Monday, July 25, 2005

Santorum Not Running For President (I Hope)   Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has announced he's not going to run for President in 2008.  Santorum, if you'll recall, has equated homosexuals with practitioners of bestiality.  He defends his hatred and contempt for whole classes of people, and his belief that gays should be legally barred from raising children, on the basis of "morality".  That's right; he's a people person.  I'm sure most people of faith have the same reaction to that I have:  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  Praise Jesus!  Thank God!  I was confident a truly merciful God wouldn't inflict a Santorum Presidential candidacy on our nation; a plague of locusts, maybe; possibly a hail of frogs; but not a Santorum Presidential candidacy.  But it turns out that the media group that runs Santorum's campaign website has bought up all the likely addresses for a 2008 Santorum candidacy.  It seems possible that Santorum is lying.  Yes, yes, I know, it's a shock that a politician might be  telling an untruth.  But Santorum is running a difficult race for reelection to the Senate now.  He's getting creamed, actually.  And Santorum's possible plan to mostly blow off the Senate for a year or two in order to focus on a Presidential candidacy is an issue in the race.  And a defeated Senator would not be a seriously player in a Presidential race, anyway.  So, it may be that Santorum has no plans to run for President now.  A change of mind would need to wait on his current political prospects improving from his current 13-point deficit.  But if he should get reelected, then his plans are likely to change.  I still persist in believing that God wouldn't let a thing like that happen.  But it's up to Bob Casey, Jr. to beat Santorum and save us from that horrific fate. 11:45:33 PM    comment []

Traitor Karl   Beyond the dead certainty that Rove lied about his role in leaking Valerie Plame's identity, it seems increasingly clear that there are a number of laws besides perjury which he might be charged with violating.  He is guilty of, in fact, espionage, which is the revealing of any classified information, even accidentally.  It's a crime.  And Rove did it.  And maybe he could spend his time being treated oh-so-gently at Guantanamo, with all the others who worked against America. Every day I wake up and there's a prospect of traitor Karl going to jail is a good day. 5:32:31 PM    comment []

Liar, Liar   Since his nomination to the Supreme Court, both John Roberts and his supporters have been at pains to deny his membership in the Federalist Society (a very conservative legal organization), or at least Roberts has denied he has any memory of belonging.  Well, the Washington Post has reported that as recently as 1998, John Roberts served as a leader of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Federalist Society.  There are only three possibilities here.  One is that John Roberts has an advanced case of dementia, so vast and comprehensive a case that he cannot recall the 1990s.  Or he spent the decade so looped on drugs he cannot recall the period with any accuracy.  That, or he has been deliberately lying about his membership. There's nothing wrong with belonging to the Federalist Society.  I've bought several books that the Society has reprinted.  This is very much the traditional Washington story, where the cover-up is worse than the original sin; no surprise from a man who has spent his entire life since college in the D.C. political and legal community.  It's very much unlike the Plame case, where no cover-up could possibly be as bad as the original treasonous effort to damage our national security out of partisan pique. Then again, maybe Roberts is not lying.  Maybe he's simply and totally gone around the bend; or he's a drug addict.  Either answer could explain his statements...and his legal opinions. 2:15:07 PM    comment []

Lance's "Feat"   Much has been said about Lance Armstrong's streak of 7 Tour de France championships.  This hasn't.  No other cyclist spends the whole year preparing to compete in just one race.  They can't afford to.  So Armstrong goes into each tour healthier and more rested than any of his competitors.  It's akin to a boxer taking a year between fights, but giving his opponents two days to train.  The last big winner on the Tour de France was Miguel Indurain, who won 5 consecutive Tour de Frances, and also won 34 total Tours or World or Olympic championships.  He won 58 stages in his career.  Winning a stage is easy to understand.  It means he finished in front of everyone else.  Lance won 22 in his career (11 of which were time trials...effectively team awards); he spent almost all of this year's Tour in a pack about forty places behind the day's winner.  Something where you can come in 40th on a regular basis and still say you win is never going to catch on in the US.  (On the final day of his championship, he was in 118th place.)  Armstrong also won an impressive amount of events, but almost all of them were two or three-day things in the US against risible competition.  His record is still impressive...just not nearly as impressive as has been suggested. Also, Armstrong's long-time association with one of the Dr. Strangelove's of world steroid use tends to bely his claims that he never used the drugs, but just that he used either a dosage or a masking agent which kept him from getting caught. But all of that is beside the point.  More importantly, cycling isn't a sport; it's transportation. 10:23:14 AM    comment []

Karl Rove   Republicans claim that a Democratic protest against Karl Rove lead to a much larger than expected turnout at a fundraiser for Rep. Jim Gerlach.  The fundraiser was held not in the Pennsylvania district which he nominally claims to represent, but in Washington, D.C., the place Gerlach will likely live the rest of his life.  Only 40 were expected to attend the $1000 a plate dinner, but 100 showed up.  First of all, that's pathetic; a Republican Congressman who has been so ineffective at giving away Americans' tax dollars to corporate interests and the uber-wealthy that he can only get 100 to show up for a fund raiser?  Gerlach's an embarrassment to his party.  Republicans ascribe that apparently extraordinary turnout to the protest against Karl Rove, a man who has been described by former President George Herbert Walker Bush as "the most insidious of traitors".  Republicans think that people showed up at the dinner for $1000 a plate because people outside were protesting...and what sort of people showed up to pay a grand for a meal?  Probably mostly lobbyists, let's face it. I think they showed up to see Rove before he goes to jail.  Soon he may not be demagoguing for dollars, but making license plates for pennies. 8:11:58 AM    comment []

Quote for the Day, 7/25/2005   "Whatever you say, my dear; though whatever you're saying I really don't know.  I'd like to help, but you're both Talking in my sleep, evidently."   -Christopher Fry, Venus Observed 7:44:00 AM    comment []