Archive for September 23, 2008

Warning: this post contains offensive language

September 23, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , ,

What is this world coming to?  I don’t know which part of this story to begin with- the part where the school asked children to wear red white and blue to show their patriotism (which all too often, people interpret as “partisanship”), or the part where an 11-year-old, Daxx Dalton, insisted on wearing this hateful t-shirt:

So, the school suspended the child (after he refused to turn the t-shirt inside out).  But, I am sure you can imagine the heap of trouble he was in when he got home:

“It’s the public school system — let’s be honest, it’s full of liberal loons,” Mr Dalton [the child’s father] said.

“The facts are his rights were violated, period.”

Aurora Public Schools declined to comment on the case but said it’s investigating, while Mr Dalton has indicated his intentions to bring a lawsuit against the school district.

This isn’t the first time a public school has wrestled with the protection of free speech for minor children.  Just last summer the Supreme Court sided with a high school principal who disciplined a student who held a banner that said “Bong hits 4 Jesus,” because the banner could have been interpreted to encourage illegal drug use.  In 1969, the Court upheld students’ rights to wear armbands to protest the Vietnam War if they did not interfere with classes.

But the Court’s 1986 decision does not bode well for Mr. Dalton’s cause.  In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor a high school that suspended a student who used “offensive” language in a speech at a school-sponsored event on school grounds.  The court held that:

Nothing in the Constitution prohibits the states from insisting that certain modes of expression are inappropriate and subject to sanctions.  The inculcation of these values is truly the work of the school, and the determination of what manner of speech is inappropriate properly rests with the school board.

Boy, I bet the liberals were f***ing pissed off about that one.

I think we can easily resolve this misunderstanding.  I’d like to suggest to Dann Dalton that he should feel free to send his child to a school that is not funded by the taxpayers, that way he can continue teaching Daxx Dalton baseless hate-speech on his own terms.

In fact, if you are reading this Mr. Dalton, I’d like my money back, please.

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Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow: Advisor to Barack Obama

September 23, 2008 at 4:41 pm · Filed under foreign affairs, Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Folks, this story is a little in the weeds and now old — I managed to NOT publish it, despite writing it two days ago, when we were all shaking our heads at the “wildly exaggerating” McCain ad that called Franklin Raines (former Fannie Mae chief) an Obama advisor.

But it is still very important that you know that Sarah Palin did not withdraw from the anti-Iran rally because she is unaware of the grave threat Iran poses. Nor is it because she is intimidated by the vitriolic Ahmadenijad.  And she certainly isn’t calling for negotiations.  I am not sure where you heard those rumors, but none of them are true.  The truth is, she was just being jerked around on a string by political operators who hate freedom.

One of Sarah Palin’s advisors, a guy named Mark Wallace (husband of McCain campaign spokeswoman Nichole Wallace), is executive director of the group organizing the rally.  He thought Hillary Clinton — who signed on in August — would be fine appearing on stage with the new female phenom, and with Hillary being such a prominate Democrat, no one would miss team Obama.   So, nobody bothered to invite them, until five days before the event, when there was no Hillary to lend heft and painful irony to Palin’s appearance (because she withdrew when Sarah Palin’s addition made the event overtly political).  So, the organizers invited the Obama campaign to participate, with a full four or five days notice.

The Obama campaign signed on, sending over well-known Florida (and Jewish) Congressman Robert Wexler.  Well, at that point, the organizers decided the rally was getting too much political attention from too many “political personalities” and disinvited Palin and Wexler.  Huh?

Menacham Rosencraft at the Huffington Post explains:

Let’s be perfectly clear. The organizers had initially invited Governor Palin without ever contacting, let alone inviting, anyone from the Obama campaign. When they finally issued a belated invitation to the Obama side, it was accepted, and a prominent Democratic Member of Congress was going to speak at the rally. The organizers then disinvited both Governor Palin and Representative Wexler. And whom does the GOP hold responsible for this fiasco? Barack Obama, of course.

Never mind that the Obama campaign was ready, willing and able to participate in the rally. Never mind that neither Senator Obama nor his campaign had had anything to do with the organizers’ decisions to invite and then disinvite Governor Palin. Never mind that the McCain-Palin campaign had been perfectly content to have Governor Palin speak at the rally without anyone representing the Obama campaign. Lamenting the rally organizers’ withdrawal of the Palin invitation, the McCain campaign charged that “Senator Obama’s campaign had the opportunity to join us. Senator Obama chose politics rather than the national interest.”

If John McCain and his GOP flacks thought they could get away with it, they would blame Barack Obama for the Great Depression, the 1876 massacre at Little Big Horn, the bubonic pandemic of the 1340s, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. And they would probably run ads alleging that Mrs. O’Leary, whose legendary cow is alleged to have started the Chicago fire, was an Obama public safety adviser.

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The Man from Montana

September 23, 2008 at 4:32 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Stumbling as I did on Montana GOP chairman Erik Iverson’s mindless repetition of Sarah Palin’s mind-numbing talking points has led me to consider what Iverson used the canned line for in the first place.

Apparently, Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer gave a speech in July where he seemed to joke about intimidating Republican poll watchers and about holding the vote tally of the Democratic stronghold of Butte, Montana.

He included as an example a detailed description of how he had called Indian tribal authorities two weeks before the election and warned them to be on the lookout for people who would show up at the polls on Election Day to try to discourage people from voting by asking them for identification.

Then Mr. Schweitzer described how the tribal police had closed in on poll watchers who he said had shown up.

“ ‘You can either come with us in the back seat of our car, or you can both get in the front seat of your car, and we’ll lead you off this reservation and if we never see you again, you won’t go to jail,’ ” Mr. Schweitzer said, describing the encounters. Then he paused, and said, “We didn’t lose one single vote.”

The Indian vote, strongly Democratic, was important in Mr. Tester’s victory over Conrad Burns, a Republican incumbent who lost by about 3,500 votes of more than 406,000 cast.

In the speech, Mr. Schweitzer also described the county clerk and recorder in Butte-Silver Bow, Mary M. McMahon, as sounding “nervous as a pregnant nun,” when he called her late in the evening after the polls had closed, but before Butte reported its results.

Mr. Schweitzer briefly told the lawyers about the deep Democratic traditions of Butte, where the American labor movement cut its teeth in organizing mine workers decades ago. When Ms. McMahon came on the phone, he said in the speech, she told him the vote count would be ready in perhaps 15 minutes.

But that was not good enough.

“ ‘I want you to listen, I want you to listen close,’ ” Mr. Schweitzer said he told Ms. McMahon. “ ‘I’ll call you when you’re done counting — now do you understand it?’ ” The lawyers laughed. “She’s from Butte — she understood exactly,” Mr. Schweitzer said.

On Wednesday, Ms. McMahon and Mr. Schweitzer both said that she had refused to take his call that evening, and that she phoned him later with the election results.

I get that Schweitzer is folksy and gutsy and funny.  And he seems to be doing a good enough job running Montana, with the press calling him one of the most popular governors in the nation (his ratings have been above 70%).  But, clearly, that popularity has gone to the man’s head.  I would put uttering such a statement right up there with claiming the fundamentals of the economy are still strong– stupid.

Now, the story about intimidating the Republican poll watchers on the Reservation was, in a “take that!” kind of way, almost amusing.  Amusing because we have gotten used to reports of voter intimidation by these same watchers and “vote challengers” (case in point, the Macomb County GOP preparing an assault on voters whose homes were foreclosed on).  Still, each party should have the right to observe.  And we all want to believe in the right of observers to show up and do a good and honorable job.

As for the story about Schweitzer calling up the county clerk in Butte, it was clearly a ridiculous thing to say, even if you are lying (how often does a lie mitigate the alleged wrongdoing?).  Schweitzer himself seems to agree; he now says that Ms. McMahon did not take his call on election night, which is one thing on which he and Ms. McMahon seem to agree.

The Montana GOP would like to see an investigation.  Unless they turn up some real evidence, besides the careless, idiotic boasting of an over-confident governor, they may not get one (the Democratic Attorney General has said as much).

Wherever the truth is, as Mr. Iverson put it, none of this reflects well on the man from Montana who appears to have gotten “a little too big for his britches.”

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Palin’s hollow platform

September 23, 2008 at 2:56 am · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The other day I watched Fox News’ Sean Hannity sit down with Sarah Palin.  It wasn’t exactly a game of “Stump the Candidate.”  And because it wasn’t, it was an excellent opportunity to practice the campaign talking points.  Here are a few excerpts from Governor Palin:

And in that cronyism — it’s symptomatic of the greater problem that we see right now in Washington and that is just that acceptance of the status quo, the politics as usual, the cronyism that has been allowed to be accepted and then it leads us to a position like we are today with so much collapse on Wall Street.

And that’s why John McCain tapped me to be a team of mavericks, of independents coming in there without the allegiances to that cronyism, to that good ole’ boy system.

As a team member in this — on this new team promising the reform. Reform that actually happens is tough and you can’t just talk about it . . . 

Well, I just recognized that there — as John McCain talked about on the campaign trail, also — it doesn’t matter which party it is that is just kind of creating the good-old-boy network and the cronyism.

And it’s that commitment that John McCain is articulating today, getting in there, reforming the way that Wall Street has been allowed to work, stopping the abuses and that violation of the public trust that too many CEOs and top management of some of these companies, that abuse there has got to stop.

That’s the reform that we’ve got to get in there and make sure that this happens. That’s why there hasn’t been the reform of the abuse of the earmark process. And real reform is tough and you do ruffle feathers along the way.

And I will focus on energy independence and reform overall of Washington and tax cuts for Americans and reigning in spending.  

We’ve got to put government and these regulatory agencies back on the side of the people. They want to know if government is going to be put back on the side of the people and that it will be their will implemented in their government. 

But I so respected John McCain, his maverick streak in him there really being made manifest in choosing someone who has a track record of that commitment to reform, of being able to share the examples of the reform.

We’re moving forward on a ticket of reform. I have an opportunity to respond and to join a teammate here — John McCain — in reform, putting government back on the side of the people. 

Copy Cat alert: Overreacting to Governor Brian Schweitzer trying to take credit for Democrat Jon Tester getting elected to the Senate in 2006, Montana state GOP chairman (and chief of staff to Montana’s lone Republican in Congress, Denny Rehberg) appears to be clutching the same campaign memo for dear life:
 
This is the sort of good-old-boy cronyism and politics as usual that folks all across Montana and America are rightly fed up with,” GOP Chairman Erik Iverson said. 

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As goes our banking sector, so goes our healthcare

September 23, 2008 at 2:14 am · Filed under domestic policy, Politics ·Tagged , , , ,

I just want to know- did anyone in the McCain camp remember before the most recent issue of the magazine “Contingencies” was published this week that John McCain had been quoted as saying:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Surely they just forgot to pull that quote once the meltdown on Wall Street was in full swing?  No self-respecting advisor worth his or her salt would allow their candidate to be caught dead making this sort of a comment in the middle of an economic crisis.

I’d be willing to bet that this is the same advisor who let the candidate go out last Monday morning and proclaim that the “fundamentals of the economy” are strong.

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