Day: July 12, 2006

NC11: GOP’s Taylor Trailer Dem Challenger

Jon Ponder

Interesting poll from the ancestral congressional district of our branch of the Ponder family, NC11, which includes Hendersonville and all points west:

Public Policy Polling (PDF). 7/10. Likely voters. MoE 3.7% (May results)

Without leaners

Taylor (R) 43 (42)
Shuler (D) 47 (46)

With leaners

Taylor (R) 45
Shuler (D) 51

After the recent fundraising numbers for the quarter, the candidates’ respective Cash on Hand numbers will reportedly look like this:

Taylor $100K
Shuler $550K

Looks incredible, until you remember that Charles Taylor is a gazillionaire and will be able to write himself as a large a check as necessary to trash the f’ out of Shuler.

Still, this race is living up to its top billing as one of the Republicans’ most endangered seats.

Schwarzenegger Voices Support for Mercenaries and Vigilantes

Jon Ponder

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has well-deserved reputation for verbal gaffes, usually originating from the fact that he is a clueless, pampered movie star in real life.

Here’s a new one, in which the governor was asked how he felt about the Minutemen movement:

“I support any time that a civilian wants to go and do the job that law enforcement cannot do,” Schwarzenegger said in response to a question.

“I’m for that. I’m not for any harassment. I’m not for anyone carrying weapons. I’m not for any of that.

“But I have, for instance, in my house — for years and years and years — I’ve hired private security to take care of my house, because I felt that the police could not really cover every single house and protect the children and families.”

Maybe it’s acceptable in Austria for citizens to take the law into their own hands but here in America we’ve seen this phenomenon escalate into mob violence, riots and lynching. And while wealthy movie stars can hire rent-a-cops to protect their gigantoid McMansions, the rest of us are left to depend on law enforcement paid from the public rolls.

Jeb Keeps Picking Loser Christians

Trish

Jeb Bush might be wondering how the godly could get him in so much trouble. First he had to call for the resignation of his appointee as secretary of the Department of Corrections after a string of scandals that make former FEMA head Michael Brown look like he really DID a heck of a job.

“I need political influence in order to obtain the things that I think that I need to obtain for the Lord, Jesus Christ”

Under James Crosby’s DOC, Floridians have watched steroid abuse among prison guards while they lived in state housing and pilfered state supplies and vehicles; rapes of female inmates; fatal beatings of a prisoner in 1999 and a teenage boot camper this year; kickbacks from privatized prison vendors; and an investigation by the FBI.

But Jeb said when he explained to Crosby earlier this year that things must calm down soon or else he would need his resignation, the man was downright pious.

“If you’ve done something wrong, tell me now and I’ll ask for your resignation,” Bush recounted his talk with Crosby. “Lead or get out of the way. This is an important department.”

Crosby said he wanted to pray about it and discuss it with his family.

Aw, isn’t that nice? What a guy. Crosby surrendered yesterday in Jacksonville, citing alcohol abuse as the reason for his rotten-to-the-core leadership. He faces eight years in prison and the loss of his state pension.

But that’s not the only area where things have gone south for Jeb and the lordly. We recently reported that the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, Jeb’s man in the black Republican community, was in trouble for making slurs about Islam on the radio. Now the gov has asked for his resignation from his Jeb-appointed post on the judicial nominating committee of Broward County.

[Dozier’s] views, criticized by Muslims, will mean his political involvement may be less influential, which he sees as a regrettable consequence to his primary mission.

“I need political influence in order to obtain the things that I think that I need to obtain for the Lord, Jesus Christ,” he said Tuesday, two days after turning in his resignation…

“If you look at the Quran, all the way from the beginning to the end it speaks of evil and violence,” Dozier said.

And so, you see, in that respect it differs starkly from the Bible, which does not have a blood sacrifice, war, stoning, salt-turning, plague, crucifixion, or four riders of the apocalypse on every other page. But there’s a bigger lesson for Dozier, according to Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“He might take a look at his Bible again and see what Jesus what would do in these circumstances,” Hooper said. “I doubt that Jesus, peace be upon him, would seek to increase divisions and hostilities in the society in which he lived. Jesus preached love and respect, not hatred and mistrust.”

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

The Twelve Good Rules:
1. Urge no healths. 2. Profane no divine ordinances. 3. Touch no state matters. 4. Reveal no secrets. 5. Pick no quarrels. 6. Make no comparisons. 7. Maintain no ill opinions. 8. Keep no bad company. 9.Encourage no vice. 10. Make no long meals. 11. Repeat no grievances. 12. Lay no wagers.

— Charles I (1600-1649), King of Britain and Ireland

Flashback: Pres. Bush’s Carefully Parsed Statements On CIA Leak Show He Knew It was Rove all Along

Jon Ponder
Bush’s strategically nuanced wording makes President Clinton’s widely derided statement, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is,” look like incisive explication.

Almost three years ago exactly — on July 14, 2003 — Bob “Douchebag of Liberty” Novak revealed the identity of a secret CIA agent named Valerie Plame, effectively shutting down her undercover operation tracking the black market for WMD in Europe. Novak claimed that Bush Administration officials had revealed Plame’s identity to him.

We have believed from the getgo that within hours of learning that Novak was going to publish Plame’s name, President Bush knew exactly who in his administration had done the leaking and that statements he made thereafter were carefully parsed to protect himself and the leaker from future liability.

Now that Novak has confirmed that Karl Rove was the leaker, it is a good time to look back at two key statements made by President Bush in the wake of the revelation. Notice how the president’s strategically nuanced wording makes President Clinton’s widely derided statement, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is,” look like incisive explication.

[…]

Inventor of ‘Thatcherism’ — UK’s ‘Supply Side’ Economics — Had Form of Autism

Jon Ponder
The former Conservative education secretary, who was Mrs Thatcher’s mentor in the 1970s and 1980s, had Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that renders sufferers unable to interpret social situations or to empathise with other people.

Asperger’s syndrome is a form of autism that may have affected both Andy Warhol and Richard Nixon. Now the Independent in London is saying that a leading advocate of supply side economics in Britain in the 1980s may have also been Aspergic:

Sir Keith Joseph, the father of Thatcherism whose free market principles are still followed to some extent by Tony Blair, had a form of autism that is reflected in his political philosophy, a psychiatrist believes.

The former Conservative education secretary, who was Mrs Thatcher’s mentor in the 1970s and 1980s, had Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that renders sufferers unable to interpret social situations or to empathise with other people, according to Michael Fitzgerald, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin…

Joseph – who died in 1994 – was a brilliant lawyer who served in Harold Macmillan’s government in the 1960s but was prone to eccentric behaviour and errors of judgement that can be attributed to his mental condition, Professor Fitzgerald said. In the early 1970s, he was urged by friends to challenge Edward Heath for the Tory leadership but he lost any chance of winning after making a speech in Birmingham in 1974 in which he implied that the lower classes should be deterred from having children.

Terror in Indiana: Hoosier State Brings Home the Homeland Security Pork

Jon Ponder
As of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

You probably heard that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reduced funding for security in New York City, partly reclassifying the city’s landmarks as just regular buildings that would be of no interest to terrorists:

The [DHS] formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, the United Nations, the Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation’s most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.

“I think the facts are clear,” [New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg said. “What they’ve really done is taken what was supposed to be threat-based and just started to distribute it as normal pork.”

But where did the terror pork go? Why, Indiana, of course:

It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.