Waldo's on holiday.

The weather's great this weekend. Go play outside.

The sort of question she just never "had" to take as an American candidate.

The she-Clinton - who could never say "gay" in public as a candidate for president and who used her daughter as chum in gay bars, thinks foreign gays deserve rights Americans don't:

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton said she simply "had" to take a question from a man wearing an "I Love Hillary" tee at a Q&A session at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier today. And what did this young man want to know? What, exactly, her boss (that would be President Obama) planned to do for gay men and women around the world. Hint: Clinton received a standing ovation at the end of her speech.

Responded Clinton: "Human rights is and always will be one of the pillars of our foreign policy. In particular, persecution and discrimination against gays and lesbians is something we take very seriously."

A perfect answer, according to the Financial Times' Brussels Blog: "Clinton’s performance was brilliantly executed in that she pitched her message at exactly the level the European audience wanted. They wanted to hear an American talk like a European, and that’s what they got."

As a brief reminder, Clinton:

• Voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, which failed in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 49-48.
• Supports the repeal of the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" provision, which her husband enacted as president;• Supports civil unions for gay men and women, to encompass "full equality of benefits [with] nothing left out," but not full gay marriage• Supports an employee non-discrimination measure that includes sexual orientation.

Suckers

In the tragic, ice-bound planetoid that is Gay Patriot, dogs are Patriot Pooches and they say rosaries for Barbara Bush and the Republican Party they kiss up to still doesn't give a flying fuck.

Can the N-word be far behind?

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn calls out Governor Sanford's crochets and whimsies.

Watch for TPS to call Clyburn a race-monger; a Pork King; a pimp; a tax dollar waster (except that Wheels would happily accept a new car and a boat from Clyburn, just as he'd happily accept special parking privileges from a Democrat legislator); the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (calling Vice President Kaine!); a failure; and a race-baiter.

And that's only the last nine months' worth.

Somewhere, Massa Dawson is plotting a comeback: Part 3

Massa Dawson speaks for the Lawn Jockey Caucus (but only to be helpful):

“I have a very different management philosophy and style,” said Katon Dawson, the South Carolina GOP chair who finished second to Steele. “It wouldn’t have taken me four weeks to give them the money,” he said, alluding to the transfers to the congressional campaign committees. 

Why both parties should worry

Few work up a high dudgeon like author Stanley Crouch, who writes in Slate about how the Repubilcans are failing the key test of democracy: checking the opposition (with something beyond "Just Say No"):

The central problem facing the Republicans is that they offer nothing resembling intellectual substance that is not offensively hostile. The tires have been worn bald on their vehicle and are now given to perpetual flats which are passed off as proof of how good the tires are, so smooth, so shiny, so lacking in bulky treads. The Republican role has been forgotten by people like Limbaugh, who is cheered on by Ann Coulter, that professional witch here to prove that blondes neither have more fun nor can provide any to people interested in substantial criticisms based in actual hope for the country. Coulter is the extremely slim bartender whose private stock contains one drink: bile.

The function of the Republicans is far more important to our democracy. It is to hold the Democrats back from selling out completely to unions, entitlements, and supposedly oppressed special-interest groups. The Democratic job made obvious in our present condition is to keep the Republicans from selling out to the toxic narcissism that has made writer Tom Wolfe’s observation of a "me generation" more palpable than ever. This is the result of the soulless buccaneer capitalism that has been on such disgusting public display, like hawkings of slime sliding down the inside of a slop jar.

"We are an empire now, and we make our own reality"

Waldo's been running a little series of reality-based examples of how marriage discrimination increasingly turns logic and common sense on their heads, and has invited the good movement conservatives of the SC blogdom to explain why such policies are fair. You'd think Anaconda, who's declared homosexuality a birth defect; or Boy Fogle, who equates support for gay rights with threats to public safety; or Savonarola, who just wants to burn them all at the stake, would have spoken up by now. Funny, isn't it: such a big issue for them, but one they are all afraid to talk about except in the echo chambers of their blogs.

Here's a new one, from Andrew Sullivan:

A reader writes:

DOMA should be renamed the "Homosexual Discrimination Act of 1996" or HDA. It is the most discriminatory piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years, and a Democrat signed it into law. DOMA's reach is vast and affects legislation even today.

I agree that the foreign born provision is the most cruel. My partner of near 5 years is from the Czech Republic. I spend $15,000 to $20,000 a year visiting him and bringing him here. Each time he comes I must write a letter to Homeland security taking responsibility for his timely exit from the country and swear I have the resources to support him while he is here and be able to produce proof of financial resources upon request from the US customs officials.

I have considered legal action but I fear the attention would hurt my business I have worked hard to build. I'm a life long Republican and still hold many Republican positions but I voted Obama this time.

Because it's all for nothing if you don't have liberty.

Scooping the Scoop

Waldo, March 5, 9:15 pm:

Ann Coulter disses South Carolina. Surprised? Suckers....
The Palmetto Scoop, March 6, 9:53 am:

Coulter swipes at USC
The quality of TPS' coverage has gone up since he did thething he swore he'd never do in a million years.

Jim DeMint's Diary: Education

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Department of Reader Inquiries

Earl Capps asked a good question the other day in response to a post that referred to SC political consultants looking to get into- or stay in- "The Show."

What's "The Show"? Capps asked.

It's baseball slang for the major leagues. One source I found put it this way:

The Show -- Baseball played at the highest level...Major League Baseball, the highest level of professional baseball, is sometimes called The Show. The phrase "He's going to The Show" indicates that a player is being called up from the minor leagues to a Major League Team and may get a chance to show his stuff and become a permanent player at that level.

First time I recall hearing the term was in the 1988 baseball movie Bull Durham:

In Waldo's world, "The Show" is the upper echelon of campaign work- say, governor on up.

Thus the analogy.

It's that he asks questions that is one of the things I like about The Blogland of Earl Capps.

As opposed to the guys trying to get into The Show who just posture and brag about their 911

with the Blaupunkt.

Somewhere, Mary Kay LeTourneau is laughing

Andrew Sullivan has another example of the irrational disparities of US marriage law. The only consistent thing about it is that straight people get to do pretty much whatever they want:

A reader writes:

The specific situation where under-age people get married speaks directly to your point about the GLAD DOMA challenge: My home state of New Hampshire lets 13-year-old girls get married, if the kid's parents agree. Most other states set the threshold at 16, and a lot of people may find the idea of a 13-year-old girl marrying an older man distasteful - yet there's no DOMA provision discriminating against pre-adolescent marriage. 

How is gay marriage different?

I'm assuming the question is rhetorical. But the answer is pretty simple: because gay adults have fewer rights in their relationships than 13-year old straights. Inmates on death row have more rights - they have an inviolable right to marry even if they will never be able to live with or even have sex with their spouse. The clinically insane have an inalienable right to marry. Larry King has the inalienable right to marry seven times to six different women. Suze Orman? Not so much. And the repercussions extend to social security [PDF] and over a thousand other federal benefits.

And that is entirely a deliberate message sent to gay citizens: you are anathema, and your families are worthless. Your own government will continue to treat you as if you did not exist.

Twitter will be old school before you know it. Or the Republicans.

Here's an item for the Donehue tekkies of the blogdom to consider, from Steve Newton at The Delaware Libertarian:

Individuals do adapt to changes in media types. The fact that Barack Obama has successfully melded the political killer instincts of his Clinton hold-overs with the new media savvy of his own people (think: the exquisite marginalizing of, first, Sean Hannity and now Rush Limbaugh, who represent some of the last dinosaurs of Clinton-era media trends) is indicative that we may have the first administration in place that not only understands the media of its day, but also understands and adapts to media evolution over time.

This is critical because media has not stopped and will not stop evolving. I'm not good enough to tell you what will replace the Drudge/kos, YouTube, Facebook/MySpace, Twitter milieu of today, but I can tell you without fear of contradiction that 2014 the politicians positioning themselves for 2016 will exist in an entirely different communications world.

That's why, IMO, there is structurally nobody on the GOP side--policies aside--who is able to compete, because in terms of media Rush Limbaugh really is the best they've got, and he's outdated by ten years.

"Just say no."

"With the growth of Hispanic voters in the state of Texas, if we don't do better with Hispanics we'll soon lose Texas," [African-American RNC member Keith] Butler said of the state that's voted Republican in the last eight presidential elections and is the home of the party's last two presidents. "So we'll have to devise policies that reach out to minority voters, such as Hispanics. There is a debate going on right now about changing the face of this party and how it's going about that."

-Real Clear Politics, January 30, 2009

Compare with this The Hill Blog Briefing item from today:

John Hawkins over at Right Wing News has this stunner: No Republican senators are planning to attend the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce's 19th Annual Legislative Conference next week in D.C.

Hawkins writes:

Here's the kicker: supposedly, the Democrats have 20 senators scheduled to attend various events and receptions. The Republicans? Are you ready for this? They have no senators currently scheduled to attend. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

I called Dale Crowell, who handles press inquiries for the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce's 19th Annual Legislative Conference. He confirmed for me that there are currently no Republican senators scheduled to attend the event and that Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart are the only two Republican Congressmen he had scheduled. He told me that they'd really love to have more Republicans attending and he also noted that there are a "considerable number" of Democrats scheduled to attend.

Somewhere, Massa Dawson is plotting a comeback: Part 2

As Waldo predicted, the Lawn Jockey Wing of the Republican Party is stepping up its plan to put Massa Dawson in charge of the RNC as God meant for him to be.

Today Dr. Ada Fisher of North Carolina, an RNC member who as a black woman saw no irony runnnig a photo with Jesse Helms on her failed congressional campaign website- and a Dawson backer- called on Michael Steele to resign.

Ann Coulter disses South Carolina. Surprised? Suckers....

Ann Coulter, the thinking reactionary's Sarah Palin, is much-loved by South Carolinians, but love is a one-way street, it seems:

Indeed, Keith [Olbermann] is constantly lying about his nonexistent "Ivy League" education, boasting to Playboy magazine, for example: "My Ivy League education taught me how to cut corners, skim books and take an idea and write 15 pages on it, and also how to work all day at the Cornell radio station and never actually go to class."

Except Keith didn't go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell.

The real Cornell, the School of Arts and Sciences (average SAT: 1,325; acceptance rate: 1 in 6 applicants), is the only Ivy League school at Cornell and the only one that grants a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1 applicants).

Which is why you set up a social network to provide you the ultimate echo chamber

Harare Grocer's way easier than even Facebook. All you have to do is show up at an event he approves of and you are his- in the imperial 'we' sense- friend:

It was my great pleasure to be at the Greenville Tea Party last night with 2000 of our closest conservative friends.

We're guessing the Grocer's view of friendship is purely opportunistic. Waldo, who's a pretty conservative guy fiscally, apparently coulda showed up along the Reedy and laid claim to friendship with the Grocer.


But wait. The Grocer, a single and increasingly middle aged sort, along at  home at night with naught but the purity of his conservative ideas, has established a sort of invitation-only, conservative Facebook.


Waldo hasn't been friended.


Plus which, Waldo's....well, gay. Which gets the Grocer and his clerks upon their desks crying, "Eek! Eeek!"


And there were doubtless reporters there, which, unless they work for Fox Carolina News, Means They Are Enemies.


And curiosity-seekers. No friends there.


So the short answer is, Josh don' know squat 'bout the people he drive a hundred miles to claim he was hangin' wit his peeps. And only 2000? Boy Fogle says it was "thousands."

Joy in the Low Country

Waldo yields to no one in his admiration of Joan Perry, whose Charleston Daily Photo blog- like Eric Tenen's Paris Daily Photo- show what an inspired writer and story-teller can do with a fairly hackneyed format. In the right hands, a blog makes the reader feel s/he is the author's friend. It's the same intimacy one feels reading a really good novel, or set of essays.

So Waldo was pleased to no end to read that JP and her blog won an award for local blog fabulosity in Charleston.

Molti, molti complimenti, Joan amico!

Now we've determined what they are, the only thing left is to settle on their price

We've been chronicling the recent efforts of SC Hotline supremo Jeffrey Sewell to become the big swingin' arbiter of who's a Real Conservative in SC.

You only gain admission to SC Hotline's echo chamber by passing his inarticulate standards of conservativeness, all of which FITS NEws, Wesley Donehue (even after WD called JS after the infamous beer in the computer incident) and The Blogland of Earl Capps recently failed. Even though SCH still cites Anaconda regularly (and gives Boy Fogle-who seems to enjoy Sewell's special favor) one of his few exits from the landlocked Republic of Quinnland.)

Now it turns out SC Hotline is just another handmaiden to its' owner's political ambitions.

Is there a single conservative blog in South Carolina whose proprietor isn't either trying to stay in The Show or to get back in The Show?

Between the political hacks on the right and Tim Kelly's Borg on the left, the number of genuinely independent political blogs in South Carolina is small indeed.

Waldo, typing furiously in his bath, is one of them. Proudly so.

Somewhere, Massa Dawson is plotting a comeback

Pam's House Blend:

I missed this latest humiliation for RNC chair Michael Steele. Hired to try to expand the party base beyond the aging, angry, white bible beaters, apparently his feeble attempts at hipness, paired with his huge faux pas of offending the Great One Rush, has people already talking about serving up a pink slip for Steele. You be da man....NOT. "What is amazing is that Steele was elected because of his communications skills, and it is those skills that are damaging the Republican Party. Before people begin to completely judge him as worthless, Steele needs to focus and knuckle down on building a strong foundation at RNC so we can begin rebuilding our majority," says a top GOP strategist who has worked for House and Senate Republican leaders. "If his implosion continues, RNC members are likely to call a special session to dump him for an effective chairman. There is not much patience for failure." Others want Steele to re-evaluate his role in the party. Of concern: For no reason, he is dividing the GOP between conservatives who like Limbaugh and moderates who don't and jeopardizing future fundraising efforts, his key responsibility. "The general sentiment of the conference is that Steele needs to step back and get a handle on his role in the party," says an influential congressional aide. Oh my. He needs to know his place get a handle on his role. Holy crap. They can't even accept Steele pretending to be the negro overlord for two seconds. Maybe the GOP would have been better off electing a more compatible leader, you know, like runner-up Katon Dawson, a Southerner who was a member of an all-white country club until last year.

Tracing dollar signs in the air

The United States is on its path to a dystopian society as depicted in the classic novel "Atlas Shrugged," Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) said Wednesday.

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” Campbell told the Washington Independent.

Campbell, a conservative Republican, was referencing the 1957 novel by libertarian author Ayn Rand in which a socialistic government destroys the economy through a series of political and economically repressive laws. In the novel, the laws result in a revolt by the economic leaders who create growth in the economy.

Inauguration Day, 1933

President Roosevelt was inaugurated 76 years ago today. This newsreel has a fascinating glimpse of how technology raced to get the news out, and for sheer curiosity value, features a segment of a military band playing while on horseback.

Can someone explain this to me, like I'm a six year-old?

Here's an example of how the United States of America contemplates two married couples in Massachusetts and determines one is entitled to way fewer of the rights the other takes for granted:

The best-known couple described in the case shows how the discrepancy works. Plaintiff Dean Hara is the widowed spouse of former U.S. Rep. Gerry E. Studds. After 13 years together as a couple, Studds and Hara married in Boston in 2004, when Massachusetts allowed them to do so. Two years later, Studds did not come home from his morning walk with their dog, because he had passed out from a blood clot in his lung. He died in the hospital. Massachusetts treated Hara as a surviving spouse, by, for instance, releasing Studds' remains to him. The federal government, in contrast, treated Hara as if he and Studds had never married. Hara was denied the lump-sum benefit to which the Social Security Act entitles surviving spouses and was denied the annuity he would have received as the spouse of a federal employee.

Waldo would really, really like to have some opponents of marriage equality explain why this- as a matter of civil government- is fair.

Even less than meets the eye

Boy Fogle is the gift that keeps on giving. We finally got around to listening to his video pitch for his TPS Report- the poor man's version of Anaconda's daily send-me-money report.

We'll skip the TPS Report, since Scoopy assures readers it contains all we read in TPS and stories not important enough to hurdle the clearly low standard the blog has already set. But his pitch is worth viewing if only to regret the difficulty he has deciding which way is up, and to the right.

Too clever by half, dawg.

Somewhere, Carl McCall is pretending to laugh

Now that his campaign to be Limbaugh's Toby has ended, Katon Dawson's SC GOP can contemplate new leadership....

More white men.

(h/t The Blogland of Earl Capps)

With enough money you can make a democracy a theocracy

Box Turtle Bulletin has a nice item on how the LDS Church, notwithstanding all its Palmetto Scoop-like "I'm a victim of people who make me think about things I'd rather plug my ears with cheese and sing,'la, la, la, la' than actually use my mind to consider", is trying to buy Illinois the way they did California.

Just a passing thought the next time you find yourself thinking Mitt Romney might make a good president.

Ice-skating with queers

Somewhere, Henry James is laughing:

Here's what the GOP is up against: Analysis of network exit polls by The Washington Post and Pew show that in terms of both party identification and vote margin, the Democrats' advantage over Republicans among voters younger than 30 is as large as it has been in more than three decades. Looking at party affiliation, for instance, in 2008, 46 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds identified as Democrats, 27 percent as independents and 27 percent as Republicans, about the same as the breakdown in 1972. But as recently as 2000, there was much more parity: 36 percent were Democrats, 29 percent independents and 35 percent Republicans.

At the Union Pub, Dustin Siggins, 24, says he sometimes uses humor to deflect the awkwardness of being on the margins of his generation. "I met a girl today at the gym from Boston College. She was getting a law degree from George Washington. She was cute," he says. "But she wants to work for the ACLU, and I said, 'Oh, you're one of those.' "

Later, in a phone interview, Siggins says he struggles with some of his party's more culturally orthodox ideals. "Because I am in this generation and was raised in a pro-gay-marriage era, I am only a little bit against gay marriage, but only a little, like 53 percent to 47," he says. "I have about a dozen gay friends, 30 or 20, and they would all back me up. In college, I used to have lunch with them. . . . We went ice skating once."

Block That Metaphor (especially now that the GOP opposes volcano monitoring)

The New Right:

Gingrich had his ideas bubbling up from somewhere deep inside, churning and frothing on the surface until they were laid out like a picnic lunch, cogently and coherently by a master conceptualist. Limbaugh's speech was more volcanic- erupting against Obama and the Democrats emotionally while flowing effortlessly from pop culture conservatism to a more thoughtful but still generalized critique of the Obama administration.

Newt's kind of pope

Mattheus Mei deserves praise for his triumph of hope over experience: he welcomes the news that arch-homophobe Newt Gingrich is going to do a Tony Blair.

Repent, the end is nigh

SC conservative bloggers: have you offended Rush Limbaugh? Have you contemplated disrespectful or impure thoughts about your party's supremo?

Just as the Catholic Church has brought back indulgences to reduce your time in purgatory, here's a site that let's you make amends to El Rushbo, lest ye be banished from his sight.

Michael Steele did it. Mark Sanford did it. You should, too.

Somewhere, Senator George Aiken is laughing

A Republican congressman wants to make victory in Iraq law.

Bad news for the inside-the-Beltway pros who told him to bet on Tim Kaine for Veep

Boy Fogle, having invoked the blogdom to out bloggers who displeased him, now thinks anonymity is a good thing:

FEDERAL SHIELD LAW MAY ONLY APPLY TO ‘FULL-TIME JOURNALISTS’

Bloggers hoping to gain a little more legal insulation when providing cover to an anonymous source may be left out in the cold.

An important piece of legislation currently being considered by Congress that would shield journalists from having to disclose sources may only apply to “full-time journalists.” That would mean bloggers, freelancers, citizen journalists and others who don’t work professionally in the media business would not be able to legally protect informants.

The House version of the bill would only apply to people who glean significant revenue from journalism, though a broader bill in the Senate would cover anyone “engaged in journalism,” the Citizen Media Law Project reports.

Many people in the media world would welcome a federal shield law, but there’s no good reason for it to involve some sort of income test. While it’s not clear that differentiating between “professional” and “citizen” journalists would have ever been useful in deciding which sources are worthy of protection, it seems especially arbitrary given that anyone with a cell phone can now break news on the Web. [MediaPost]

With political bloggers such as yours truly berating the living daylights out of the Congressional spendoholics, it’s no wonder they would want to be able toSLAPP us around whenever necessary. And what better way than to cut off the ability to rely on anonymous sources. Of course, they would never think of taking that right away from their liberal cohorts in the mainstream media.

Which begs the question of why anybody would want to treat with The Palmetto Scoop on an anonymous basis. One's anonymity would/will depend entirely on staying in his good graces. Get crossways with him in one of his little moments, and you're toast.

It's not activism if we like it.

An interesting analysis of why libertarians and conservatives have such a hard time playing well together includes this summation of South Carolina Republicans and their obsession with regulating women's reproductive systems:

The problem isn’t that conservatives are failing to live up to their principles. Instead, the problem is that limited government never has been a social conservative principle. The more influential social conservatives become within the movement, the more obvious this is. As Lindsey put it, ‘The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government.’

As far back as 1959, Friedrich Hayek warned that conservatives could not be trusted to defend liberty. In his essay ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative,’ he suggested that ‘the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes.’ He argued that conservatives lacked any principles which would allow them to work with people whose moral values were different to their own.(9) 

Just another touch of evil

Sheriff Hank Quinlan has given Toby the what-for. Order is now restored among the Old Confederacy & Buffalo Commons hardliners.

When it's a slow news day look for the conservatives to go after gays

One of the things we like about Anaconda is how he dresses up his homophobia in more creative ways than, say...TPS or Harare Grocer. Not to mention Savonarola. Not to mention how he prettily dresses up profanity as "effing" and bullshit is "bullsh*t."

Today it's a story about how the Episcopal Church has allowed a handful of priests to retain their ordination while they also pursue belief in other religious faiths. That, perforce, becomes the view of every Episcopalian in America. Throw in the right photo and Episcopal priest + Zen Buddhism= same-sex marriage.

Anaconda gets bonus points for whompin' on a story about a George Mason University study that defines "freedom" in terms of money and therefore lionizes the harshest states in terms of real individual liberty.

It's going round your elbow to get to your thumb but at least it's creative.

Look at it this way: the utter absence of gays in the GOP makes their miserable track record with African-Americans look progressive.

Bullshit, Waldo says. Eric Cantor's from Virginia, the state with some of the most homophobic laws in America. And he's #2 on the leadership of the most homophobic party in the House of Representatives. All he's saying is his party will fight marriage equality until they can claim it was forced down their throats by activist judges or a socialist Democratic majority in Congress. But for pure hypocrisy, the video is fun:

Cantor on This Week: GOP should be more inclusive on gay rights David Edwards and Joe Byrne Published: Sunday March 1, 2009 Eric Cantor, minority Whip in the Democrat-run House, worked on re-building America's respect for House Republicans today on ABC's This Week. Responding to comments from those within the party, Cantor put forth a picture of Republicans as agents of change. Not all critics of the GOP are democrats. Governor John Huntsman of Utah made detrimental remarks this week about Republican leadership in Washington. “I don't listen or read to whatever it is that they say because it's inconsequential, completely,” he said. “The future of our party will be based upon what happens in the laboratories and incubators of democracy. Make no mistake about it,” he added. Huntsman, 48, has been named a 'third-tier' candidate for president in 2012, and has spoken out previously about the critical situation that Republicans in Washington are in. After anchor George Stephanopoulos showed Eric Cantor a clip of John Huntsman's remarks, Cantor smiled and told Stephanopoulos that he couldn't comment, because he had not spoken to the governor. “But let's say this, George...Speaker Pelosi doesn't need our votes to pass any legislation.” Eric Cantor used the language of change, positive alternatives, and unity in his dissection of what the Republican party needs to do to solve the financial crisis. “we need...affirmative plans, positive alternatives to the problems facing this country,” Cantor asserted. “They're not just Republican or Democrat problems; they are so big, so challenging [that] we all need to join together not only in Washington but around the country and to put the ideas forward.” Additionally, Cantor recognized the bad name that Washington has acquired for it's history with financial crises. “Let's come up with solutions that actually produce results for a change, instead of making matters worse, which Washington is famous for.” Rush Limbaugh's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday addressed his desire that Obama fail. “What is so strange about being honest and saying I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?" A huge standing ovation in the packed ballroom followed. However, Eric Cantor is not a politician who thinks that an Obama failure will be a GOP victory. As the 4th-ranking Republican in the House, Cantor distanced himself from Limbaugh's perspective. “So the Rush Limbaugh approach of wanting the president to fail is not the Eric Cantor, House Republican approach?" Stephanopolous probed. "Absolutely not," Cantor said. "I don't think anyone wants anything to fail right now. We have such challenges.” But Cantor's most surprising moment on This Week came when Stephanopolous brought up the Republican stance on gay rights. “Governor Huntsman says that you’re not going to be reaching out to broaden the base of the party, reaching out to young people who’ve left the Republican Party in droves, unless you do have that positive agenda on the environment, unless you move to the middle on issues like gay rights. Are you prepared to do that in the House?” The minority Whip cautiously implicated that a shift to the middle on gay rights and the environment is inevitable. “There is no question the Republican Party has to return to be one of inclusion, not exclusion. And we are a party with many ideas.” This video is from ABC's This Week, broadcast Mar. 1, 2009. Download video via RawReplay.com Just to show Cantor's position is a sham, The Limbaugh puts marriage equality in its place:

Time to lob a few snowballs at Shelby Carpenter.

Waldo's taking a snow day. Talk among yourselves.

Somewhere, Michael Steele is laughing

The latest from CPAC: the first Republican rapper. Complete with sound. And yes: he's white. 

Kentucky's GBP on the rise

Here's a new, occasional feature: the Gross Bigotry Product (GBP).

GPB will take a look at how much conservatives are willing to soak taxpayers for to deny gay taxpayers equal rights.

Today it's Kentucky (h/t Pam's House Blend):

Naomi G. Goldberg, Peter J. Cooper Public Policy Fellow , and M.V. Lee Badgett, Ph.D., Research Director of The Williams Institute, have released a report on the financial effect that Kentucky Senate Bill 68 (a ban on  adoptions or fostering by gay and lesbian couples and unmarried cohabitating opposite-sex couples), will have on the state.

The proposed legislation, known by the benign name "Child Welfare Adoption Act," does not apply to children already placed for adoption.

Prohibiting unmarried couples from fostering or adopting would reduce the number of foster and adoptive families available to care for the 7,027 children currently in foster care. We estimate that 630 foster children will be removed from their current homes and placements during the first year that the ban is in effect. In addition, 85 children in foster care will either not be adopted or remain in foster care longer because the ban will prohibit their adoption by unmarried couples.

As a result, the ban will cost the State of Kentucky over $5.3 million in the first year. As explained below, this estimate is conservative since some likely additional costs are difficult to quantify.

...Proposed legislation would deem unmarried, cohabiting different-sex couples and same-sex couples ineligible to serve as foster parents...11.1% of the foster children living in nonrelative care are placed with unmarried cohabiting couples. New foster homes would be needed for these children. Applying that percentage to all children entering the foster care system, we estimate 565 children would be removed from their current placement with an unmarried couple and would need a new foster home.

...The State would have several options for placing the children who would have been fostered by unmarried cohabiting couples. The State could recruit and train new foster homes for the 565 children displaced from in-home care. Alternatively, the State could place all the children in congregate care settings. Most likely, however, given the on-going search for more foster homes, the State will be able to find new nonrelative placements for some children, and the remaining children will be placed in congregate care facilities.

Current placement rates show that 71.9% of children are placed in nonrelative foster care. We assume that 71.9% of the displaced children are placed in newly recruited foster homes and the remainder are placed in congregate care facilities.As a result, 406 children would be placed in nonrelative foster care, while the remaining 159 would be placed in congregate care facilities.

The GOP v.2: protecting the rights of poor nicotine addicts

Matt Bai:

As a broad generalization, most of those talking the loudest about retrenchment and confrontation are in the activist wing of the party; they’re the death-before-taxes conservatives or the picket-abortion-clinics conservatives or the online conservatives who incline, like their liberal counterparts, toward ideological purity. I got a sense of what this kind of combative approach might sound like when I called Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who convenes a weekly meeting of influential Republican operatives. Norquist was fuming that Obama, who had pledged not to raise taxes on anyone but the wealthy, had just signed a children’s health care bill that included a tax on cigarettes.

“He’s a liar,” Norquist said of the president. “He knew he was lying the whole time. Shame on him. He can no longer look us in the eye and say he won the election fair and square.” This seemed a little strong to me — it wasn’t as if Obama had just dumped nine million stolen votes out of a suitcase onto his desk — but Norquist was getting himself worked up now. “Rich people like him can afford an extra 61 cents,” he went on. “Poor people can’t. And he does not care.”

Mark Sanford: another barefoot boy from Wall Street

Frank Rich says the only thing worse than putting up Kenneth the Page to follow the President's congressional address would have been using our own Mark Sanford. Another black eye for Massa Dawson's Party:

The Louisiana governor, alternately smug and jejune, articulated precisely the ideology — those G.O.P. “policies” in the Times/CBS poll — that Americans reject: the conviction that government is useless and has no role in an emergency. Given that the most mismanaged federal operation in modern memory was inflicted by a Republican White House on Jindal’s own state, you’d think he’d change the subject altogether.

But like all zealots, Jindal is oblivious to how nonzealots see him. Pleading “principle,” he has actually turned down some $100 million in stimulus money for Louisiana. And, as he proudly explained on “Meet the Press” last weekend, he can’t wait to be judged on “the results” of his heroic frugality.

Good luck with that. He’s rejecting aid for a state that ranks fourth in children living below the poverty line and 46th in high school graduation rates, while struggling with a projected budget shortfall of more than $1.7 billion.

If you’re baffled why the G.O.P. would thrust Jindal into prime time, the answer is desperation. Eager to update its image without changing its antediluvian (or antebellum) substance, the party is trying to lock down its white country-club blowhards. The only other nonwhite face on tap, alas, is the unguided missile Michael Steele, its new national chairman. Steele has of late been busy promising to revive his party with an “off-the-hook” hip-hop P.R. campaign, presumably with the perennially tan House leader John Boehner leading the posse.

At least the G.O.P.’s newfound racial sensitivity saved it from choosing the white Southern governor often bracketed with Jindal as a rising “star,” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. That would have been an even bigger fiasco, for Sanford is from the same state as Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the junior high school student who sat in Michelle Obama’s box on Tuesday night and whose impassioned letter to Congress was quoted by the president.

In her plea, the teenager begged for aid to her substandard rural school. Without basic tools, she poignantly wrote, she and her peers cannot “prove to the world” that they too might succeed at becoming “lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president.”

Her school is in Dillon, where the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, grew up. The school’s auditorium, now condemned, was the site of Bernanke’s high school graduation. Dillon is now so destitute that Bernanke’s middle-class childhood home was just auctioned off in a foreclosure sale. Unemployment is at 14.2 percent.

Governor Sanford’s response to such hardship — his state over all has the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate — was not merely a threat to turn down federal funds but a trip to Washington to actively lobby against the stimulus bill. He accused the three Republican senators who voted for it of sabotaging “the future of our civilization.” In his mind the future of civilization has little to do with the future of students like Ty’Sheoma Bethea.

What such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard. Listening to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father’s inability to pay for an obstetrician, you’d never guess that at the time his father was an engineer andhis mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. Sanford’s first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his “family’s farm” taught him “about hard work and responsibility.” That “farm,” the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.

Rest.

WaPo's Marc Fisher reprints a long article, first printed ten years ago, about radio broadcaster Paul Harvey. He died yesterday at 90. Worth a read.

-as is this profile of Harvey's wife, an influential figure in radio on her own.

Department of WTF?

Well, of course. In my house the talk is of little else:

Christianity and Slavery

This week I had the opportunity to be reminded why I had such a teeth gritting experience in my stint at Regent University. I have been vocal in the past about two of them, namely too much self righteous judgment and a complete inability to mind their own business, both with the necessary of ignorance and arrogance to pull them both off effectively. But there is yet a third—they cannot defend their beliefs when confronted to save their souls, bless their black little hearts.