Flanked by McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who endorsed McCain on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger said he was giving McCain his blessing “because I am interested in a great future and I think Sen. McCain has proven over and over again that he is reaching across the aisle in order to kill Sarah Connor.”
Okay, I might have mangled that quote slightly.
Ralph Nader, who apparently still labors under the illusion we live in a parliamentary system and/or have something other than first-past-the-post voting,
…launched an exploratory committee Wednesday for another White House bid, and told CNN he is likely to get in the race if he can put the resources in place.
…Nader has launched an official exploratory committee Web site, and said he will formally make a decision in about a month.
Read on at CNN.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey told the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that it would be inappropriate to discuss whether the “waterboarding” interrogation method amounts to torture.
…Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, pointed out that — because Mukasey has acknowledged his opposition to torture — his refusal to pass judgment on waterboarding is “like saying you’re opposed to stealing but not quite sure that bank robbery qualifies.”
…Waterboarding was used during the Spanish Inquisition and by Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the World War II Japanese military, according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
Read on at CNN.
Caroline Kennedy writes an interesting editorial in the NY Times:
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.
(thanks to Ted for the link)
Romney: Who Let the Dogs Out? « FOX Embeds
I am … without words.
The presidential hopeful met a friendly crowd at the Martin Luther King, Jr. parade here. The former Massachusetts governor often runs back and forth across streets during parades to greet people and today was no exception. He shook hands with ROTC members, tiny beauty queens, police officers and many parade-goers, including children screaming his name. He jumped off the Mitt Mobile to greet a waiting crowd, took a picture with some kids and young adults and awkwardly quipped, ”Who let the dogs out? Who who.”
He took pictures with many in the crowd and greeted one baby wearing a necklace saying, “Hey buddy! How’s it going? What’s happening? You got some bling bling here!”
(Hat tip: dnA, at Too Sense)
…and it can’t come soon enough.
“I don’t believe democracies generally lead to warlike governments… ‘Please vote for me. I promise you war’ is not something that tends to win elections.”
– George W. Bush, in this week’s interview on ABC, straight-faced
An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.
…Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran and Afghanistan, CTV said.
Read on at Reuters.
“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said.
(emphasis added)
Mitt Romney may regret saying he voted for Tsongas in ’92 not because he actually liked that Democrat but because it was “strategic voting”, so the Dems would end up with an unpalatable candidate.
Given that Michigan’s Democratic primary is wasted, Daily Kos has already been encouraging Michigan Dems to vote for Romney in that state’s open primary so that he’ll stay in the race and continue to savage the other Republicans.
Or, to put it another, more entertaining way:
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
Decent article; brilliant comment.
The salient fact in American politics — and we forget it at our peril — is that there are usually enough people in this country to elect a president who would volunteer to live with their family in a cardboard box under a bridge, and eat sparrows toasted on an old curtain rod, if you could promise them that the black, or Mexican, or gay guy in the next box over doesn’t even get the sparrow.
Posted by: Davis X. Machina | January 13, 2008 8:17 PM
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
Not to sound all tinfoil-hat here, but when other countries show big differences between polls and results, we use that as grounds for declaring election fraud. When it happens in NH, well…
Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich… has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”
“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery – not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”
Also, the reports, allegations, and rumors regarding possible vote-count irregularities have been further fueled by the stunning disparities between various “independent” pre-election polls and the actual election results,” Kucinich wrote.
There’s more at Kucinich’s site.
Ed Helms, Rachael Harris, and the folks at declareyourself.com present: “Vote: It’s the Least You Can Do”.
(thanks to Coleen for the link)
Ron Paul. Just a plain-spoken, for-the-people, anti-war libertarian, right?
Try reading his newsletters, which The New Republic did.
Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began,” read one typical passage…
Such views on race also inflected the newsletters’ commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa’s transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a “destruction of civilization” that was “the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara”…
One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after [Martin Luther] King, suggesting that “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,” and “Lazyopolis” were better alternatives.
…Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in [Paul's] newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.
A French newspaper is reporting that Nicolas Sarkozy, who got divorced on October 18, may wed girlfriend Carla Bruni, a supermodel, next month. They met a month ago.
You cannot make this stuff up.
Read on at CNN.
Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Competency as a Cultural Value
This is a stunningly good articulation of something I think is crucially important to understand in today’s political climate. The whole piece is great; I’m hard-pressed to pick an excerpt.
[...]
I’ve written before in my blog about how “blue state” elites in the United States continue to walk into the trap of blandly assuming that competency, skill and experience are sufficient and universally appealing attributes for a political candidate in national elections, as long as that candidate also has generally liberal views. Following the Iowa caucuses, I’m returning to this theme, because it’s one claim that seems to rub a lot of my readers the wrong way and I’m desperately hoping that this time, the message gets across to Democratic voters.
That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now. The other Texan on the segment talked about a completely different issue, changes to family life and the status of women, but there was some of the same declensionist mood in her remarks. Families and women are just different than when she was young, she said, and she’s mighty concerned about it all.
Educated liberals have a lot of quick answers to these kinds of statements: they’re factually wrong, they’re unfair, they’re reactionary. All true. But those rejoinders don’t get to the heart of what’s being said: that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it. They despair at the way the world and their corner of the world is nevertheless.
[...]
But the thing of it is, in some measure, many ordinary Americans are not wrong to think that some of what afflicts or haunts their everyday lives is happening on scales of time and change and causality that aren’t reducible to the kinds of neat policy packages and governmental initiatives and ten-point plans that highly competent, experienced, meritorious political candidates tend to showcase. Like southern Africans, many ordinary Americans may invoke vague and metaphysical ideas about conspiratorial action and sinister agency to explain those larger transformations, but the basic take-away (as in southern Africa) is often: we’re fucked.
Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. Yes, of course one of the things that makes me furious is that many Republican political leaders are exempted from this suspicion when in fact they ought to be the faces on the wanted poster, but that has something to do with the extent to which the Republican leadership since Reagan has largely avoided selling itself as the party of superior competency in policy-making, but instead as the party that can address the deeper spiritual condition of the nation, change the movement of the geist.
[...]