Author: Trish
McCain: Listen to What I Say But Ignore What I Did
As each of the Republican front runners in the 2008 presidential campaign competes for the favor of evangelicals — and falls short of their harsh, parochial judgement — we hear the same sanctimonious defense: “But my private life doesn’t influence my public service.”
John McCain is the only the latest in a string of GOP hypocrites that includes Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich.
John McCain, who remarried one month after his 1980 divorce, said Friday that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who remarried one month after his 1980 divorce, said Friday that the personal lives of White House hopefuls shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign.
“I would like to see this campaign conducted on past record and ambition for the future,” McCain told reporters after a fundraising luncheon in Charlotte, N.C. “I would hope that gossip — or, quote, ‘family issues’ — would not enter into this campaign.”
Well golly, straight talkin’ John, that sounds good. Almost as good as you sounded when you voted to convict Pres. Clinton on impeachment charges for attempting to hide an extramarital affair back in 1999.
The President’s offenses were committed to cover up private not public misconduct. Therefore, if he thwarted justice he did so for the perfectly understandable and forgivable purpose of keeping hidden an embarrassing personal shortcoming that, were it discovered, would harm only his family and his reputation, but would not impair our system of government.
This, too, is an appealing rationalization for acquittal. But it is just that, a rationalization…
The President’s defenders want to know how can I be certain that the offenses, even if true, warrant removal from office. They are not expressly mentioned in the Constitution as impeachable offenses. Nor did the founders identify perjury or obstruction as high crimes or high misdemeanors. Were an ordinary citizen accused of perjury in a civil proceeding he or she would in all likelihood not be prosecuted or forced out of political necessity into a perjury trap.
No, an ordinary citizen would not be treated as the President has been treated. But ordinary citizens don’t enforce the laws for the rest of us…
Presidents are not ordinary citizens. They are extraordinary, in that they are vested with so much more authority and power than the rest of us…And accordingly, regretfully, I must vote to convict the President, and urge my colleagues to do the same.’
Gee Johnny, here you’ve been living all ordinary and stuff, and now you want us to elevate you to superhuman perfection with our votes. No wonder cousin Jon calls you — derisively — “St. McCain.”
Gingrich Got Blown While Attacking Bill Clinton’s Blowjobs
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.
“The honest answer is yes,” Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. “There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There’s certainly times when I’ve fallen short of God’s standards.”
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton’s infidelity.
Because…?
Bush Bemoans Language Disadvantage in Latin America
Bush: “I wish now I had learned to speak Latin”
Protests — from graffiti to waved signs to chanted slogans — greet the president and first lady as they tour Latin America.
Fresh graffiti reading “Get Out, Bush! Assassin!” in bright red letters popped up along busy highways near the locations in Sao Paulo where Bush will appear as he kicks off his Latin American tour.
Viewing the display, with lips moving as he tried to sound out the words, Bush leaned over to the Lauratron 2007 and said, “I wish now I had learned to speak Latin.”
Yes, I’m kidding.
Edwards Says No to Fox Noise Channel
Go John! Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards turned down a debate opportunity in Nevada if it meant having to deal with Fox “News.”
The state’s Democratic Party — led in part by Sen. Harry Reid, a Mormon — forged a “partnership” with the biased broadcaster, supposedly in order to reach a more diverse group of voters. That would be the “Minds Locked Down Tighter Than Guantanamo” block, I guess. Even they now admit it’s not working.
…in a letter posted Wednesday on the party’s Web site, Democratic Party Chairman Tom Collins said Reid now shares activists’ concerns and “has asked us to take another look.”
Dogpile Metasearch Engine Pulls Ads Off Coulter Site
What a relief! I was muy dismayed earlier this week when I found out my favorite metasearch engine, Dogpile, advertised on Ann Coulter’s web site.
If you’re not familiar with a metasearch engine, also known as an aggregator, check it out. Dogpile — and the rest — put your search terms out there on many, many single engines, like the G-site and the Y-site, for examples, and give you the results from all of them, all at once. Plus, there’s a neat little mascot dog that wags its tail while you type in the box. Can’t beat that.
You can see why I was pretty heartbroken about the skank site ads. But before I unbookmarked Dogpile for good, I sent them an email and asked them to pull their ads from Harpy.com. At first, they said they were still mulling it over. I conferred with Jon, who suggested I help them clarify things by asking if they would have so much trouble deciding what to do if Coulter had used the n-word instead of the f-word in a public forum.
Very quickly, I was informed Dogpile had decided to pull its advertising from the Coulter site. Hooray!
The next time you’re trying to find something online, use Dogpile. I wish they had never been on Coulter’s site to begin with, but I applaud their decision to rectify the mistake.
New Governor: Dump “Darkeys” and Faux Florida State Song
Among the many controversies (and we’ll get to some in later posts) that Florida’s new kinder, gentler Republican-lite governor, Charlie Crist, has brought about is whether to change the state song. Even those of us who never really knew we had a state song can guess what it might be. That’s right, Stephen Foster’s classic, “Old Folks at Home,” popularly known as “Way Down Upon the Suwannee River.”
Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee” sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize
It all started when Crist — who can’t pass a day without being compared to California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger for his “populist,” centrist, two-month-old leadership — decided to forgo the playing of the state song during his inauguration ceremony. No one seemed to miss it at the time, what with all the other festivities, but later Crist was asked to explain the omission.
”There are lyrics in it that are, in the opinion of some, a derogatory reference to some time in our historical past that involves slavery,” Crist said. ”I can’t condone it.”
Since he said that, people like me who know the first couple of lines and then hum, have been wondering what the actual lyrics are, and how this got to be Florida’s state song. What the research turns up is fascinating.
For starters, Pennsylvanian Stephen Foster never set foot in Florida, and his song wasn’t even about Florida until Foster realized that “Swanee,” as he spelled it, sounded better than “Peedee,” the river in South Carolina he originally sought to memorialize.
Wait, it gets better. Foster wrote the song in 1851 for E.P. Christy and his traveling show, “Christy’s Minstrels.” It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and by the 1880s, was credited with starting Florida’s tourist industry. But a look at the lyrics is enough to make you recoil, or guffaw, or both. […]
Hawaiian Rep Calls Bush Emergency Iraq Budget “Baloney”
U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D — Hawaii), has given us talking points for when Republicans start claiming Democrats are the bad guys by refusing to keep up Bush’s sham emergency funding of his wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abercromie is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, and he’s followed the money trail.
Some of the so-called emergency replacement items in the 2007 request won’t even be available until 2010 or later
The Bush administration has asked Congress to approve $93.4 billion in emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of 2007 and another $141.7 billion for next year. This, on top of a proposed 2008 defense budget of $481.4 billion.
Please note that the two supplemental appropriations requests are termed “emergency,” which ought to mean unexpected or unpredictable costs. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been funded through emergency spending requests since they began. …
Why is a supplemental request the budget vehicle of choice? Because as an emergency measure, it doesn’t count against the budget ceiling that Congress adopts to guide spending, and therefore isn’t figured into government estimates of our annual budget deficit. So, for the last four years, these emergency spending bills have helped President Bush obscure the true cost of the war.
As “emergency” legislation, these supplemental requests don’t get the same scrutiny as regular annual appropriation bills. In fact, for the last five years, there’s been heavy pressure from the administration and the Republican majority in Congress to approve them quickly and without argument. Those who have opposed, or even questioned, any part have been accused of “not supporting our troops.”
The Bush administration is already saying that if it doesn’t get everything it wants — or if Congress adds requirements for troop readiness or demands for protective equipment — our men and women in combat will run out of bullets or be left stranded in the desert.
Baloney.
PBS to Air Inconvenient Truths About Mormons — and Romney
PBS is working on a two-part special on Mormons, set to air April 30 and May 1. The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam says it could hurt Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney, since the less Joe Sixpack knows about the tenets of the cult (oops, I said the C-word), the better.
“PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week…It’s bad math for the Mittster”
The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons call themselves, cooperated with “The American Experience ” and “Frontline, ” the show’s co-producers. [Filmmaker Helen] Whitney in turn pays the church the compliment of taking its faith very seriously indeed. The positives are there for all to see: the Mormons’ triumph over persecution in mid-century America; the dramatic “exodus” from Illinois to Utah, the “country no one else wanted,” according to Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of the Mormon pioneers; the devotion to family and community.
But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange…
“The Mormons” even tackles the ultimate red herring, “celestial marriage,” Joseph Smith’s term for polygamy…”The Mormons” estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 fundamentalist believers practice polygamy. Whitney has footage of 11 happy children passing plates around the dinner table, with three mothers and a father in attendance. Heather has three Mommies! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Michael Sullivan, “Frontline” executive producer for special projects, calls the project “respectful but frank. We’re not out to get the Mormons.” He says “there is a small section on Romney” in the portion of the documentary that is still being edited. Romney declined to be interviewed for the show.
What does it all mean? PBS claims it has 75 million viewers a week. Let’s say one-tenth — no, one-twentieth — of that audience watches “The Mormons.” That’s almost 4 million men and women who will know more about the Mormon faith than Romney might wish them to know. It’s bad math for the Mittster.
