This just in: Florida governor is straight

First of call, congratulations to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on his engagement to single mother Carole Rome.  Sure, there are skeptics are wondering why all of the sudden Crist, who was married briefly in 1979, has found his true love.  I am sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the Republican is on the short list of potential running-mates for John McCain.

Rumors of his interest or lack thereof in women have dogged Crist for years. As the Orlando Weekly noted in 2006, every reporter in Florida heard the rumors. One staffer even admitted having sex with him which Crist denied.

Sure, Charlie’s a hot 50-year-old bachelor with well-coiffed silver hair and a fondness for nicely tailored suits. But he just survived a primary against a fundie who premised his whole campaign on the notion that Charlie doesn’t hate gay people (or abortion) enough. You’d think if Tom Gallagher had something to say, he would have said it. Instead, a week before the primary Crist denied that he had fathered a love child… We’d guess that every reporter in the state has heard them, but as yet no one’s produced any proof, much less a picture of Crist having a Brokeback encounter with the pool boy.

The same rumors dogged the former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey who even  had rumors spread about him that he liked to go to strip clubs with his buddies to look at …women. I don’t know whether these rumors at Crist are true or enough but they would sure make another great example of Republican hypocracy if they were. ..Not there is anything wrong with that.

Will Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama join forces?

from TVCrazy.netHillary Clinton has been coyly hinting that she might be interested in joining forces with Barack Obama, proving that she knows which way the wind blows.

The former first lady has been gaining ground since winning the closely watched contests in Texas and Ohio. She is in good shape to win the next big battleground in Pennsylvania where the state’s Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter are supporting her. A poll from  bears this out.

The survey found that Clinton has erased the once-commanding lead that Obama held in most national polls following his 11 straight victories in February’s primaries and caucuses. Obama is the favored nominee among 45 percent of Democrats, compared with 44 percent for Clinton, according to the poll, which was based on telephone interviews with 1,215 registered voters March 5-6.

Of course, polls aren’t worth much a bucket of warm spit in this election. Time and time again, they’ve shown that people either lie to pollsters or that the survey takers ask the wrong questions at the wrong time.  People seem to like both Clinton and Obama for different reasons at different times. That sort of changing feeling is difficult to measure.

Democrats are deeply divided. Republicans are divided too but they have managed to coalesce around John McCain. But continuing to battle one another, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama only benefit the Republicans. It’s time for them to put their egos in neutral and do what’s best for the party and join forces.

Why the Republicans should be thankful for John McCain

(Via Flickr) Hatch 1921As John McCain clinched the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator said he “never believed I was destined to be president.” Neither did many Republicans,but the party faithful should be thankful.

McCain is the best hope for the GOP to win the White House. Granted, that hope is fairly remote and odds are pretty good that the one-time Vietnam POW will get a whopping not seen since Barry Goldwater got creamed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he is the only Republican that stands to a party to bring victory to a party lead by an extremely unpopular president who brought America into an extremely unpopular war.

The word “maverick” often is used to describe him. He is a very likable guy and has bucked his party from time to time. But Paul Krugman of the New York Times argues that’s a myth.

Mr. McCain’s reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us.”

But now — at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger — Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of “rogue state rollback,” anticipating the “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Mr. McCain’s aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

The Democrats are going to tie together McCain and Bush in ways the two rivals would never tolerate.  Bush is due to endorse him tomorrow. McCain isn’t hiding from Bush entirely telling his supporters that he didn’t need to “defend the decision to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.” He also spoke of looking forward and not back but you have to wonder how long that talk will last.

Barack Obama trumps Hillary Clinton’s fundraising news

Leave it to Barack Obama to rain on Hillary Clinton’s parade.

The New York senator’s faltering campaign thought it would get some positive press when it “announced one of the best fundraising months of American political history, and the best of her campaign,” according to Politico. While the $35 million figure is indeed impressive, it pales in comparison with the more than $50 million that Obama reportedly raised.

Clinton is even trying to spin the fact the she had to lend her campaign $5 million of her own money.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“When people found out that we didn’t have the resources to compete, and I did put my own money in, it just set off a chain reaction across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people saying, ‘Wait a minute, we want this campaign to go on,'” Sen. Clinton said.

The 200,000 new donors in February is “nothing short of astounding,” said the campaign’s Internet chief, Peter Daou, on a conference call with the Sen. Clinton’s fund-raisers in which journalists were allowed to listen in but not to ask questions.

Imagine if Obama and Clinton joined forces.  These fund-raising figures would seem like chicken feed.  I don’t see how John McCain could compete.

John McCain’s odd relationship with a lobbyist

Even John McCain’s friends damn him with faint praise. One, William P. Cheshire, told the New York Times that “he is essentially an honorable person. But he can be imprudent.”

The Arizona senator’s closest friends seem to think they need to save him from himself. Consider his relationship with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Both deny their relationship was inappropriate or that they did each other favors.

From the Times:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices.

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.

Do we need a president who needs to be protected from himself? This story could do serious damage to McCain, making a Goldwater-like thumping at the hands of the Democrats more likely.

Barack Obama cuts the cheese in Wisconsin; Hillary Clinton melting away

Refracted Moments (via Flickr)Now that Barack Obama has won the Wisconsin primary, the question isn’t whether Hillary Clinton will withdraw from the race but how and when.

The victory is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, as The New York Times noted: “Freezing conditions did not stop thousands of Wisconsin residents from voting in the presidential primaries, and the votes were just beginning to be counted.” The state also supposedly had many blue-collar workers who were supposedly Clinton supporters. Moreover, lots of white voters who were supposedly reluctant to vote for an African American candidate seemed to have gotten over their hang-ups. Early returns showed Obama with a double-digit lead over Clinton. His momentum is almost unstoppable.

On the Republican side, John McCain easily beat back a challenge from Mike Huckabee. A McCain-Obama contest will offer voters the biggest age gap in the history of presidential elections. The race is about to get even more interesting.

John McCain is the Republican Ozzy Osbourne

sabbath.jpgIn 1976, Ozzy Osbourne and his pals from Black Sabbath sold their soul for rock `n’ roll. In the 30 plus years since then, the heavy metal legend kept selling and selling until he became the drug-addled idiot we see today.What does this have to do with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain? Plenty.

Like the heavy metal maestro — who shares a birthday with me — McCain is selling his soul to be president. Recently, he sold out perhaps its most deeply held core belief against torture. Hell, he of all people ought to know how bad torture can be because ..well he was tortured himself while prisoner in Vietnam. I don’t know how else to explain his vote against an intelligence bill that said:

No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

McCain’s explanation that he remains opposed to torture and waterboarding but voted against the bill because it would have applied military standards to the CIA makes no sense.

It looks like the Arizona senator just bit the head off the proverbial bat.