died of AIDS. Are you really minimalizing the loss to those of us who have loved ones who have fought, and lost life to cancer?

[RiversideGator]

Speaking of AIDS funding, which Stephen apparently has a personal interest in, why is it appropriate the AIDS gets more federal dollars for research per infected person than does cancer?  Apparently Helms wasnt too successful here.

you arent serious are you?

Do you know how many artists, dancers, writers and bright fantastic people from our generation died before thirty?

You bastard.

Maybe no one interesting ever spoke to you in college, but yes, having lived in the cities, I know a lot of dead people, thanks for asking.

Lighten up, Nancy.  All I am saying is there should be more equity with research dollars.  I do not believe there should be no research dollars going to AIDS.  And, I have been far more affected by cancer than AIDS.  Also, AIDS is nearly always self-inflicted whereas cancer is sometimes self-inflicted and sometimes only tangentially so.

[RiversideGator]

More remembrances for this great man:

Remembering a Patriot
Jesse Helms, R.I.P.

An NRO Symposium

Former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms died on Friday at age 86. National Review Online gathered former Hill staffers and admirers to identify his legacy.

Andrew E. Busch
Jesse Helms should be remembered, first and foremost, as one of a rare breed of politicians who simply did not care what the New York Times said about them or about the wider world.

When he thought the State Department was not taking a tough enough stand, he had no problem playing hardball, even when there was a Republican president.

He did not hesitate, either, to make big campaign issues out of hot cultural concerns that polite liberals preferred to sweep under the rug â€" as in 1990, when he won a close race for reelection partly by focusing voters’ attention on the injustice of racial preferences.

Helms helped remake the South into a Republican bastion on the basis of a strong defense, unwavering anti-Communism, and cultural conservatism.

He was sometimes a bit rough around the edges even for his allies, who wondered whether his bare-knuckle tactics were so stark that they might alienate some of the voters conservatives were seeking to persuade. Whatever reservations any might have harbored, conservatives were glad to have Jesse Helms on their side. In the end, he showed that one could challenge the pretensions of the Left in the most vigorous possible way and thrive politically anyway. It was undoubtedly this proof that most infuriated the CBS newsroom.

â€" Andrew E. Busch is an associate professor of political science at the Claremont McKenna College.


Linda Chavez
I first met Sen. Jesse Helms under less-than-auspicious circumstances. The Reagan White House had just announced my nomination to become staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which, at the time, was a high-profile agency that had been a constant thorn in the administration’s side. No doubt my selection seemed an inexplicable choice: I was a Democrat and, at the time of my nomination, was a top assistant to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Helms’s staff was loaded for bear at my first interview, grilling me for what seemed like hours. But when I went in to see Sen. Helms, he was the epitome of a southern gentleman, courteous, even courtly. If he had any misgivings, he never let me know â€" at least not then. It was only later when I ran into him at a social event that he let on how worried he’d been about my appointment. By that time, the New York Times and Washington Post were excoriating me on their editorial pages for the anti-quota direction I and my fellow Reagan appointees at the Civil Rights Commission had taken the agency, which, of course, had removed any doubts he might have had.

I later found out that my experience was far from unique. One well-known feminist told me how taken aback she was that Sen. Helms was friendly, even kindly, when she met him one-on-one. He took his politics seriously, but he didn’t use political differences as an excuse for bad manners. The same can’t be said for many of his adversaries.

â€" Linda Chavez is chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity.


Michael G. Franc
Today’s conservatives remember and admire Sen. Helms above all for his independence of spirit and unwavering dedication to principle. Along with colleagues such as Bill Armstrong of Colorado, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and Phil Gramm of Texas, and maybe one or two others, he seemed entirely at ease and at the top of his game when he confronted Washington’s many liberal establishments.

How many tough-talking conservatives win elective office to, as the saying goes, represent the goodness and wisdom of their constituents to Washington only to “go native” and gradually find themselves representing the conventional wisdom of Washington to their constituents? Not so with Sen. Jesse Helms.

And it’s a good thing he stood firm against the Beltway’s elite opinion. Helms, after all, was so often proven right. He was as prescient as President Reagan on the inherent evil of Communism and on the need to defeat, rather than merely contain the Soviet Union. The idiocy and incompetence of the United Nations motivated him to push for a much-needed (and, alas, still pending) overhaul of Turtle Bay. The anti-Americanism that all too easily seeps into the DNA of the State Department led him to mount a similar reform effort aimed at Foggy Bottom. And Helms understood that the then-burgeoning HIV epidemic would be contained only when public-health authorities came to their senses and deployed all the tools used routinely to control other sexually transmitted diseases (i.e., confidential reporting and partner notification) to control the spread of HIV.

None of these crusades endeared Helms to those elites. In fact, they almost seemed designed to trigger an earlier version of what we now call Bush Derangement Syndrome. Remember the reaction when he tried to rein in the National Endowment for the Arts?

Another legacy he leaves is that principle always â€" always â€" trumps partisanship, especially when it is one’s own party that is abandoning a core value. If one can uphold a core principle only by standing up to one’s own party leaders, then so be it. It is hard, for example, to imagine Sen. Helms standing idly by these last few years as Hill Republicans earmarked their way to minority status.

It is a legacy our current crop of conservative lawmakers would do well to ponder.

â€" Michael G. Franc is vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.


Doug Heye
When I interned in his office in 1991, Sen. Helms suffered from Paget’s Disease. Because he was not allowed to carry heavy objects, I brought his unusually heavy briefcase into his office each morning. Unless he was in a meeting or on the phone, he would never simply offer thanks. “Sit down, young fella,” he would say, asking about my experiences in his office and his 1990 campaign, school, family or â€" old sports reporter that he was â€" the previous night’s baseball game.

“I don’t understand how a nice gentleman from North Carolina such as yourself can support a team called the Yankees,” he joked.

When I mentioned reading Richard Nixon’s memoirs, he obtained an autographed picture of Nixon for me and was thrilled when I brought it into his office. Later, he invited all of the interns to meet him after the weekly Senate Republican Conference lunch to meet Vice President Quayle. It was heady stuff for a 19-year-old. It still is.

In our conversations, I tried soak up as much history (and John Wayne stories) as I could. At the time, I thought I must have made some kind of positive impression on the senator for him to spend so much time with me.

Over the years, however, I learned there were countless young people who had similar stories. That’s just who he was; he was the nicest man.

Rest in peace.

â€" Doug Heye served as communications director for Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), among other campaign and Hill roles.


Jay Nordlinger
When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, Mich., all conservatives were hate figures. And Jesse Helms was the Most Hated of All. In time, I left Ann Arbor far behind, mentally. And I grew to appreciate and value Jesse Helms.

He understood Communism â€" he had Communism’s number. And that was the most important issue of his age. All those who sneered at him, degraded him â€" they did not have half the understanding that Helms had.

About everything concerning the Cold War, Helms was right. His critics and enemies were horribly wrong.

He also had the U.N.’s number. And the socialists’ number. And the universities’ number. (Pardon the redundancy.) And he had a very strong moral sense.

When a Ukrainian sailor named Medved jumped ship off the American coast, the only person in all the world who cared about him was Jesse Helms. U.S. authorities â€" under Reagan, no less â€" dragged him back to the Soviets, kicking and screaming.

And, as I understand it, Senator and Mrs. Helms adopted a supposedly unadoptable boy. When I interviewed him in 2005 â€" for the interview, go here â€" this was the only subject he declined to address. Modesty and humility ruled.

I don’t know that he was completely innocent on race. I doubt he was especially guilty â€" particularly for a white southerner born in 1921. And, about affirmative action â€" a.k.a. race preferences â€" he was 100 percent right.

He had the courage of his convictions, which is not enough, of course: Those convictions were right. Jesse Helms was courageous, right, and good. That is a powerful combination.

â€" Jay Nordlinger is a National Review senior editor.


David Rouzer
Jesse Helms helped change the world. He understood that America was created for a purpose, and he believed in the strength, ingenuity, and generosity of the American people. When others were willing to compromise with brutal tyrants, he stood firm for freedom and liberty â€" inspiring both those who lived in freedom, and more importantly, those who did not. He had the courage to stand his ground and do what he felt was right, rather than succumb to the temptation of political expediency. Such courage is why he supported Ronald Reagan in 1976 when many thought Reagan’s campaign was obsolete. It is why he argued against liberalism when few dared to tackle it head-on. It is why he was unflinching in his opposition to Communism.

Not only was Jesse Helms a great statesman, he took great pride in helping others. He never lost sight of protecting the interests of the people whom he was elected to represent; he tackled every problem brought to the office by a constituent as though it was his own.

Jesse Helms will be remembered as one of America’s great patriots. He was a true gentleman who served for all of the right reasons. It is only fitting that he joins two other great patriots, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in exiting this world on the Fourth of July â€" and not by coincidence.

â€" David Rouzer a former staffer to Senator Helms.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjkzZjFmYmI4OWVlOTBlZDc2NjgyNzQ3YmZmN2I3MjU=&w=MA==

[Clem1029]

Self inflicted?

You dopey bigot.

This is why you got banned from urban planet isnt it?

Ah, yes...the quality lefty internet debate style...when confronted with reality, call the other person a bigot, and this you win the argument.

In Gator's defense, let's try this again...try and form a logical argument why the majority of AIDS is not a lifestyle disease. Please. I'd love to see the logical contortions required for this to make sense.

Or you can just dismiss me as a bigot and not actually provide facts for discussion...