ABC News’ Jonathan Greenberger Reports: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a new explanation today for why he supported a Democrat in 1992.
That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on "This Week," that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
"In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary," said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. "When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican."
But 12 years ago, the Boston Globe reported that Romney was giving a different explanation for his vote for Tsongas.
"Romney confirmed he voted for former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the state’s 1992 Democratic presidential primary, saying he did so both because Tsongas was from Massachusetts and because he favored his ideas over those of Bill Clinton," the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips wrote on Feb. 3, 1994. "He added he had been sure the G.O.P. would renominate George Bush, for whom he voted in the fall election."
(Emphasis mine) Some folks unaccountibly find this a bit hard to believe…
Romney’s contention that his vote for Tsongas was a vote for the weakest opponent for Bush – a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as "raiding" – surprised Professor William Mayer of Northeastern University in Boston.
"That would have been a strange election to have done that in, in the sense that Paul Tsongas was obviously going to carry his home state" of Massachusetts, said Mayer. Tsongas won the Massachusetts primary with 66 percent of the vote.
Doubter. What’s not to trust in this fine upstanding man of God? See…he voted for the hometown candidate, whose ideas he liked. Except he didn’t. And that was then and this is now. I’ll say this for Romney…you seldom see a politician so blatantly telling the public that his word doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.
Buying a greeting card for someone’s birthday, anniversary or if they’re feeling under the weather is pretty straightforward. But what if they’re undergoing chemotherapy or struggling with depression? "Get Well Soon" probably won’t cut it.
Likewise, most cards lining the store shelves don’t work on occasions as someone leaving an abusive spouse, undergoing drug rehab or declaring their sexual orientation.
Hallmark Cards Inc., which has built its $4.2 billion empire on sentiments for life’s happier times, is releasing a new line of cards that will speak to those and other situations that the company says have either been ignored by greeting card companies or received only a smattering of attention from niche players.
Well I just know I’m going to enjoy reading the "declaring my sexual orientation" card that’s somewhere between the So Sorry You Have Cancer and Congratulations On Your Drug Rehab cards…
No topics were off-limits, said company spokeswoman Rachel Bolton, noting two cards that could be sent to gay people who have disclosed their sexuality. The cards don’t directly refer to homosexuality, only extolling the person to "Be You" or "This is who I am" or featuring a rainbow, a symbol of gay pride.
Bolton said the writing is general enough for other uses, however, with one focus group member saying they would send it to a friend starting a new job.
"Our findings determined that people didn’t want to be labeled or identified,’’ Bolton said. "We want to be inclusive and not exclusive."
Coming from the company that was protecting the sanctity of stuffed bear family life a few years ago (more about that Here), I’m probably expected to regard this as progress of sorts. Except it isn’t. Hallmark isn’t merely trying to grab a piece of the gay dollar here, they’re trying to position themselves as "inclusive and not exclusive". That card isn’t for gay customers. You don’t market a card that’s too scared to utter the word "gay" to gay people who’ve taken that difficult, nerve wracking, terrifying step of coming out to family and friends. Who the hell sends a card that can’t even utter the word "gay" to a gay person, congratulating them on coming out of the closet? Be Who You Are…Just Don’t Say It… That’s crap. The card is PR, nothing more. Here’s what’s going on…
The $7 billion greeting card industry already brims with tiny niche players who make and sell cards dealing with such things as serious illness or thanking caregivers, said Barbara Miller, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Greeting Card Association.
But she said none of them have the ability to reach customers searching for those types of cards across the country.
Oh yes they do, if they want to exploit it. It’s called the Internet lady. It’s been four years since a Hallmark store had security escort a same sex couple out the door for trying to buy a pair of boy bears they’d discovered kissing, even though the magnets weren’t supposed to allow that, and now all of a sudden the company is a tad concerned that all those little niche players are going to run away with a big chunk of their market while they’re busy appealing to the lowest common denominator. Having a Hallmark store in shopping malls from one end of the country to the other won’t keep the piles of cash coming, in an age where people can make or buy their cards online and print them out at home. Yet even in the face of that, Hallmark can’t bring itself to reach out to that potential market, to actually be "inclusive and not exclusive". On the other hand, that’s probably exactly why Hallmark gets it so right with their core market.
This isn’t progress, it’s window dressing. Cheap, insincere sentiment from your one stop shopping center for all-purpose cheap, insincere sentiment. What you send when how you feel about yourself is more important then what the person you’re sending it to is feeling. Why is it not surprising that it’s a Hallmark moment.
The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.
…
[Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.
"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing."
Why Haggard chose to act out in that manner is something Haggard and his advisers are trying to discern, Ralph said.
I’ll hazard a guess…because he’s gay. This is the guy after all, who said he didn’t even know the guy he was paying for sex, right up to the moment the answering machine tapes came out. Not your most trustworthy source, this guy.
On the other hand, this could also just be the usual ex-gay double-speak too. Haggard isn’t gay, because according to ex-gay dogma nobody really is anyway. He’s just in therapy to control his acting out behavior. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. His acting out was on the order of seeking sex under less then wholesome circumstances. But that was because of denial, not homosexuality.
Sex is one of the strongest of all instincts, and you can’t bottle it up inside a person without damaging consequences. Haggard’s adventures with the prostitute were eminently predictable. You see that kind of behavior all the time in married, closeted homosexuals. The ex-gay solution is merely to bottle it up even more. So it looks like Haggard’s first step out of therapy is taking him right down the same old road he was on before he got caught with his back being rubbed. No wonder they were encouraging him to stay out of the ministry.
But when a judge warned that unfaithful spouses could technically be sentenced to life in prison, an obscure and seldom-used provision of the state’s criminal law became the subject of international scrutiny.
It’s unclear how serious Judge William Murphy of the Michigan Court of Appeals was when he pointed out the possible consequences of extramarital sex. Some observers say the liberal judge was making a political point by taking a strict interpretation of the law to an absurd conclusion.
Others have suggested Murphy was trying to embarrass Michigan Atty. Gen. Mike Cox, whose office triggered the ruling by appealing for a harsher sentence for a man who traded drugs for sex. In 2005, Cox acknowledged having an adulterous relationship.
Murphy’s adultery bombshell was a footnote in a November ruling on a drugs-for-sex case. But since a Detroit Free Press columnist wrote about the footnote last week, blogs and radio talk shows have debated the pros and cons of life sentences for cheating spouses.
The ruling came in the case of Lloyd Waltonen, 43, a man from Charlevoix in northern Michigan, who supplied a cocktail waitress with the prescription painkiller OxyContin in exchange for sex. Last year, Charlevoix Circuit Judge Richard M. Pajtas sentenced Waltonen to four to 20 years in prison, but dismissed four counts of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct, punishable by a life term, on the basis that the sex was consensual.
The state attorney general’s office successfully appealed Pajtas’ ruling, citing an obscure provision of Michigan’s criminal law, which states that a sexual act committed at the same time as a felony constitutes criminal sexual conduct.
An appellate panel found Waltonen guilty of criminal sexual conduct. He has asked the state Supreme Court to consider an appeal.
In the opinion, Murphy wrote that although legislators may have drafted the law conceiving of scenarios in which there was a violent felony involving forced sex, he was "curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."
Murphy wrote that a person was technically guilty of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct any time he or she "engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship."
He noted that state law defines first-degree criminal sexual conduct as sexual penetration involving another felony. Because adultery is a felony, he wrote, adulterous sex could result in life imprisonment.
So…dig it. A wingnut prosecutor on an anti-drug jihad piles a sex charge on top of a drug charge, in order to get a stiffer sentence handed down. The law he’s trying to bend out of shape here was only intended to apply to violent sex crimes, but never mind…he thinks he can use it any damn way he pleases, because he’s on a mission to clean up what consenting adults do in private. And it works. Even better then he probably wanted it too. See…one of the big jokes here in all this, is that this prosecutor has admitted to having an adulterous affair in his own past…
No one in Michigan has been charged with adultery since 1971.
Nevertheless, defense attorneys across the state are snickering and speculating about the prospect of life in prison for the attorney general.
From his office in Lansing, criminal defense attorney Hugh Clarke Jr. chuckled as he contemplated the idea — apparently raised by colleagues — of setting up a special prosecution team to charge Cox.
"It’s all so silly," he sighed. "I only wish Judge Murphy would have used a different example. The judiciary in Michigan shouldn’t be held up to ridicule because of his use of that analogy."
Cox declined to speak to reporters about Murphy’s ruling. His spokesman, Rusty Hills, said Cox’s adultery was not relevant to the case.
He is trying to get a man sentenced to life in prison for trading drugs for sex, with a completely willing partner, and he thinks his own immorality isn’t an issue. Well of course not. Morality laws are for the peasants…to keep them in line. The authorities live by their own rules, up in Valhalla.
But this is what happens when the law starts treating purely moral issues as criminals ones. It’s what happens when the law is reduced to panty sniffing by puritan nutcases who are outraged over the possibility that somewhere someone is having a good time. Suddenly, we’re all criminals. Every one of us. And that’s the point. All have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God…and especially fallen short of the glory God’s right hand men… If we weren’t here to tell you how to live your lives…who knows what you’d do with them…
But the real belly laugh here isn’t the prospect of a jackass prosecutor getting hung by his own petard. Here’s the belly laugh, proudly posted on the right wing news site, World Net Daily, and thanks to Pam’s House Blend for catching it…
What do you think of the possibility of life in prison for adultery?
Sex between consenting adults should not be a matter for any criminal court, period
32.43% (1248)
Leave it up to civil courts for monetary damages like alimony, but not jail time
15.75% (606)
Come on, if everyone who committed adutery were jailed, there’d be hardly anyone left on the street
12.16% (468)
Stiff jail time is needed, we have to do something about rampant infidelity
10.63% (409)
A little jail time is proper, but life is preposterous
9.98% (384)
Old Testament laws call for executions, so let’s get back to the Bible
7.28% (280)
Other
4.96% (191)
I agree, life in prison is appropriate
2.60% (100)
Any jail time for adultery is ridiculous in this modern age
2.31% (89)
Life sentence is too light, should be execution according to Sharia law
1.90% (73)
TOTAL VOTES: 3848
This is the same crowd that was screaming for blood when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas. This is the same crowd that thumps the bible like a machine gun constantly on issues of gay rights. They can cite you chapter and verse each passage in the bible that they believe condemns homosexuality.
Never mind that Adultery is condemned right in the fucking ten commandments not just once…but if you read it broadly enough, twice:
7. Thou Shalt Not Break Wedlock.
10. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s House; Neither Shalt Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife, His Manservant, His Maid, His Ox, His Ass, Or Ought That Is His.
-Translated by William Tyndale
Suddenly it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame when it’s a matter of…er…your own balls. Listening to the American right wing bellyaching about morals and values, right up to the moment the finger turns around and starts pointing right back at them, you really begin to see why Jesus didn’t much like hypocrites.
I’m reading about the big blow-up at ABC over Isaiah Washington’s insults to fellow Grey’s Anatomy actor T. R. Knight. Knight is gay and Washington called him a faggot on the set. Then during the Golden Globe award ceremonies Washington announced to all the assembled reporters that he’d never called Knight a faggot. You have to admit, the guy has a certain deft charm when it comes to his co-workers. Seems like now everyone is calling for Washington’s head…
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21 — Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.
…
The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.
ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.
The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.
If you piss on the grave of a dead gay kid and it gooses your tabloid news show’s ratings…that’s good business. But if a fag baiting actor’s antics start cutting into your multi-million dollar profits on your high rated prime time TV series…well, that’s just plain unacceptable.
And…by the way…I hear the right wing shock jocks at ABC/Disney’s San Francisco talk radio station who called Barack Obama a "halfrican" still have their jobs.
Bank sees February or March timeline if Israel strikes
Warning that investors might be "in for a shock," a major investment bank has told the financial community that a preemptive strike by Israel with American backing could hit Iran’s nuclear program, RAW STORY has learned.
The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled "Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities."
ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING’s daily update Prophet that further underscored the bank’s perception of the risks of an attack.
ING’s Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was "high impact, if low probability," but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as "not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War…
Robertson suggests a February-March 2007 timeline for several reasons…
Well right now we are advising our clients to put all they can into canned food and shotguns…
THE WALT DISNEY CO.’S FAILURE to suppress access to controversial audio files from its ABC Radio affiliate KSFO is a textbook example of the impossibility of controlling the marketplace of ideas in the digital age.
Like a swarm of tiny locusts overwhelming a massive mouse, it was fascinating to watch the blogosphere unite in defense of the online media critic Spocko last weekend. Disney had sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Web site Spocko’s Brain and its ISP, 1&1, after the online muckraker taped segments of KSFO’s morning talk show, posted them on his site, and invited the station’s advertisers to listen.
What they heard was drive-time hosts endorse torture, insult Muslims and enact the execution of journalists. When some advertisers fled, the Disney legal department briefly killed the messenger with a cease-and-desist order, alleging copyright violation.
But less than 48 hours after Spocko’s case was brought to light on the progressive news blog "The Daily Kos," several new Web hosts, including YouTube, Blogintegrity and Firedoglake, stepped up to provide access to audio files from KSFO. Instead of one ISP to threaten, there were now many–basically challenging MouseCorp to sue all of them.
………………..
Disney is now left with the option of playing a virtual game of "Whack A Mole," as the Rodent Empire’s lawyers will need to slap citations against a series of sites as swiftly as they pop up. Plus, it may only be a matter of time before the mainstream media rides the story for at least one new cycle. That’s got to be Disney’s worst nightmare: 24 hours where "Disney" and "Hate Speech" are both part of the topic line.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. –John Gilmore
Via The Christian Science Monitor…this from Peter Akinola, who it’s a safe bet fancies himself the Archbishop of the new church he’s busy carving out of the Anglican one. It’s really entertaining when they don’t know enough to keep their goddamned mouths shut…
Best known for his vocal opposition to homosexuality, Akinola has found support among US Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who opposed the 2003 consecration of a gay bishop and the church’s move to allow dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Last month, two of America’s oldest Episcopalian churches – both in Virginia – voted to break with the US branch of Anglicanism over the issue and concerns about church leaders’ adherence to biblical authority. These churches, and several other smaller churches, joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is connected to Akinola.
"Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it, unity as we know it, family life as we know it, so how can we endorse that?" asks Akinola. "That is completely outside what God planned for humanity. When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn’t he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner? He could have done so. He didn’t,"
[Emphasis mine] Say…weren’t they saying the same thing about mixed race marriages not all that long ago in Virginia…?
David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:
A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….
This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…
Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:
Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.
Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:
Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.
I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people. It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class. People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo. Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan.
But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this. What he’s counting on is that you don’t. He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now. My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do. Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too. Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield. On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money. Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause. Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf. But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money. Really…that’s all you need to know about him.
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he’d take his oath of office on the Koran — especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.
Yet the holy book at tomorrow’s ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison’s 5th District, was happy to help.
Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.
Goode represents Jefferson’s birthplace, Albemarle County Virginia. Though I’m sure they’d lend him one, you have to suppose a Jefferson Bible wouldn’t be good enough for Goode to put his hand on while taking an oath. Or…maybe I have that backwards…
Thomas Jefferson believed that the ethical system of Jesus was the finest the world has ever seen. In compiling what has come to be called "The Jefferson Bible," he sought to separate those ethical teachings from the religious dogma and other supernatural elements that are intermixed in the account provided by the four Gospels. He presented these teachings, along with the essential events of the life of Jesus, in one continuous narrative.
This presentation of The Jefferson Bible offers the text as selected and arranged by Jefferson in two separate editions: one edition uses a revised King James Version of the biblical texts, corrected in accordance with the findings of modern scholarship; the second edition uses the original unrevised KJV. The actual verses of the Bible used for both editions are those chosen by Jefferson. Visitors should find the revised KJV text much easier to read and understand. Those seeking the precise English version Mr. Jefferson used when making his compilation can click on "Unrevised KJV text."
He may be on the conservative movement’s shit list these days, but Andrew Sullivan is still its useful idiot…
I doubt whether Massachusetts will forgo the honor of being the first state to grant gay couples legal equality with their straight peers. But there’s one way to find out. Let’s debate and campaign. The national gay groups, whose record on marriage has been spotty at best, need to make this the first priority of the national movement. Winning a democratic vote on marriage is a huge opportunity – and well within our grasp. We have the arguments. We have the evidence. Now let’s have the vote.
We have the arguments do we? Well…one argument we won’t have I guess is that no civilized nation puts the human rights of minorities up for popular vote. Can someone tell me when reason ever made a dent in the mindset of bigots? It wasn’t the voters who swept away the segregation laws in America, it was the hated Warren Court.
The Conservative Soul is it? Well of course. Conservatives never were very big on the concept of liberty and justice for all were they…
A bill, of course, they wouldn’t even consider when they were in the majority.
There is something profoundly sickening about watching the party that made race baiting and fag bashing into political art forms bellyaching about minority rights.
The Washington Monthly: REDEFINING FAILURE…. Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, was on CNN yesterday discussing the war in Iraq, Saddam’s pending execution, and the Middle East, but CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry had the temerity to ask about the terrorist behind 9/11.
Officials from this White House are known for some bizarre comments, but Townsend’s response has to go in the Hall of Fame. (via)
HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we’re going to get him. Still don’t have him. I know you are saying there’s successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That’s a failure.
TOWNSEND: Well, I’m not sure — it’s a success that hasn’t occurred yet. I don’t know that I view that as a failure.
A "success that hasn’t occurred yet"? By that logic, practically nothing could ever be characterized as failure. Indeed, I’m not sure why the Bush gang hasn’t thought of this sooner.
"Budget deficits are just surpluses that haven’t occurred yet."
"Global warming is just global cooling that hasn’t occurred yet."
"Stagnant wages are just raises that haven’t occurred yet."
"The civil war in Iraq is just peace that hasn’t occurred yet."
It’d be amusing if it weren’t so sad.
My lottery Jackpot is a fortune that just hasn’t occurred yet. It’s big too. Huge. I could pay off the national debt with it.
A renewal deal between Time Warner Cable and Viacom will include expansion of cities showing Viacom’s LOGO, a network targeting homosexual viewers. The president of an organization that monitors the influence of homosexuality in the culture, and the head of another that observes cultural trends in media, both say it is really just a natural development of what is already being done on other cable and satellite channels.
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth says it is significant — but not surprising — that the all-homosexual channel LOGO is expanding outside of New York City, its only availability location on cable thus far.
As Pam points out, Logo has been available outside NYC for quite sometime now. But…never mind cable. Seriously.
Pst… Pete… Hey…jackass… Anyone anywhere with a good line-of-sight to the DirectTV satellites can get Logo. And it’s not a premium or pay-per-play channel either. Ask me how I know. They’re watching Queer As Folk and Round Trip Ticket right now everywhere in the bible belt Pete. And if they’ve got Sirius satellite radio, they’re probably listening to OutQ too. And Sirius subscribers can get OutQ in a stream feed to their PC too. That’s how I listen to it when I’m not in the car.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
