Jesse Helms Dead at 86

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Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

CNN:

Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at the age of 86, a senior congressional source said.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, announced on its website that he died at 1:18 a.m. Friday after having been ill in recent years.

Helms retired in 2002 at the end of his fifth term in the Senate.

When the Republicans were the majority party in the Senate, Helms was chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, where he consistently moved U.S. policy toward the right, especially regarding the United Nations and Cuba.

He also held seats on the Agriculture Committee, where he looked out for North Carolina’s extensive tobacco industry, and on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee…

Helms had an operation in 2002, at age 80, to replace a faulty prosthetic heart valve put in place in 1992, when he also had quadruple-bypass surgery.

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Jesse Helms Dead at 86

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6 Responses

  1. 1)
    Paul McCarthy said on 7/4/2008 @ 9:02pm PT: [Permalink]

    Here’s an anti-eulogy on former Senator Helms…

    Jesse Helms: American Garbage
    By Ken Layne

    Here’s a July 4 history lesson we should print on the back of the American Flag: If you hate long enough and hard enough, you can go to the very top of the Washington garbage heap.

    Jesse Helms died today, 25 years too late, but the stench of his rotten career will always linger in the Senate, and over the South.

    He was a hero to bigots and the cigarette corporations, a menace to the poor and downtrodden, and a mean little troll whose heart was so wrecked by wickedness that doctors had to patch it up with coronary valves from a pig.

    http://news.aol.com/political-m...rican-garbage/

  2. 2)
    Paul McCarthy said on 7/4/2008 @ 9:05pm PT: [Permalink]

    I don’t know where that “rest in Hell” comment came from in the middle of the anti-eulogy. It’s not in the original and I didn’t put it in there. Wierd.

    {Ed. Note: Indeed that is weird. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s moot now since I chopped off about two thirds of your copy and paste there. Please read the commenting rules again, Paul. Thank you. –99}

  3. 3)
    Paul McCarthy said on 7/5/2008 @ 3:33pm PT: [Permalink]

    your server must have an awfully small hard disk. The rest of the article couldn’t have taken up more than 2 or 3k. There are these big round drives that fit inside of the computer — I know the little things that stick in to the USB ports are more convenient.

  4. 4)
    socrates said on 7/7/2008 @ 5:02am PT: [Permalink]

    It sounds like the moderator put that comment in, then thought better of it after Paul’s second comment. Then she came in with her typical bad moderating. She is why this place doesn’t get many comments, and she is how this place generates the tinfoil label. People can see how unfair she is. They will wonder why she is a moderator. Every time she oversteps her boundary or plays favourites is when more readers and posters say aha, limited hangout.

    This is the same person who has dissed Cindy Sheehan and backs bullshit sources. She sounds more like Willis Carto than Ann Richards.

  5. 5)
    michelle l. said on 7/7/2008 @ 11:05am PT: [Permalink]

    Having been a political cartoonist in Jesse’s home county, I’ve since believed rumors of the Union County, NC court house boys destroying the life and career of a female assistant district attorney. She was said to have conscientiously refused to “go along,” with their ethics in certain legal decisions and rulings. She paid a hefty price; so said a seated state senator.

    It’s good to know the United Nations is now in Alabama investigating corrupt justice system procedures, that the State’s Attorney General, Troy King, has admitted to corrupted voting and elections in more than one Alabama county. It’s too bad King refuses to believe the degree to which his justice system is tainted, particularly since a former governor was framed and imprisoned by a presidentially hand-picked U.S. Attorney & gang that made the arrangements.

    Jesse Helms would have hated the fact that the United Nations was allowed to set foot in Alabama, or investigating Civil and Human Rights violations in any area of the United States of America.

    At least now, Americans have help from outside the boundaries of the likes of Jesse Helm’s form of justice and philosophy.

    It would serve Americans well if the United Nations would visit more of these areas and investigate.

    In Alabama, imprisoned former police officer Patrick Swiney’s case, in the same corrupt county where Governor Siegelman’s election was rigged, and where I lost a son while Cobb County, and Warner Robins, Georgia “law enforcement” cooperated: Baldwin County, Alabama, USA would be a good place for the U.N. to start.

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