Day: July 3, 2008

Newsflash: Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is Getting Married — To a Woman!

Trish
The future Mrs. Charlie Crist

Pull out your wallets, kids, and prepare to wager. We’ll need two separate pools. One is for the person who most closely predicts how soon Charlie Crist, 51 and gay, will call off his engagement to Carole Rome, 38 and not quite divorced yet, if John McCain doesn’t pick him as his running mate. The other is for how long the marriage will last if McCain does pick him, or alternatively, if Charlie goes through with it just to prove he’s not gay. Which he is. Gay.

But first, let’s enjoy Charile’s newfound bliss vicariously, by reading how his engagement came to be.

Crist, 51, asked Carole Rome to marry him Thursday morning at his St. Petersburg apartment, giving her a blue sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds. She immediately said yes.

“I’m very happy and couldn’t be more pleased. What a great way to celebrate America’s birthday,” said Crist, who has been mentioned as a potential running mate for Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “We’ve been talking about it for quite a while. I asked her while we were looking out over Tampa Bay and I couldn’t think of a better place to do it.”

O.K., how many men not in the closet say they “couldn’t be more pleased” that the woman they passionately love accepted their proposal? And how many describe the experience as “a great way to celebrate America’s birthday?” That would be…let’s see…rounding off to the next decimal point…carrying the one…adjusting for the Eastern time zone…yeah, zero.

But maybe Charlie was flummoxed by the scope of it all.

Asked what made him fall in love, Crist said, “Her beautiful smile, her sweetness, her brilliance — all of it.”

“All of it?” “It?” Did he really just say, “all of it?” Why not, “Et cetera, et cetera. I am the king?”

Charlie is blaming his years of bachelorhood on the bad experience he had when he attempted heterosexual marriage in his youth. That time, the union lasted days.

“It made me be very selective, candidly. Those things tend to make you gun-shy a little bit, but I’m so blessed to have found such a wonderful woman,” Crist said. “It sure is great to find the right one…

“It will be awfully nice to have her at the mansion. It’s a big place to have to be alone in,” he said.

Yeah, once she moves in they can watch movies together and try each other’s sun screens (hope hers is better than his), and swap Lean Cuisines and stuff. Fun! But here’s the kicker.

Rome was previously married to Blue Star Jets president Todd Rome. She has two daughters, aged 9 and 11, but Crist said he hopes the couple has a child of their own someday.

She’s 38, Charlie. Someday better be real soon or you might have to use third-party assists like artificial insemination. Whoops, my bad.

Find Out How Others Were Stimulated

Trish

It’s not Friday but it feels like it is, and you know what that means! Time to goof off and kill work hours online until the parties start. And have I got the fritter-er for you.

www.HowISpentMyStimulus.com is a bizarre cross between MySpace and PostSecret, but of course the subject is how people spent their stimulus checks. Some of it is pretty stimulating.

  • Vials of sperm (shipping not included)
  • A tiny garden behind a teeny, tiny house
  • Payment toward a new president (contribution to Obama campaign)
  • Annual check-up and shots for yellow Lab
  • Child’s club foot surgery
  • “A nice fat sack of Herbage”

And on and on. The site is nicely done, and for some reason I probably don’t want to understand, utterly fascinating. Go see.

Guess Who’s Coming to July Fourth BBQ

Buck Banks

It’s summertime and the season is silly.
bbq.jpg
A new Associated Press poll released Wednesday finds that more Americans would rather have Barack Obama than John McCain come to their Independence Day barbecue:

While many are still deciding who should be president, by 52 percent to 45 percent they would prefer having Obama than McCain to their summer cookout, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Wednesday.

Men are about evenly divided between the two while women prefer Obama by 11 percentage points. Whites prefer McCain, minorities Obama. And Obama is a more popular guest with younger voters while McCain does best with the oldest.

Having Obama to a barbecue would be like a relaxed family gathering, while inviting McCain “would be more like a retirement party than something fun,” said Wesley Welbourne, 38, a systems engineer from Washington, D.C.

Party label means a lot, with three-quarters of Democrats picking the Democrat Obama and the same number of Republicans picking McCain, a Republican. Independents are about evenly split.

“John and I would probably have a lot to talk about,” said Republican Michael Mullen, 53, of Merrimac, Mass., like McCain a Navy veteran.

One in six people saying they’d vote for McCain prefer Obama as their barbecue guest; just one in 20 Obama backers would invite McCain.

McFlipflop: McCain Flipflops on Criticizing Obama Just Hours After He Criticized Obama for Flipflopping

Jon Ponder

Last week we noted that John McCain had managed to complete a full 180-degree reversal on his position on offshore drilling in a mere 18-day period. Now he’s topped that record by reversing a stated position within a single news cycle. Traveling in Colombia, he told reporters that he wouldn’t criticize Obama while he was overseas, but on the plane a few hours earlier he had criticized Obama while speaking to these same reporters for, what else, changing his position on trade:

“I believe that partisanship ends at the water’s edge,” McCain said emphatically, when asked about Obama at a press conference at the Colombian Presidential retreat here.

But on the inaugural flight of the Straight Talk Express — airborne edition -– McCain felt freer to let loose.

On the plane, he blasted Obama’s opposition to the proposed Colombia free trade deal.

“He’s a protectionist and anti-free trade,” McCain said. “Now he has switched, I mean remarkably, from saying that he would unilaterally renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement in the strongest possible terms in Ohio – he went to North Carolina and said well, I’m for free trade.

“It wouldn’t surprise me to see him switch on this one,” McCain said.

For his next trick, McCain will reverse himself before he even speaks.