Category: Politics & Elections

Moral Leadership, That’s What I Always Look for in a Politician — Not!

As reported at Shakespeare’s Sister:

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned from Congress today after “ABC News questioned him about sexually explicit internet messages with current and former congressional pages under the age of 18.” In addition to the questionable emails sent to a 16-year-old former page, the IM messages, which “made repeated references to sexual organs and acts,” were also found.

The GOP will have to appoint a new chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which Foley will vacate with his departure. You can’t make this shit up.

Update: From Josh Marshall:

If I’m understanding this correctly, that means that the leaders of the House Republican caucus have known for almost a year that a member of their caucus was having cybersex with an underage congressional page. And apparently they did nothing about it.

Kerry: ‘Pretty Much Feeling’ What It Takes to Run

KERRY: “. . . You just gotta make the judgment. You also have to make the judgment, which I’m pretty much feeling, I’m saying that I have something to say, I have some unfinished business from the last round, I don’t like what they did, I don’t like how they framed it, and I don’t like what they’re doing for the country today, and I think we can do better. . . ”

— Political Radar

And NewMexiKen’s “pretty much feeling” that WE “can do better” but that you, Senator Kerry, probably can’t.

Ass

Peter Roskam, the GOP candidate to succeed outgoing Rep. Henry Hyde, accused Dem opponent Tammy Duckworth of wanting to “cut and run” from Iraq during a debate a couple days ago. The use of this common pro-war talking-point in this case surprised some observers—not to mention Duckworth herself—because the veteran Duckworth lost both of her legs in Iraq.

— TPMCafe

Just Luck

So gasoline prices have come down and people are happy again — just in time for the mid-term election.

What a stroke of luck for the oil companies!

What a further stroke of luck it would be if prices then went back up after the election.

Of course, there’s that old expression about “making your own luck.” But only a cynic would suggest that oil companies have any influence over the price of gasoline.

Or that, even if they did, they would ever try to use their influence to help the Administration retain unchecked power (other than with political contributions, which thus far in 2006 exceed $12.5 million, 83% to Republicans).

— Andrew Tobias

[Update: Here’s a chart tracking gasoline prices and Bush’s popularity.]

Winner-Take-All

A Stanford professor — the guy who invented the scratch-off lottery ticket — suggests an electoral college compact among the states — like Powerball is a compact among many states. The compact would commit each state’s electors to vote for whomever has the most popular votes for president nationwide. A bill is on Schwarzenegger’s desk now, waiting for his signature. It would commit California’s 55 votes to the scheme.

This does seem like it would make the election national, rather than dominated by the battle in a few key states. And it would be a whole lot more difficult to jimmy the vote in every state.

And it might be a good time to get it done, with so much uncertainty after two close elections.

Read all about it in this report in The New York Times.

Selling Your Freedom, One Tax Cut At a Time

Functional Ambivalent has a whole post you should read, but here’s the essence:

If you’re a libertarian and you vote Republican because you like lower taxes, you’re empowering people who would ban books, set up a huge federal broadcast censorship aparatus, give the President the power to arrest and imprison without evidence or appeal, and empower everyone in the medical supply chain to decide who gets treatment based on their own standard of moral worthiness. You’re almost literally selling your freedoms for a few dollars in after-tax income. That’s what you vote for every time you vote Republican.

There’s a New Lawman in Town

Bill Richardson has a new television commercial for his run to be reelected governor of New Mexico. Something a little lot different.

NewMexiKen thinks politicians should be required to run on their own record or positions. And they shouldn’t be permitted to run ads discussing their opponents, freedom of speech notwithstanding. Cut out the negativity I say.

Richardson is certainly running on his own record here. But has he trivialized the issues?

I think it’s fun, it’s positive and it doesn’t trivialize the issues any more than any other 30 second ad. What do you think?

Link via Steve Terrell.

The internets change everything

Joe Lieberman runs an ad that shows the sun over a beach (islands in the background, birds wading in the water).

Critics say, that must be Joe’s sunset. (One critic said, where’s the Corona?)

Campaign manager says it’s a sunrise.

Blogger does research, shows it is stock footage from Getty Images taken at Santa Barbara, California (and so, obviously a sunset).

Bloggers wonder why Lieberman didn’t use images of Connecticut shoreline.

Moral of the story: When everyone can check your facts, check them yourself.

Getting up there

John McCain is 70 today, which means he’ll be 72 years, 4 months, and 22 days old on January 20, 2009.

Just sayin’.

Update: Trivia time. President Washington was born in 1732. Presidents Clinton and Bush II were born in 1946. That range encompasses 22 decades. Name the two decades between the 1730s and the 1940s without a presidential birth.

This is obscure, but there is already a hint above.

Three presidents were born in round years (years ending in 0). Those count as the beginning of a decade, not the end.

Gone totally Katherine Harris crazy

The Urban Dictionary, an online resource for only the hippest words and phrases recently added the term “Katherine Harris crazy” to its lexicon.

No joke. (Any nonbelievers can check it out themselves at www.urbandictionary.com.) Here’s how they define Katherine Harris crazy: Noun. As insanely optimistic as Congresswoman Katherine Harris. Usually characterized by an overly optimistic estimation of someone’s chances of achieving success.

According to the dictionary, here’s how the phrase is used in a sentence: “Did you hear Jim just bought 500 dollars in lottery tickets? That boy is just Katherine Harris crazy if he thinks he’s going to hit the jackpot.”

Amie Parnes: Naples Daily News

Harris is trailing Bill Nelson 60-25 in polls. Ah, what goes around comes around.

Reversion to the Mean

I think this is a political example of the statistical phenomenon known as mean revision — in which a string of unusually high data points is often followed by a string of low ones, bringing the trend back towards the long-term average.

If you look at it that way, it’s no surprise Virginia politics has been churning out dimwitted racist assclowns for the the better part of the past 200 years. It takes a heap of mean reversion to compensate for Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason and Monroe.

But now that the state has given us Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and George Allen in such quick succession, it’s pretty clear the pendulum has swung too far. Virginia is almost down to the Texas level now, which is about six standard deviations below the mean.

Billmon at Whiskey Bar, a “16th generation Virginian,” commenting on the George Allen flap.

Al Gore and Love Story

Another of the media myths about Al Gore was that he wrongly claimed to have been the model for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s wildly successful book (and the Oscar-nominated best picture that followed) Love Story. This was made out as one more example of Gore’s tendency to lie, or at least exaggerate. Gore himself claimed only to have said during a conversation with reporters on a late-night flight in 1997 that a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean had gotten Segal to acknowledge a connection to Gore during a book tour. Whatever Gore actually said, the media told the story through the 2000 election as if it was totally off the wall.

But it wasn’t. In late 1997 Melinda Henneberger in The New York Times, reported:

Those reports were half-true, Mr. Segal said: The character of the preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was modeled on both Mr. Gore and his college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.

But it was Mr. Jones who inspired the half of the character that was a sensitive stud, a macho athlete with the heart of a poet, Mr. Segal said. The author attributed to Mr. Gore only the character’s controlling father and feeling that his family was pressuring him to follow in Dad’s footsteps.

According to Henneberger, Segal stated that, though he knew her, Tipper Gore was not model for the book’s Jenny Cavilleri (played in the film by Ali MacGraw).

Do you remember learning during the 2000 election cycle that the story was in any way true?

What Gore actually said about the internet

In light of Ken Jennings’ comment (previous post), in jest one presumes, here is what Al Gore actually said, from the Transcript: Vice President Gore on CNN’s ‘Late Edition’ – March 9, 1999:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

Without doubt, within the Congress, Gore was a leader, instrumental in legislation that helped establish what we now know as the internets. According to Bob Somerby, via Nexis, the first mention of the word “Internet” in The Washington Post was in November 1988. Gore had already introduced his legislation in the Senate. According to Newt Gingrich in 2000, “Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”

It seems clear that “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet” is a truthful statement by Gore. He did not say he invented the internet. The media did.

The power of incumbency

Democratic incumbent Sen. Jeff Bingaman has nearly $1.8 million stockpiled for his re-election campaign, providing him with a large fundraising advantage over his Republican challenger, Allen McCulloch.

McCulloch, a Farmington physician, had a cash balance of $2,487 in his campaign account at the end of June, according to the latest federal campaign finance reports.

AP via The Albuquerque Journal.

Thanks to ‘Burque Babble, who has a good post on the power of incumbency and some “interesting” suggestions for what the Senator could due with the money.

Worth repeating

“Santorum got excited because he finished a jigsaw puzzle in 6 months and the box said 2 to 4 years.”

Crooks and Liars Stupid Santorum Jokes

Another (from the comments):

Q: What would Rick Santorum say if you asked him if his turn signal is working?
A: Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.

[First posted here a year ago.]