Year: 2007

War On Xmas Breaks Out In Arizona

Buck Banks

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Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona, this week lighted a large piece of green vegetation festooned with shiny things in a ceremony in the lobby of the Capitol Tower in Phoenix. She called it a “holiday tree.” But unlike most people who think such things should be called by another name, Napolitano is accepting of differing points of view:

“I think we’re celebrating a number of holidays,” the governor responded Wednesday, while acknowledging that only one religion — Christianity — has a holiday associated with a tree.

“You can call it whatever you want,” she responded.

As you might well imagine, the 150 comments on the Arizona Star article were, for the most part, much less tolerant.

California GOP Faces Debt, Layoffs, While Rudy Backers Pour Money into Initiative That Could Hand Him the Presidency

Jon Ponder

Fundraising is down dramatically nationwide for the Republican Party, but things are especially bad here in California, where the state GOP is in such dire straits that its ability to compete in both state and federal races could be affected.

If it passes, this last-minute, unilateral change to the rules will almost undoubtedly hand the presidency to the Republican nominee next year.

But while the state party is cutting programs and considering layoffs, hundreds of thousands of dollars are flowing in from out-of-state fatcat supporters of Rudy Giuliani — funds the state GOP can’t touch because they are earmarked specifically to promote a ballot initiative that would, if passed, give Rudy 20 or so of the state’s 55 Electoral College Votes, even if he loses the state to the Democratic candidate.

The California GOP has been in a death spiral since the 1990s when, under former Gov. Pete Wilson, the decision was made to make illegal immigration its signature issue. It’s way too soon to send for the embalmers but the current crisis couldn’t be worse:

According to state records, the California GOP was $1.7 million in debt at the end of October, the most recent figures available. Its federal committee was nearly $430,000 in the red, records show.

An e-mail sent by regional vice chairman Jon Fleischman to other party officials, which was obtained by AP, pointed to a shortage of cash.

“I don’t know how to sugarcoat this,” Fleischman wrote in the e-mail. The party “is going through a very fiscally challenging period.”

Warned by the party’s chief operating officer that state GOP layoffs could follow if the county funding was continued, “I was forced to vote to end a program that I believe is a good one, simply because we are faced with a situation of limited resources,” Fleischman wrote. He later predicted finances would improve.

And:

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General Who Asked ‘Gay Question’ at Debates a Clinton Supporter

Buck Banks

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During last night’s CNN/YouTube Republican debate, retired Army Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr asked the candidates a question about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the U.S. armed forces. Seems Kerr neglected to tell CNN that he is one of nearly 50 co-chairs of a group called Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary. Doh!

‘Today, don’t ask, don’t tell is destructive to our military policy.’
— retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr

According to The Politico, Kerr asked: “Why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians?”

Here’s how the candidates (predictably) responded:

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, got first crack at Kerr’s question. He said he thought having openly gay men and lesbian women in the military “would be bad for unit cohesion.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, answering next, basically agreed.

Cooper then singled out former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who in 1994 said he looked forward to the day gays and lesbians could serve openly in the military.

Romney said times have changed. Though he said he laughed when he first heard talk of the don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and didn’t think it would work, he said: “You know what? It’s been there now for 15 years, and it seems to have worked.”

[moderator Anderson] Cooper then turned to Kerr and asked whether he felt he got an answer to his question.

Kerr responded: “With all due respect, I did not get an answer from the candidates. American men and women in the military are professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians. … Today, don’t ask, don’t tell is destructive to our military policy.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam veteran, got the last word on the subject.

He said, “almost unanimously, they [high-ranking military officials] tell me that this present policy is working, that we have the best military in history, we have the bravest, most professional, best-prepared, and that this policy ought to be continued because it’s working.”

CNN and the Clinton campaigns scrambled to apologize and/or disavow, as the case may be, but apparently Kerr passed the network’s vetting process, despite being a member of the Clinton support group and having been a supporter of Sen. John Kerry in his run for the presidency.

Rudy’s Adultery Problem Raises Its Ugly Head

Jon Ponder

During his term as mayor of New York, which coincided with his 16-year marriage to Donna Hanover, a local television personality, Rudolph Giuliani reportedly had at least two extramarital affairs. The first of these, as alleged by Hanover and a Vanity Fair article from the time, was with his press spokeswoman, Cristyne Lategano. Their affair apparently ended around 1999.

Mayor Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during his affair with Judith Nathan.

Soon afterwards, the mayor began seeing Judith Nathan, a pharmaceutical sales executive. In May 2000, Giuliani famously called a news conference to announce he was seeking a divorce from Donna Hanover — who learned about his plan to divorce her while watching his announcement on television.

The divorce proceedings were messy and played out like a reality show version of “Dynasty” or “Dallas” in the local news. Hanover and the Giuliani children remained at the mayor’s official residence while the mayor decamped to the apartment of a gay couple. His affair with Nathan was an open secret — she was barred by court order from visiting the mayor’s residence — but unacknowledged publicly.

Yesterday, news reports suggested that during this period, Giuliani may have cooked the books to hide expenses related to his visits to Nathan at her home in Southampton, in the Long Island suburbs:

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents … show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.

The alleged billing shell game went on for three summers, from 1999 through the first weekend in September 2001, just days before the attack by al Qaeda that brought down the World Trade Center towers.

Giuliani and Nathan were married in 2003.

Rove’s Latest Outrageous Lie: Says Congress Rushed Bush into War

Jon Ponder

First some ancient history: In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration was preoccupied with ramming its Iraq war resolution through Congress. It wasn’t that they needed the resolution to go to war. Not hardly.

What the Bush team wanted was to get the Congress on the record about the war before the midterm elections that November — in particular the resolution was intended to cause a rift between bloodthirsty voters back home and antiwar Democrats in the House. They also hoped to use votes for the resolution by Democratic senators who might run against Bush in 2004, including Sens. Kerry, Clinton, Edwards and Lieberman, to name a few, as a wedge issue to separate them from their liberal base.

The war resolution was part of a “marketing campaign,” as Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, referred to it, that had been put together by the Iraq Study Group, an elite corps inside the West Wing that included, among others, Karl Rove.

Last Wednesday, a mere five years after helping ram the war resolution through Congress, Karl Rove went on Charlie Rose and rewrote history as brazenly as it has ever been done:

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Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

But in truth, in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of the government.

— Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) English philosopher

Huckabee’s Record: Freed a Rapist Who Became a Killer, Destroyed Gov’t Hard Drives, Misappropriated Funds, Raised Taxes

Jon Ponder

Recent polls show that Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and Baptist preacher, is rising in popularity in Iowa, where he is cutting into Mitt Romney’s lead. (Romney has 28 percent, Huckabee has 24 percent in the ABC news survey; Romney is at 27 percent and Huckabee’s at 18 percent in the local KCCI-TV poll.) He’s also moving up in in Florida, where he’s running second to Rudolph Giuliani, 26 percent to 17 percent — leaving good ol’ boy actor Fred Thompson in fifth place with 9 percent.

With Thompson’s campaign fading, Huckabee becomes the last best hope for the GOP’s Christian nationalist base. Unlike Thompson, Huckabee is authentically one of them. He believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and says he does not believe in evolution. He wants to amend the Constitution to outlaw abortion, and he is the only candidate who has smeared a gay person in the debates, so far.

But Mike Huckabee comes with some serious baggage, and with his rise in the polls comes new scrutiny of his record as governor Arkansas, both in the media and by his opponents, who are quickly finding his record in Little Rock to be what opposition researchers might call a “target-rich environment.”

The scandals associated with the Huckabee administration in Arkansas include:

  • A rapist released at Huckabee’s behest who went on to murder his next victim
  • Accusations that Huckabee and his family misappropriated tax-payer funds for personal use
  • The charge that at the end of his term, Huckabee ordered the destruction of government computers worth over $300,000, apparently to obstruct possible future investigations
  • While he was governor, the state of Arkansas raised taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars

Details follow:

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In Case You Missed It

Trish

Today’s Shocker from Borowitz:

In a stunning development that has confounded medical experts around the world, doctors examining Vice President Dick Cheney said today that they have detected signs of a heart…

“We had been operating under the assumption that he didn’t have one,” said chief of staff David Addington, who said that Mr. Cheney also has not had a soul since 1995, when it was purchased by the Halliburton Company…

At the White House, spokesperson Dana Perino said that the sudden appearance of a heart in Dick Cheney’s chest had motivated President Bush to schedule an MRI of his head.

Maybe I Will Get to Vote for Kucinich After All

Buck Banks

As a registered Independent in Florida, I don’t get to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries — not that it would mean anything if I could. But if I could it would mean that I would at least have the opportunity of voting for Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich before his campaign gets ground to dust by the Clinton-Obama-Edwards juggernaut. Not that I necessarily would, but I might could, as they say up in North Carolina.

But even if Kucinich gets the snot kicked out of him in the primary, I might still get to vote for him in a third-party bid. National Journal columnist Craig Crawford sees a potentially potent third-party ticket of Kucinich and Republican presidential candidate Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Crawford even gins up some hints from the candidates themselves:

Kucinich is not a fierce partisan for the Democratic Party: ‘I don’t buy into that stuff.’

“I hear that a lot, but I haven’t really thought about it,” the Ohio congressman said of talk about running with his House colleague from Texas. “I like Ron Paul. He’s a real patriot. He and I will be working together in a lot of circumstances.”

Kucinich added that he is not a fierce partisan for the Democratic Party. “I don’t buy into that stuff,” he said. And he noted that in many lopsided House votes he and Paul often stand together against their parties — sometimes by themselves. “Kucinich-Paul. You’ll find that on more than a few roll calls.”

Both men are party outsiders — Paul ran on the Libertarian ticket in 1988 — but they also have significant differences in beliefs, Crawford notes:

While Kucinich’s pro-government philosophy and Paul’s libertarian credo might not mix at all levels, they are both passionately against the war in Iraq and dedicated to restoring congressional power under the Constitution.

But what adds some credibility to the possibility is Crawford’s conclusion about the two scrappy outsiders:

Running together in an independent effort would garner a lot more attention than continuing their party bids long after others have locked up the nominations.