The Chinese gentleman smiled as he replied, “If, as you say, my ancestors are all in hell at this moment, it would be unfilial of me not to be willing to suffer with them.”
This item was apparently “dumped” into late Friday news cycle last week, although it’s unclear who was trying to downplay it, James Dobson, the leader of the tax-exempt anti-gay group, Focus on the Family (FOTF), or Mike Huckabee, the no-shot Republican presidential candidate:
Ironically, evangelical Christian couples have a higher divorce rate that normal couples, and yet their leaders are too obsessed with their hatred of gay people to act against this this scourge within the church family.
James Dobson, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical Christian leaders, backed Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid Thursday night, giving the former Arkansas governor a long-sought endorsement as the Republican field narrowed to a two-man race.
In a statement first obtained by The Associated Press, Dobson reiterated his declaration on Super Tuesday that he could not in good conscience vote for John McCain, the front-runner, because of concerns over the Arizona senator’s conservative credentials.
Dobson and his confederates promote FOTF as an advocacy group for “moral values.” However, it apparently does not concern them that Huckabee has two advisers who are notorious adulterers: Dick Morris, the professional Clinton-hater who consorted with prostitutes while married, and Rev. Tim Hutchinson, the former Arkansas senator who was conducting an extramarital affair in 1998 when he voted to convict Pres. Clinton for lying about having an affair with a staffer.
(Similarly, Pat Robertson, the TV preacher who also raises millions by promoting homophobia, endorsed Rudolph Giuliani, a serial adulterer, whose second wife learned he was leaving her for another woman when he announced it at a news conference.)
After Sen. David Vitter, R-La., an unctuous spouter of family values, admitted last year that he’d consorted with call girls back when he served in the House, there were no calls for his resignation from his Senate colleagues and certainly no investigations launched by the Senate Ethics Committee.
Why? Not because these senators disapprove — or care — about Vitter’s predilection for paying for it (and reportedly wearing diapers when doing so). No, the issue is numbers. If Vitter had resigned, the governor of Louisiana, a Democrat at the time, would have replaced him with a Democrat, which would have tilted the already tight balance of power in the Senate one more seat to the left.
But when it comes to gay sex shenanigans, there’s no such reticence. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Id. — no less a family values spouter than Vitter — was not even seeking to pay for the sex he was after in an airport men’s room last summer. And yet, the Senate Ethics Committee is coming down hard:
The Senate Ethics Committee said Senator Larry Craig engaged in “improper conduct” during and after his arrest in a Minneapolis airport bathroom by seeking to withdraw his guilty plea and showing his business card to the arresting officer.
“We consider your attempt to withdraw your guilty plea to be an attempt to evade the legal consequences of an action freely undertaken by you — that is, pleading guilty,” the committee wrote, according to a letter posted on its Web site yesterday.
The panel said that Craig’s showing his Senate business card could be construed as an attempt to receive special treatment. The committee also criticized him for failing to secure its approval to use campaign funds to pay legal fees.
So Vitter did not expect, and receive, special treatment from the DC Madam because he was a member of Congress?
What Craig did was illegal. Having sex in a public bathroom is tacky, gross and a public nuisance. But what Vitter did was also illegal — and, yes, the statute of limitations had expired — but to ignore his shenanigans while pursuing Craig wreaks of homophobia.
There is no doubt that Barack Obama has what the elder George Bush called “Big Mo’.” In a conference call early today, his campaign manager, Pavid Plouffe, told reporters that by their reckoning:
If current trends hold, Clinton needs to win the four remaining big states in order to stay even in the delegate race.
Obama now leads Clinton by 136 pledged delegates. Because Democrats split primary and caucus votes proportionally, Clinton would have to win the remaining contests in “blowout form” to pull even with Obama, Plouffe argued.
That includes the big showdowns on March 4 in Texas and Ohio, where Plouffe said Clinton would have to win by well over 20 points to significantly close the gap.
“We see absolutely no evidence in any of the contests remaining that that would be the case,” he said. “The math is the math.”
Following Obama’s string of victories since the weekend, Plouffe said, “We believe that we couldn’t be in a stronger position.”
A lot of people, notably my colleague Trish and, especially, Air America talkshow host Randi Rhodes, are upset at the prospect that even if Obama wins the regular delegate count, Clinton could take the nomination by having more superdelegates.
But if the trends hold, Obama will continue to win by large margins, roughly 2 to 1, while Clinton’s wins will remain narrower, roughly 55 percent to 45 percent.
Plouffe may be overstating a bit what it would take for Clinton to remain even, however. She could still win with slim majorities in Wisconsin (Feb. 19) and the four remaining big states — Ohio and Texas (March 4), Pennsylvania (April 22) and North Carolina (May 6), which would give her the momentum to win narrowly in a few small rural states like Wyoming (March 8), Guam (May 9) and Montana and South Dakota (May 20).
This would leave Obama with lopsided wins in small states including Hawaii (his home state, Feb. 19), Rhode Island (March 4), Mississippi (March 8), Kentucky and Oregon (May 20) and Puerto Rico (June 7).
Trends suggest otherwise, however. If Clinton does not win both Ohio (161 delegates) and Texas (228 delegates) on March 4, it will be harder for her to win Pennsylvania (158 delegates) and North Carolina (115 delegates).
She has weaknesses in both of the latter. If the Philadelphia suburbs trend with their Delmarva neighbors instead of New Jerseyites, she might not be able to make up the difference in Pittsburgh and the central region. North Carolina could well tally up more like Virginia than Tennessee. Tar Heel Democratic demographics skew toward Obama. African-Americans comprise roughly 30 percent of the state, and college-educated professionals dominate in its two largest metro areas, Charlotte and Raleigh.
For Clinton, it appears that it all comes down to Ohio and and Texas in three weeks. Otherwise, the contest is Obama’s to lose.
As more and more of us are waking up, thanks in part to Bill Clinton’s performance on the stump, to how much we don’t want to relive the Clinton years anew, the Howard Dean-led Democratic party seems poised to do the inescapable: screw up big.
In a piece titled, “Democrats: Are They Dumber than Concrete?” Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas frames the issue.
Consider this scenario, which no longer seems so far-fetched:
Barack Obama goes into the convention having won the majority of primaries and delegates. But he doesn’t have enough delegates to win the nomination.
And so the superdelegates — a group of politicians and political insiders — go into their star chamber and pick Hillary Clinton.
The fallout not only would cost Democrats the November election but would haunt them for many elections to come.
Democrats in Florida are fed to the teeth with their votes being thrown out, first by the Supreme Court and then by Howard Dean, who issued a fatwa on us after the Florida legislature changed our primary date. But the rest of the country will be feeling our pain if that idiot facilitates ramming the Candidate of Self-Proclaimed Inevitability down our throats.
Even superdelegate and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who cheered Dean on as he banned Florida from participating in selecting a nominee, has threatened publicly to leave the party if the superdelegates prematurely anoint a candidate contrary to that chosen by the people.
In an email funds solicitation today, Howard Dean said, “I think we’ll have a nominee before the convention.”
What does that mean, Howie?
Right now, Obama is ahead. Going in to Texas and Ohio, the tally stands at Clinton with 1220 delegates and Obama with 1259, out of 2,025 needed to win the nomination on the convention floor. If that’s where it happens.
Clinton has recalled Bill from the campaign trail, first not paid and then replaced her campaign manager, loaned her campaign $5 million of her own money, and pissed off Barbara Walters by not settling to just get a pundit suspended for saying Chelsea was being “pimped out” by her mom’s campaign (even as the former first daughter made headlines for handing out doughnuts in a polling place, and then remaining there after the voting started, and for taking a 21-year-old superdelegate to breakfast), but also calling for the guy’s head on a platter. As we suffered through all this, Clinton lost the last ten elections in a row.
Meanwhile, Obama sailed along, embodying the h-word,* as well as the c-word,** and winning, winning, winning.
So if Democrats resort to a superdelegate maneuver to foist Clinton upon us, then I have an answer for columnist Thomas.
“Yes. But maybe dumber.”
* Hope
** Change
*** Duh
Nothing underscores the fantastical thinking of conservatives more than their propensity to justify torture based entirely on scenarios out of the television action drama, “24.”
If terrorist’s bomb was ticking, “it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that.”
– Scalia
The show — which is produced by friends of Rush Limbaugh, including Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, who accompanied him on a Viagra-fueled vacay on a Caribbean island in 2006 — features weekly potboilers with all the dramatic substance of “Perils of Pauline” and similar cliffhanger series from the classic movie era. The plots are beyond far-fetched, of the sort that could never happen in real life in a million years.
And yet the latest wingnut to base a legal interpretation of the legality of torture on the television show — although he never mentions the show by name — is no less an august personage than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a radio interview broadcast Tuesday that interrogators can inflict pain to obtain critical information, such as the location of a bomb about to explode or the plans or whereabouts of a terrorist group.
“It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia told the BBC’s “Law in Action” program.
Scalia said that determining when physical coercion could come into play was a difficult question. “How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction,” he said.
And:
“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture,” he said. “Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?
“Is it obvious, that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it’s not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.”
Of course, the Islamic terrorists are in de facto suicide pacts when they launch attacks, so there is nothing that would prevent the tortured prisoner from lying and thus achieving two objectives: blowing up Los Angeles and punching his ticket for entry to heaven and the 90 virgins who await him.
In an unrelated but equally unbelievable statement, Scalia asserted that he is not the bad-tempered jerk he appears to be.
“I’m very tender,” he told an interviewer.
Apparently, John Edwards is among those in the Democratic Party who fear that Barack Obama’s content-less platitudes are a souffle that will quickly deflate under withering attacks being readied against him by GOP operatives, should he become the Democratic nominee:
As he weighs a possible endorsement in the Democratic race, former Sen. John Edwards is as split as the party he once hoped to lead — and is seriously considering supporting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, despite the sharp criticism he leveled at her on the campaign trail, according to former aides and advisers.
In deciding between his one-time rivals, Edwards appears deeply divided. Several former advisers likened his thought process to a heart-versus-head split — with his heart favoring Sen. Barack Obama’s strong message of change, and his head attracted to Clinton’s tested nature and commitment to tough fights.
And:
On Obama, the [unidentified Edwards] aide says, Edwards worries “whether he’s tough enough to be President of the United States. If you look at what Edwards ran on, which is not negotiating with the special interests, taking away their power, that’s pretty different than the Obama model.”
The Edwards aide added that Obama’s lack of a health care plan with a “mandate” is a “tough hurdle for him to get over.” He added, however, that Edwards is much more in line with Obama on other issues.
While there is ceaseless debate about whether Obama’s political experience qualifies him to be president — Abraham Lincoln had less; George Bush had more, so go figure — one thing is not debatable: He has never run in a competitive race against a Republican. He held a safe seat for three terms in the Illinois Senate, and when he attempted to unseat incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, he was defeated in the Democratic primary. His GOP opponent in the 2004 U.S. Senate race was Alan Keyes, a laughingstock African-American pundit who moved to Illinois to take on Obama but ran a shoestring operation and never launched a meaningful, much less aggressive, campaign.
Despite Edwards’ wavering, the odds favor his endorsing Obama because, for one thing, the party’s momentum is moving that way. But if Edwards did not have grave doubts about Obama’s ability to take on Republicans and his readiness to be president, he surely would have endorsed him by now.
Arizona Republican legislators are so worried about depressed turnout among their base in November if their senator, John McCain, is the GOP nominee that they have introduced a bill that would put yet another anti-gay marriage before voters on the general election ballot this fall. Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts documents the absurdity:
The real purpose of this ballot measure, of course, is to throw out red meat to entice voters for Mike Huckabee — who has made homophobia a hallmark of his presidential campaign — to go to the polls.
But wait … Didn’t we already vote on that, you ask?
Well … yes. We did. In 2006, the Protect Marriage Arizona amendment was put to a public vote, and it failed. Not because voters support gay marriage – most don’t – but because the proposal reached too far, outlawing domestic-partner benefits to government employees who decide to take a pass on a trip to the altar.
(Because, you know, anything straight people want to do is just fine.)
But wait. Don’t we already have a state law that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, you ask?
Well … yes. We do. But you know how those activist judges can be.
But wait. Hasn’t the state law that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman already been upheld by those activist judges, you ask?
Well … yes. The Arizona Court of Appeals in 2003 ruled that the law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman is constitutional.
So naturally, legislative leaders on Monday introduced a proposed amendment to the state constitution, decreeing “only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as marriage in this state.”
All but three Republican legislators have signed on to co-sponsor the bill, which would do absolutely nothing to ban gay marriage.
The real purpose of this ballot measure, of course, is to throw out red meat to entice voters for Mike Huckabee — who has made homophobia a hallmark of his presidential campaign — to go to the polls.
Of course, the initiative may be as unnecessary politically as it is legally if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, since rightwing Christians have a propensity for racism as well as homophobia.
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.
