Year: 2007

Yikes — Florida Dems’ Electoral Future Rests on Karen Thurman’s Shoulders

Buck Banks

The only good thing I can say about the fact that Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman will be in Washington tomorrow lobbying the national Democratic Party to not punish Florida Dems because the Republican-controlled Florida legislature moved the presidential primary to Jan. 29 is that she won’t be at the Barak Obama fundraiser in Miami. I bought tickets to see Obama and was not looking forward to having to listen to Thurman if she was participating in the event.

The potential smack-down by the national Democratic Party could have far graver repercussions than just screwing up Florida’s primary.

Instead, she’s going to be arguing her case before the Democratic National Committee, which holds the keys to whether Florida’s primary counts and whether candidates will be punished for campaigning in the state. As co-editor Trish admitted in an e-mail yesterday, the very thought of the defense of Florida’s electoral fate falling to Thurman made her feel queasy. Thurman sent an e-mail today asking Florida Dems to write messages explaining why their party should not be punished for something it — as the minority in the state legislature — could not have stopped.

As an Independent, I don’t get to vote in the presidential primary, and I have no plans (as my wife does) to switch to the Democrats just so I can. But the potential smack-down by the national Democratic Party could have far graver repercussions than just screwing up Florida’s primary. If candidates face punishment for campaigning in Florida, it’s likely some will just skip the state, which would help the Republicans. Worse, if the national party takes away delegate seats, it could mean that once again Floridians’ votes won’t count. But I’m not really worried — Karen Thurman is on the case. Yikes, I’m feeling a mite queasy myself.

Actually, the only thing that makes me feel optimistic about Thurman’s task tomorrow is that I don’t believe the national Democratic Party would be stupid enough to fault Florida Dems for breaking rules that they could not in any way not violate. It’s simply not the Fla. Dems’ fault that the Republican-dominated Florida legislature moved the primary date (Although one could argue that in a way it is, because the Florida Democratic Party is, as we Crackers say, useless as teats on a boar hog, and has, therefore, through its ineffectiveness ceded power to the Repugs).

So maybe this trip to Washington is just a formality, and it won’t really come down to how well Karen Thurman can make her case before Howard Dean, et al. Then maybe Trish will get over her queasiness and the Democratic Party won’t shoot itself in the foot and blow the presidential election.

Yeah, and the Army Corps of Engineers will fix the Everglades, Charlie Crist will admit to being the father of a love child and the Miami city administration will go a month without having a corruption scandal. Oh, and pigs will fly, too.

Former Christian Action League Pres. Pleads Guilty to Hooker Charges

Jon Ponder

Via Pam’s House Blend, Coy Privette — the 74-year-old right-wing Christian nationalist politician, former Baptist preacher and member of the Baptist State Convention, who was fired as the president of the Christian Action League after he was arrested June 19 for aiding and abetting prostitution — has pleaded guilty to those charges.

When we first reported this story, several Privette supporters wrote in to say that, despite the fact that the charges were investigated by North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation, the allegations were either erroneous or trumped up and politically motivated to take down a prominent spokesman for “family values.”

Summers taped phone conversations with Privette for investigators and gave police a picture of Privette kissing her cheek, which she took with her camera phone.

Now that Privette has pleaded guilty, the preponderance of the evidence against him has been revealed:

Privette, who has made few public appearances since his June 19 arrest, had to sit in public and watch as [a prosecutor] spelled out details about investigators’ evidence that he paid Salisbury resident Tiffany Denise Summers for sex six times from May 4 through June 25.

Investigators had records from two Salisbury hotels where Privette signed in under his own name. They had separate security tape images showing Privette and Summers in the same hotels on the same days.

They also had evidence from Summers, 32, who cooperated with authorities once investigators called her in.

She taped phone conversations with Privette for investigators and gave police a picture of Privette kissing her cheek, which she took with her camera phone.

He was sentenced to 48 hours of community service and a year of probation, and is required to undergo counseling and pay court costs.

Privette still holds elective office on the Cabarrus County Commission in suburban Charlotte.

Just Like Iraq? On the Campaign Trail with the Romney Boys

Trish

The Romney Boys in Iowa: “Craig got the strawberry rhubarb, Josh and I got the cherry.”

From the Five Brothers blog: “Craig, Josh and I had about as much fun as allowed on a campaign last weekend in Iowa. Road trips and bike rides are very low key ways to get out and stump for the old man…We laughed a lot that weekend, especially when Craig started getting desperate for food halfway through the ride. At one point I remember turning to him and saying, “Isn’t this fun?” to which he gruffly replied: ‘I’m seriously grumpy right now. We have to get food NOW!!’ …we finally found a farm that was selling homemade cookies, pies and ice cream…Craig got the strawberry rhubarb, Josh and I got the cherry.”

What’s crashingly offensive about Romney’s response isn’t a small set of ill-chosen words but the entire universe of assumptions behind them.

Columnist Froma Harrop got right to the heart of what was wrong with Mitt Romney equating his sons’ participation in his campaign with serving in Iraq. Supporters of the former Massachusetts governor and forever Mormon later characterized the question about why his sons aren’t serving in Iraq as “rude.”

We know that the armed forces are all-volunteer (“the good news,” Mitt said) and that few children of the rich have much to do with it. If military service were a prerequisite for becoming president, most of the current contenders would be out of the running. The only candidates making the cut would be Arizona Sen. John McCain, California Rep. Duncan Hunter and Texas Rep. Ron Paul on the Republican side, and Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel on the Democratic.

What’s crashingly offensive about Romney’s response isn’t a small set of ill-chosen words but the entire universe of assumptions behind them. Throughout the campaign, Romney has showcased his athletic boys, ages 26 to 37, as all that is good about America and himself. It apparently never occurred to him that anyone in the audience would place his five princes in the same thought as Sadr City.

The official Romney Website even features a “Five Brothers” blog — a youthful jaunt across a cloudless America that seems solar systems away from the Sunni Triangle. Son Craig talks about how he and brothers Josh and Matt participated in the Annual Great Bicycle Ride across Iowa. (Two of them had trained on a hotel’s stationary bikes, we are told.) Photos show the clan boating in New Hampshire, bonding after a volleyball match and enjoying a game at Boston’s Fenway Park.

And the boys’ day jobs? Ben attends medical school in Boston, Craig works for an ad agency in New York, Josh develops real estate in Salt Lake City, and Matt manages commercial properties in San Diego.

Tagg helps run his father’s campaign and gets a bit political on his blog. He writes that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, wants to “raise taxes, grow government, take over health care and run away from Iraq.”

So while the “chickenhawk” label could stick to most of the candidates, there’s something especially jarring about the Romney family portrait: six hunky males, all untouched by military service. (During the Vietnam War, Mitt obtained a draft deferment to do missionary work in France.)

As part of his answer to the “rude” question, Romney called for a “surge of support” for the troops. A more politically astute response would have been to propose a national program requiring everyone’s children, including his own, to serve their country in some fashion.

It’s a good bet that the idea never crossed his mind.

Hate Crimes Bill Will Not Restrict Bigots from Using the ‘N-Word’ – Or Ministers from Preaching Hate against Gays

Jon Ponder

Jesus Cries When Christians Lie

A new version of the hate crimes law being debated in Congress would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of currently covered conditions, including race, color, religion, national origin, gender or disability.

If hateful speech and thoughts about blacks were illegal, 99 percent of the Republican Party would be in jail.

Christian extremists, including a cadre of rightwing African-American preachers, are engaged in a coordinated disinformation campaign to convince their followers that this new law, dubbed the Matthew Shepherd Act, would institute new penalties, including jail time, for their hate speech against gays.

Of course, the bill has no such language. Speech, even hate speech, is fully protected under the First Amendment. The new law only criminalizes actions that lead to the bodily harm of the protected groups.

In editorial in the Los Angeles Times today, Geoffrey Stone debunks the Christian disinformation campaign:

[…]

Bush 2004: Comparing Iraq and Vietnam ‘Sends Wrong Message’ to Troops, Enemies

Jon Ponder

BONUS AUDIO CLIP
Bush: “Perhaps the most important lesson that I learned in Vietnam is that you cannot fight a guerrilla war with conventional forces.”

Today, George Bush lectured the country about the dangers of deploying out of Iraq by comparing leaving Iraq to the end of the Vietnam war. On “Countdown” tonight, MSNBC played a snippet from Bush at a news conference in 2004 literally bristling at the same comparison, and all but accusing those who made it of hating the troops and giving aid and comfort to the enemy:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, April [2004] is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half Americans now support it. What does that say to you and how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

THE PRESIDENT: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.

Get Yer Green On — Daily

Buck Banks

Although we are loathe to send you, gentle reader, away from Pensito Review, sometimes there’s stuff on the Internets out there that is worth sharing. Like The Daily Green, a daily e-mail newsletter from Hearst that has just started being distributed this week. It is what its name implies — a daily compendium of good stuff for the planet.

From earth-friendly veggie recipes (Trish and Jon will be happy) to biodegradable doggie poop pick-up bags (Spot, Bonnie and Pookey will be thrilled) to profiles of green people (Brad Pitt!!??) and tips on how you can change your lifestyle to be easier on Ma Earth (skip the bleach when washing clothes), The Daily Green is a good, practical resource. And it’s free, too.

In the same vein, check out Grist Magazine (environmental news and commentary) and its consistently entertaining advice column, Ask Umbra. Both are free, too.

Chickenhawk Bush Has the Gall to Lecture Americans on Vietnam

Jon Ponder

When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Bush is in effect saying that Vietnam could have been won if only we’d stayed there longer — that winning would have only required a few tens of thousand more lives lost — other than his own, of course.

As is well known, Bush’s elite status entitled him to a cushy berth in a “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard. Associates from that era remember young Bush as being preoccupied with doing drugs, driving drunk and chasing women. There are rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway while hungover. And there is strong circumstantial evidence he was discharged less than honorably after failing to show up for a series of Pentagon-mandated drug tests.

With that in mind, here is how Bush today, rewriting and politicizing the war he sat out:

The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end…

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

[…]

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

A man’s judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it … Give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process and make him something less than a man.

— Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (1891-1968), publisher of The New York Times