There are so many Democratic candidates for president in 2008 because Democrats are flighty and disorganized and usually out of left field. In fact, trying to get them to move together is like herding cats.
At least, that’s the sentiment that underscores the punch lines of the recent jokes on late night T.V. on the subject.
But according to my count, there are at least as many contenders on the Republican side. Why aren’t we yukking it up over how many and varied they are?
Democrats Declared or Expected to Run for President in 2008:
1. Sen. Joe Biden
2. Sen. Hillary Clinton
3. Former Sen. John Edwards
4. Sen. Barack Obama
5. Gov. Tom Vilsack
6. Sen. Chris Dodd
7. Rep. Dennis Kucinich
8. Gov. Bill Richardson
Republicans Declared or Expected to Run for President in 2008:
1. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani
2. Gov. Mike Huckabee
3. Rep. Duncan Hunter
4. Sen. John McCain
5. Gov. George Pataki
6. Gov. Mitt Romney
7. Rep. Tom Tancredo
8. Sen. Chuck Hagel
9. Rep. Mike Pence
Then there are the nightmare wild card candidates: Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, Condo Rice. And once that pesky constitution gets amended (or — more likely by the time Bush leaves office — just plain trashed), Arnold Schwarzenegger. The only comparable wishful thinking maybe on the Democratic side is Al Gore.
So enough with the jokes about the sea of Democratic candidates. From where I sit, there are about a dozen too many Republicans on the way.
In response to the article I posted today describing a couple of innovative and important proposals for saving the institution of marriage — criminalizing adultery and de-licensing marriages that do not produce children — a Christian conservative wrote a rather lengthy response that caught my attention.
If you have mowed the lawn, stopped by the office or baked a cake on Sunday, you are as big an abominator as the gayest person on the planet. Your earthly punishment is death and your cosmic penalty is eternal damnation.
It would have been interesting to hear what a right-wing Christian thought about a tight clampdown on the rules related to marriage. Instead, as is typical of the Limbaugh-Hannity-O’Reilly-trained mind, this writer focused on the style of my article (my questionable wordsmithing), railed fantastical charges against “the Left” and offered wild suppositions about what I don’t know — but never got around to addressing the substance: locking up adulterers and annulling non-procreative marriages.
But this bit of Dittohead bombast made me chuckle:
The piece is also filled with fallacies, and I give the writer (and most activists) the benefit of the doubt in that they don’t read the Bible, and that they have been spoonfed the lies about what it contains and base it off of stereotypes instead of lying themselves. “In fact, there is nothing of any consequence about gay sex in either Testament.” Oh really? Ever read Leviticus? Probably not.
Leaving aside the fact that I am not an “activist” (and calling me one insults those who are), as it happens, I am extremely familiar with the contents of the Bible, especially Leviticus, and especially the part of Leviticus that says being gay is an abomination unto the Lord:
Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
Yup, and since “lying with” is Bible code for “having sex,” I’m in deep shit. But as bad as this is, a couple of lines down it gets worse — much worse:
Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”
What? No boiling in oil?
Yes, the biblical sentence for being gay is the death penalty. It is unambiguously clear. Gay people must be killed on sight, and their corpses are to be drenched in their own blood.
It says so in the Bible.
Which brings us to the tricky part. If you believe the Bible, and you believe that gay people are doomed to hell because of this edict in Leviticus, then you also have to believe gay people should be executed on the public square. If you don’t believe all those things, then why bother believing any of them?
The experience of human spirituality might well remain constant from millennium to millennium, but it is impossible to take seriously today judgments made by desert nomads 5,000 years ago about food storage, apparel, animal sacrifices, women’s rights and human sexuality. Our understanding of these things has changed radically — is still changing. What we know now renders the attitude of nomads in 3,000 BCE to be, well, inconsequential.
But Enough about Me
So let’s talk about you for a moment, dear reader. You may be thinking, “He’s just tap dancing around the issue to excuse his immoral lifestyle choice. I’m not gay so I’m going to be fine.”
Sorry. Even if you are as “completely heterosexual” as Rev. Ted Haggard, you are not off the hook, abominations-wise.
Sadly, dear reader, you have undoubtedly committed abomination-class sins in your life — maybe as recently as at lunchtime. Maybe even at this very moment. In fact, you could be committing an abomination-class sin as you are reading these words — without even knowing it.
Worse news: ignorance is no excuse. You have committed sins that are equally as bad, equivalently as offensive to the Lord, as anything any gay person has ever done. And you are going to hell in the very same handbasket.
So before you judge me and deny me the right to marry the man I love and have lived with for 28 years, let’s examine your sins more closely.
We must not depend on any sort of Divine Providence to put a stop to war. Providence says, Kill one another, my children. Kill one another to your hearts’ content. There are plenty more where you came from. Consequently, if we want war to stop we must all become conscientious objectors.
There have been two exciting developments recently in the campaign to protect marriage. In Ohio and Michigan wingnuts are pushing adultery laws with life-sentence penalties. In Washington state, liberals have proposed a law that prohibits infertile couples from marrying and annuls marriages that have not produced children after three years.
Count me in. I’m strongly in favor of both these efforts, and believe they warrant serious debate.
Criminalizing Adultery
Rightwing anti-marriage activists say that allowing same-sex couples to wed would destroy the institution of marriage.
But any rational observer would say that it isn’t homos who are wrecking marriage, it’s adulterers who cause most marriages to fail. And since about half of marriages end in divorce, we can surmise that there is a whole lot of adultery going on.
If conservatives feel as strongly as they say they do, why not make adultery punishable by death?
I have long been an advocate of taking the anti-marriage right at its word and criminalizing adultery — after all, it’s in the Bible. One of the Big Ten: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.
Conversely, nowhere in the Ten Commandments does it say Thou shalt not be gay. In fact, there is nothing of any consequence about gay sex in either Testament.
I was surprised to learn last week that several states already (or, rather, still) have laws on the books against adultery. In Michigan, the penalty for sexual misconduct is a life sentence.
Bottom third: Our man in the White House still manages, amazingly, to garner the support of a third of respondents to polls, according to National Review’s PollTrack:
Bush’s job approval rating in Gallup’s latest survey is 32 percent, a slide of 4 points since mid-January, which puts the figure just one point higher than the lowest it has been during his administration.
His approval mark on foreign affairs has reached its lowest point to date at 31 percent. And assessments of his handling of immigration and the situation in Iraq, now at 25 percent and 26 percent, have returned to the bottoms they reached in January 2006 and last month, respectively.
Recent attention on global warming hasn’t caused his approval ratings on energy policy to bounce around much, either. Three in 10 said they approve of the way he’s handling energy issues — not a marked difference from 2006’s numbers.
Kind of explains the popularity of “American Idol” and “Deal or No Deal.”
Here is good news for unhappy homos and homo-hating Christians alike. Rev. Ted Haggard has completed his therapy and apparently has forsworn consorting with male prostitutes forever. After only three weeks of therapy, he has been judged to be “completely heterosexual” now:
Evangelicals believe science has a liberal bias.
“He is completely heterosexual,” [said Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur, Colorado, one of four ministers who oversaw Haggard’s re-education therapy.] “That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”
Ralph said the board spoke with people close to Haggard while investigating his claim that his only extramarital sexual contact happened with Mike Jones. The board found no evidence to the contrary.
“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days and it hasn’t happened.”
Science, of course, says that sexual identity is engrained and immutable, and that no amount of guilt, recrimination or praying away the gay can change it. Of course, Evangelicals like Rev. Haggard believe science has a liberal bias, as Stephen Colbert put it.
No word on whether Haggard addressed the issues behind his and his wife’s admitted use of crystal methadrine.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all politcal parties, from conservatives to anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In shutting down debate yesterday on Pres. Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war, Senate Republicans embarked on what could be the riskiest legislative gambit since House Speaker Newt Gingrich shut the government down during a budget dispute with Pres. Clinton.
If Dems were to hold all their seats in 2008 (as they did in 2006) and pick up just 10 of 13 GOP seats that are in play, they would have a 60-seat “super majority.”
The GOP filibuster puts GOP senators squarely on the opposite side of public sentiment. In a Rasmussen poll released last Friday, 55 percent of Americans said they favor a firm timetable for withdrawing troops that gets our troops out within one year — while only one-third (33 percent) said they believe the escalation will succeed.
All but two Republican senators voted with their leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to close the debate on a non-binding resolution — a rebuke of the president so mild that critics view it as little more than a slap on the wrist. Sen. Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, voted with the Republicans.
The two GOP senators who voted with the Democrats — Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of Minnesota — are both up for reelection in 2008.
And they are not alone. In fact, what makes the GOP gambit so risky is that nearly half the members the GOP Senate conference — 21 out of 48 — are up for reelection next year, whereas only 12 of the 48 Democratic seats are in play. (Neither seat held by independents — Lieberman and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — are up.)
If their votes now to stifle debate on this unpopular war were to become an issue in campaigns next year, the GOP losses could hand a 60-seat majority to the Dems, giving them the magic number required to shut off filibusters on bills and nominations.
As things stand now, one GOP senator, Wayne Allard of Colorado, has announced his retirement, and five GOP seats are considered vulnerable — Collins, Coleman, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Gordon Smith of Oregon — with seven seats called “Republican favored.” If the Dems were to hold all their seats (as they did in 2006) and pick up just 10 of the 13 seats that are in play, they would have a 60-seat “super majority.”
In 1996, voters’ dim view of Gingrich’s government shut-down — especially after he admitted that he was motivated by a fit of pique after feeling slighted by Pres. Clinton on Air Force One — made it a winning campaign issue for the Clinton-Gore campaign.
Similarly, voters in 2008 who are angry over the Senate Republicans’ seemingly bizarre support for an unpopular war and an even more unpopular president may be surprised to learn that Minority Leader McConnell has close, even intimate, ties to the Bush administration. His wife, Elaine Chao, is a Bush Cabinet member; having served as secretary of labor since 2000.
Not for sale: It has come to my attention that recently Microsoft Corp. sent Acer Ferrari laptop computers to about 90 bloggers to assist them in reviewing Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. As a result, some columnists criticized said bloggers for accepting a $2,200 gift from a company whose product they were then supposed to objectively review for the supposed benefit of consumers.
Let me just set the record straight — we here at Pensito Review did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft. At least I know I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure that my fellow editors didn’t either. Jon would have bragged if he had received one, and Trish would have broken it within 48 hours and would have told us that via e-mail from her favorite North Florida library branch.
We simply refuse to be stoogie tools of Bill Gates.
But the fact that we did not receive Acer Ferrari computers from Microsoft is beside the point — it’s our ethical standards that count, unlike those unscrupulous bloggers who kept their Acer Ferrari computers. Would we have sent our newly received Acer Ferrari computer back to the Microsoft public relations flack who sent it to us? You bet!
See, the only way that we here at Pensito Review can remain astride our high horses is to be living emblems of ethicality. The only way we can continue to muckrake is by staying above the muck or moral compromise. The only way we can, with clear consciences, lambaste wingnuts and Repugs with impunity is to be better than they are, which, though relatively easy, does require some effort. We have our standards, and by golly, we’re sticking to them, no matter how many Acer Ferrari computers Microsoft throws at us.
You know, this is not the first instance where Microsoft has tried to influence public opinion through a shameless public relations ploy.
In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported that Microsoft, during its antitrust trials, hired PR companies to flood newspapers with fake letters of support, bearing ordinary individuals’ names but actually written by Microsoft PR staff.
Pensito Review did not run those fake letters, and not just because it didn’t exist in 1998. If it had existed, we still would not have run fake-o PR letters.
Later, during the antitrust trials, Microsoft attempted to prove the inseparability of Windows and Internet Explorer by playing a video for the judge. But the government’s lawyer noticed that as the tape rolled on, the number of icons on the desktop kept changing. Microsoft had spliced together footage from different computers to make its point.
We would have been too savvy for that one, too. Especially Jon, who lives in Los Angeles and thus is close to the motion picture industry.
Then in 2002, Microsoft’s Web site featured a testimonial called “Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert,” a first-person account by an attractive brunette “freelance writer” about how she had fallen in love with Windows XP.
Unfortunately, a Slashdot member discovered that the identical photo was available for rent from the stock-photo libraries of GettyImages.com. Sure enough: Microsoft had hired a PR firm to write the testimonial. The “switcher” did not actually exist.
That one would never have made it past our crack fact-checking team here at Pensito Review. Besides, anyone who has ever used a Macintosh computer would be utterly incapable of “falling in love” with Windows XP.
So the point that those “stunts” were pulled by Mircosoft before Pensito Review existed is moot. The real point is, our unassailable ethical standards would have protected us — like some kind of magical shield in a movie full of elves and orcs — from the evil minions of Microsoft.
I’m sure that Microsoft has not learned the error of its ways and the next time it introduces a new operating system it might send us a laptop computer to review that operating system. But we won’t take the bait from a company trying to exploit the lax ethical standards of the so-called blogosphere. We refuse to be stoogie tools of Bill Gates.
Nope. That puppy is going to be headed back to Redmond, Wash., just as quick as United Parcel Service can take it. Of course, it might not be fully functional. Right, Trish?
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats, reports Florida Phoenix. Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle. Currently, women hold about one-third of state legislative seats across the country — a record level of representation but nowhere near parity.
“Prediction markets about the 2026 midterm elections have surpassed $1.4 billion in trading volume as Election Day fast approaches,” CNN reports. “This year has seen massive growth in the prediction industry, where people can bet on real-world events like sports, entertainment and the weather. While small-scale election markets have been around for a while, they gained traction before the 2024 presidential election and have seen huge numbers for the 2026 midterms.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Low-knowledge 2024 voters say they backed Trump by 8 points, according to our poll. Today they give him a net job approval of ?27, a 35-point shift. Compare that to Trump’s approval rating among voters who got both questions right: These voters backed Harris by 1 point and now give Trump a net ?24 approval, a 23-point shift. … Low-information voters have moved against Trump at a higher rate than high-information voters, by 12 points.”
President Donald ?Trump’s approval rating fell to a record low as Americans worried about high gasoline prices and appeared ready to punish his Republican Party in the November 3 congressional elections, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday. Some 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s ?performance in office, down a percentage point from two weeks earlier and the lowest level in ?either of his presidential terms, the four-day poll showed.
KFF Poll: “With the 2026 midterm campaigns in full swing and early voting about to begin, there is a wide enthusiasm gap between partisan voters, with Democratic voters 25 percentage points more likely than Republican voters to say they are ‘more motivated’ than usual to vote (63% vs. 38%).”
