Their engagement is barely a month old, and people are already asking questions about the buddyish appearance of the so-called romance between Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Gay) and his fiancee, Carole Rome.
The lovebirds: “My tan’s darker than yours”
They may as well be an old married couple.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s sexy betrothed gave him a tie for his 52nd birthday Thursday.
“Well, it’s a …,” started Rome, about to reveal its brand. As a former New York City socialite, she did spend some time on Madison Avenue.
“Oh, let’s just keep that to ourselves,” Crist said, rolling his eyes, as he gently caressed the tie. “I hope it’s from Dillard’s.”
Strange that the Florida governor — whose hasty engagement is rumored to be more about trying to be picked as John McCain’s running mate than true love — would toss out Dillard’s, based in Arkansas, instead of Jacksonville’s own Stein Mart. Then again, sounds like he was in a hurry to cut Rome off before she gave away TMI about her finances.
Rome ran her family’s Halloween costume importing business until a few years ago, when she relinquished control to her sister and moved to Miami. No doubt she knows her way around a tie and Charlie’s is first-rate.
But I wonder what she’ll get him for Christmas. Maybe some really nice socks?
Is this bad or good? James Dobson, the maniacal fundamentalist (notice how that word has “mental” in it?) preacher beat out Howard Stern for inclusion in the National Radio Hall of Fame.
Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program is the first religious program to receive the honor, started in 1992 by the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications.
Speaking of crazy, but in a good way, alien-conspiracy-cover-up aficionado Art Bell will also be inducted. Those left out were Stern, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and Bob Costas. Bummer. I like Bob Costas.
Dobson was chosen in the “national active” category, which required a national broadcast contribution of at least 10 years. Orson Welles, Jack Benny, Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh are among the past honorees.
Pollster John Zogby’s new Electoral College analysis gives Barack Obama 273 EC votes to John McCain’s 146. Zogby says 119 votes are too close to call at this point in the election cycle.
Here are the latest changes and Zogby’s analysis on the Zogby Electoral College map:
Arkansas changes from purple to red: “It may look like a toss-up, but the conservative base is probably too solid for Obama to crack.”
Arizona changes from purple to red: “The state may be changing, but it is still home turf for McCain. Look for conservatives to come back to McCain.”
Florida changes from red to purple: “Seniors and whites provide McCain a cushion over Obama. However, no one should count votes here too soon.”
South Dakota changes from red to purple: “A tough call here, so we’ll shade it purple for now.”
Say you’re Al Franken. Your idol was Sen. Paul Wellstone, a man who exemplified what was right with America and with America’s Democratic system of government. But Paul Wellstone died, and his alter-ego from hell took his seat: a man whose only ideas are those placed in his head by the Bush neocons, who voted with Bush on everything — especially everything Iraq-related — but the surge. And he probably only voted against that because he was looking at re-election and knew the subject of the ongoing occupation, which he facilitated at every turn, might come up.
Bad incumbents through the ages have used the same tactic when they have only a poor record of their own (except for bringing back hockey, but that’s another subject) on which to run: ATTACK! It doesn’t get much worse than this ad from Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman:
Coleman’s going the old, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to sound like it is,” one better by keeping his smears so vague it’s hard to even know what the ad is really saying, let alone how to refute it. But it gives people the impression that Al Franken has done some very bad things, especially if your preferred source of news is porky white guys in shirts from three different bowling leagues.
We all know Al Franken had a career before he ran for office. We also know, from listening to him on Air America, that he gets it, and that he could help Congress reclaim its place as a co-equal branch of government.
The funny thing is, until 1996, Norm Coleman was a Democrat. When he was 20, Coleman celebrated his birthday at Woodstock. His college roommate, lawyer Norman Kent, recently took Coleman to task for hypocrisy on his past pot-smoking after Coleman toed the Republican line about the war on drugs.
My friend Norman,
Coleman during a Vietnam War protest
Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana…
Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows…yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s advice.
We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint.
You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good…
How about standing up and saying: “I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969.” That “I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal.” How about saying: “I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits.”
How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were?
Norm Kent
Those last words, about standing up for who you were, seem especially relevant. Coleman wants Franken to abandon his famous past, which aside from being in show business, consists of a 32-year marriage to his college sweetheart and fathering their two children, Thomasin, a 27-year-old Harvard graduate and, Joe, a 22-year-old Princeton grad.
If Franken wanted to go after Coleman with nods and winks and innuendo and whispers, it wouldn’t be hard. But then he wouldn’t be Al Franken. We know Franken will find an effective way to push forward, and we know it will take money.
Regardless of where you live, achieving the magic number of 60 Democrats in the Senate is vital. Help Al Franken return the seat once occupied by Paul Wellstone to its rightful owners: us. Please donate to Al Franken, the sooner, the better.
If you thought you could escape political ads by watching the Olympics, we have some bad news. A presidential candidate has bought $5 million in ads. The good news is, it’s Barack Obama!
Will this make him the Official Presidential Candidate of the U.S. Olympics?
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC Universal’s Olympics coverage. In the first significant network-TV buy of any presidential candidate in at least 16 years, the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads.
According to NBC’s political file, the campaign had initially requested information about 500,000, $2 million and $4 million package of Olympics spots. The network also offered the candidate a $10 million package.
So will this make him the Official Presidential Candidate of the U.S. Olympics? Maybe not officially.
The Obama campaign will join major advertisers including McDonald’s and Anheuser-Busch. The Beijing games begin with opening ceremonies Aug. 8.
If you’re wondering, the last person to buy time during the Olympics was Bob Dole. Hopefully Obama knows what he’s doing. And let’s face it, he hasn’t screwed up yet.
The buy comes as the Obama campaign continues to set fundraising records. Its decision not to accept federal matching money leaves it able to spend as much money as it can raise. The campaign reported it raised $52 million in June, compared with the nearly $21.5 million raised by his challenger, Sen. John McCain.
A chemical tanker collided today with a fuel barge from one of three nearby refineries in the Mississippi River near New Orleans, causing the barge to split in half and spill 420,000 gallons of oil into the waterways.
A sheen at least 12 miles long spread down river, and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said efforts were being made to minimize the impact on air and water quality and wildlife.
Drinking water intakes were diverted or closed in the area and citizens were asked to conserve water use to maximize supplies on hand pending resumption of water treatment operations, the New Orleans water department said.
Floridians have been told that Louisiana and Alabama allow drilling off their coasts and nothing bad ever happens to them. Right.
The Coast Guard has deployed 45,000 feet of inflatable booms to contain the spill and is lining up another 29,000 feet, but it could be days before the river is reopened, she said.
The accident left a sheen over 90 percent of the area, she said.
However, the spill is much smaller than the ones that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the Coast Guard estimated that more than 7 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Mississippi and nearby waterways.
While the accident is still under investigation, you can’t help but wonder if rough seas in the wake of Hurricane Dolly are partly to blame. But then again, Floridians been assured that oil operations always stand up to any weather challenge.
Presidencies are about looking forward, not backwards, so it was predictable that Barack Obama would signal that, if elected, he would have little interest in prosecuting the criminal acts of the current administration. If Nixon had been imprisoned, it’s doubtful that 30 years later Dick Cheney would have opted to exchange his seat as the head of Halliburton, where he was free to rape and pillage the world with impunity, for the vice presidency, where his power would have been constrained by the U.S. Constitution.
As predictable as Obama’s position is — John Kerry would likely have held the same view under similar circumstances, and certainly John McCain supports it — it is deeply troubling because of the seriousness of the crimes in question, which include lying to Congress about the rationale for war, authorizing torture, betraying a covert CIA agent, criminal negligence in the response to Hurricane Katrina, spying on Americans without warrants, using the Justice Department as the political enforcement arm of the Republican National Committee, election fraud and consorting with corrupt lobbyists, just for starters.
At the Netroots Nation meeting in Austin last weekend, Chicago Law School professor Cass Sunstein, an informal adviser to Obama, warned liberal activists not to expect Barack Obama, if he is elected, to prosecute Bush crimes unless the crimes are what Sunstein described as “egregious”:
[Sunstein] urged caution in prosecuting criminal conduct from the current administration, while also noting that egregious crimes should not be ignored. Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, he argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.
The fatal flaw in Sunstein’s formulation is that, in fact, there has not been a “cycle of criminalizing public service.” There has been one system of high accountability for Democrats and another system that allows Republican White House officials to escape any sort of accountability whatsoever.
While dozens of Clinton White House officials were dragged before Republican-controlled congressional committees hundreds of times for matters as petty as an investigation into the Clintons’ cat, none of which resulted in a charge of wrongdoing — and Clinton himself was more than held accountable for the crime of lying about an extramarital affair in a deposition for a civil lawsuit — Bush, Cheney and their associates have not been held accountable for a whole host of deliberate criminal acts, especially including lying to Congress and the American people about their reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was by all measures an “egregious” abuse of power that has resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
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%).”
The lovebirds: “My tan’s darker than yours”
Coleman during a Vietnam War protest
