Say It Ain't So Joe..

According to the WSJ Joe the Plumber is leaving the GOP. That's gotta hurt. The white working class was a key constituency for Republicans and Joe was Chair of the RNC's White Trash Subcommittee. This guy is taking his truck and his hatred of book learnin' and hittin' the road.

A Big Week For Hypocrisy

Whheeew. It has been a big week for the "Do As I Say, Not As I Do" Crowd. First, Bristol Palin, America's preeminent teen mother was on a morning show contradicting herself on whether teen abstinence is "realistic" and telling other teens to learn from her example while she cuddled her adorable new baby. Exactly what the message was here, we do not know.

Next Ms. California, who won conservative hearts by standing up for traditional marriage turns out to have posed semi nude and had her breasts enhanced at the expense of the Ms. California pageant.

Lastly, we have the sight of Miami Celebrity Priest Fr. Alberto Cutie (kew tee ay)cavorting and groping a brunette on a Florida Beach. Cutie previously hosted a radio show with millions of listeners in the US and Latin America in addition to heading a Miami parish. (He is reportedly the most handsome priest since Richard Chamberlin in the Thorn Birds. Well handomsest fake priest ... ).


I do not know what to make of this. I suspect Prejean of just being a hypocrite and an opportunist who got caught when her "old fashioned girl next door" schtick didn't hold up. Palin is a difficult issue because I suspect she is manipulated by her mom who has to constantly whip up her base of support. Cutie seems to have a legitimate love of his faith.

So are these just folks whose weakness overcame their own strongly held and professed beliefs? If that is the case, do you then have some duty to zip it up if you cannot walk the walk? Does this suggest that some of the beliefs professed by these people are not as legitimate (I say legitimate, not authentic) as they might have thought? Just because you fall short of your own ideal, is that ideal any less valid? Or maybe we just jump on these folks because we have an innate distaste for being preached to on the most intimate and personal of subjects?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Tortuous Polling

A few new polls show that, by slight majorities, Americans would prefer not to investigate the architects of America's torture policy throughout the Bush Years. I suspect this slight majority is also part of the large majority of Americans who call themsleves Christian.

Christian-- latin for "get really mad about what other people are doing."

UPDATE


Well it turns out to be true. The nice people at Pew Research sliced and diced the polling numbers and discovered that self described Christians were more likely than non believers to believe torture was justified.

I take back the definition above. Christianity now means exactly nothing. Go to church. Talk to each other. Because its obvious you have little to offer the rest of us.

The Fightin' (And Abortin') Irish

President Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame has drawn mucho fire from conservative and pro life Catholics. How crazy have things gotten? Witness the abortion plane. Hired by the Center for Bioethical Reform, the "abortion plane" plane trails a banner with a picture of a dead fetus and the words, "10 Week Abortion." The group's other banner reads, "Abortion is terror."

I gotta give it to these guys. Never has a group cared so passionately about quasi humans and cared so little about actual humans. Abortion? Murder. War. Hey, sh-t happens.

Souter Watch

An interesting quote from of of Justice Souter's past clerks, now a law professor at U Penn:

I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it's just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

RIP Jack Kemp

I cannot help but have a soft spot for the man who guided my Buffalo Bills to not one, but two AFL championships. On the political front, Kemp will leave a mixed legacy. He was an ardent supporter of his party's embrace of supply side economics. This turned out to be an economic and moral calamity. Supply side practitioners left the rich richer, the poor poorer, and our federal budget in a shambles. On the positive side, this "bleeding heart conservative" championed civil rights in a way very few Republicans ever have, even to this day. (Kemp founded the AFL's player association and knew the potent power of racism. He understood this was not yesterday's problem.) At times he paid a price for parting with his GOP colleagues as when he was one of the very few GOP legislators to embrace sanctions against South Africa. For much of the 1980s, what little moral credibility the Republican Party had on the issue of race, it owed to Kemp.

Souter's replacement

In today's Daily Beast, a law professor writes that gender and race are not the only kind of diversity we should seek on the Court. He notes that all of the court's current justices (save Stevens, who is older than all the others) come from the rarefied world of elite law schools and the federal appellate bench. (David Souter is the only judge to have presided over an actual trial.) Few have political experience, few have actual legal experience. In contrast, the Warren Court was filled with men who had been politicians, prosecutors, practicing lawyers, and heads of major federal agencies. In short, they had been around the block. He concludes:

Limiting Supreme Court nominees to those who inhabit it[the small world of elite law] largely limits the field to members of a social and intellectual elite who generally lack much in the way of either practical political experience, or contact with people outside their rarefied socio-economic status. The court is ultimately a deeply political institution, and, as the history of the Warren court illustrates, being immersed in politics for much of their lives may serve justices better than having gotten straight A’s at one of two law schools.

Specter II

I watched a little TV news last night.

I am convinced that Joe Biden practices his "Establishment Look" for at least two minutes each morning. Right after his forhead loosens up.

I notice that none other than former LAPD Detective and noted racist Mark Fuhrman is now a FOX news analyst. I am not really sure how he got the job. Maybe FOX just figured "Well OJ was black and Fuhrman called him a n---r. President Obama is black maybe Fuhrman will call him a n---- too."

With Arlen Specter's departure, the GOP got a lot smaller. Its now Michael Steele and the guys you meet at gun shows. At least it keeps the catering bills down and someone always has a pocketknife.

On a more serious note, I think we all have to be concerned that one of our major parties is now headed not by politicians, but by media personalities like Rush, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. They, of course, are accountable to no one and have no obligation to actually govern the country. In a way its ironic. The GOP was always prattling on about Hollywood liberals. Now their entire party is run on one end of the AM dial.

Spectatin' on Specter

I know Democrats are happy that Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter has decided to become a Democrat. This brings the talisman of 60 votes so much closer. At the same time though, exactly how much help is Specter going to be? His politics seems to be informed just as much by soul sucking egomania as principle and he voted down the line with many of former President's Bush's key proposals. Not sure we need any more of those Democrats.

I only wish I could hear the FOX news pundits....

WOW...

File this one under "Wow..." A recent study by Ohio Sate University found that most self identified conservatives watching the Colbert Report did not realize the show was satire. In other words, they thought Colbert really held the conservative views he espouses on the show.

I suppose it is bad when you don't realize something is a spoof. It is worse when you do not realize they are spoofing you....

Nice Little Nugget

Here is a nice little nugget next time someone decries the evils of Obama's tax plans:

From 1979 to 2006, after-tax incomes rose by $863,000 -- more than 250 percent -- for the top 1 percent of households, compared with $9,200 -- or 21 percent -- for middle-income households, according to a recent analysis of IRS data by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.