Month: May 2010

Kentucky GOP-Tea Bagger Sen Candidate Rand Paul Won’t Say Whether Government Should Have Desegregated Woolworth’s Lunch Counters

Jon Ponder

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This is a major political misstep on Rand Paul’s part, and the fact that it comes less than 24 hours after he won the Republican primary in Kentucky does not bode well.

The question is, should the federal government have forced Woolworth’s to desegregate its lunch counters in the 1960s. A crafty pol who opposed the government’s desegregation of public accommodations, for whatever reason — racism or libertarianism — would have said, “The Civil Rights Act is settled law, and I support it.” Instead, Rand hammered away at the principle of enterprise free of government intervention — the foundational principle of libertarianism.

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Conservatives Show They are Anything But

Trish

ultrasoundBeing a conservative is more challenging since mass hysteria, aka, the Tea Party, entered the picture in the wake of the election of America’s first African-American president. If limited government whose purpose is not to foster social agendas was ever really what conservatism was about, it isn’t now.

Take a new law, currently on the governor’s desk to be signed (or hopefully, vetoed) in Florida. Demonstrating what happens when you get too many Republican men in a room together, the so-called conservative bill requires that women considering abortions must first schedule an ultrasound test in which the doctor describes to her the contents of her uterus, whether she wants to know about that yolk sac or not. Touting ultrasounds as non-invasive and therefore harmless led the National Institutes of Health to release this statement: “Ultrasound examination in pregnancy should be performed for a specific medical indication.”

Election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better

If the faux-conservative legislature gets its way, not only must the woman wait, with the clock ticking, for an appointment for a test she doesn’t want, she must also foot the bill for all this herself. Is it possible for government to be more intrusive in people’s private lives than this?

Marco Rubio, the so-called tea bagger candidate in the Florida Senate race, demonstrated a further failure of rhetoric with the recent announcement of his “policy committee.” Rubio, running on the outsider platform but squarely on the Republican ticket, is tapping entrenched Washington insiders Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as honorary committee chairs. No doubt they will bring fresh ideas on how to take our country back from…themselves. What’s wrong with this picture?

People who are against progressive initiatives like choice and a positive role for government are being played, again. Candidates pandering to tea bagger fears know what to say and do to appear to offer the answers, which are always both simple and vague. And election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better.

We as progressives have to figure out how to wake up our neighbors in this country that we all share, and get them to question the slogans and lies directed at them. If anyone out there knows a good way to do that, I’d love to hear it.

* Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in 2008 in Pennsylvania

KY Sen: Turnout Among Dems About a Third Higher Than GOP, Yet ‘Liberal’ Media Hands Night to Tea Bagger Rand Paul

Jon Ponder

Paul, left, and Conway
Paul, left, and Conway
Rand Paul’s win in the Republican primary yesterday has dominated the headlines coming out of Kentucky, in part because he is the first avowed tea bagger candidate to win a race (Sen. Scott Brown disavowed tea partiers’ support after he won in Massachusetts last year) and because he is the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a folk hero among libertarians.

Paul’s libertarian opposition to farm subsidies and overseas entanglements, including the Iraq war, may put him at odds with the war-mongering, big-government loving GOP base.

Paul handily defeated Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who had the strong support of Kentucky’s own Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 58.8 percent to 35.4 percent. On the Democratic side, Attorney General Jack Conway bested Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo in a squeaker, 44.1 percent to 43.0 percent. (Numbers are based on results at 5:10 a.m. Pacific, on May 19, 2010, with 99.5 percent of precincts counted.)

Just about anything tea baggers do makes headlines, so it is not surprising that the Beltway punditocracy and “liberal” media have all but anointed Rand Paul as the frontrunner in the general election. Maybe so, but voter turnout tallies suggest weak support for libertarian Paul among his party’s traditional Republican base.

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

Now that the sex lives of Supreme Court justices have become grist for commentators, we are finally free to discuss a question formerly only whispered about in the shadows: Why does Justice Antonin Scalia, by common consent the leading intellectual force on the Court, have nine children? Is this normal? Or should I say “normal,” as some people choose to define it? Can he represent the views of ordinary Americans when he practices such a minority lifestyle? After all, having nine children is far more unusual in this country than, say, being a lesbian.

— Michael Kinsley, TheAtlanticWire blog.

Sophisticated City Dwellers Have Greater Well-Being than Rural Goobers

Buck Banks

pitchfork_carrying_mob

According to a recent survey by the Gallup Organization, people who live in large metro areas demonstrate a higher level of health and general well-being than their small-town counterparts. Across six domains of wellbeing, only in the Work Environment domain do inhabitants of small towns and rural areas have scores superior to their counterparts who live in big metro areas.

For instance, in the well-being composite score, city dwellers hit 66.7 to rubes’ 64.2, a difference of 2.5. On the Life Evaluation domain, it was sophisticates 48.6 to goobers’ 40.1, or a whopping 8.5 difference. On the all-important issue of physical health, metros scored 78.0 to 74.1 for the hicks — a difference of 3.9.
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Rima Fakih Crowned Miss USA 2010, First Muslim (Sort of) to Hold Title

Jon Ponder

Miss USA 2010
Rima Fakih, Miss USA 2010
Update: Hold the presses. The pageant is investigating charges that Rima Fakih is a former champion pole dancer. (Not kidding.)

Last year, the Miss USA pageant was at the center of a proverbial firestorm of publicity after celebrity judge Perez Hilton asked Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, to state her views on gay marriage. As everybody knows, she said she was against it — albeit for reasons that were completely false.

“Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other,” said Prejean. “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage.”

Which, of course, we do not. Prejean lost the title, and later said she believed her statement cost her the crown. That point is moot, of course, because she would have lost it anyway when it was revealed that she’d starred in several self-made solo sex tapes.

This year, Rima Fakih, 24, a member of a powerful Lebanese Shiite family, was crowned Miss USA 2010:

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

We’re all Arizonans now and we say with clear unity: “Mr. President, do your job. Secure our border.”

— Sarah Palin, perfectly crystallizing the ongoing immigration debate in another one of her weird but oddly compelling-to-a-certain-percentage-of-the-populace catchphrases.