Idaho Governor Faces Speculation on Senate Seat

New York Times:

BOISE, Idaho — If Senator Larry E. Craig yields to calls for his resignation amid allegations that he solicited sex in an airport bathroom, his successor would be chosen by a fellow Republican who once entered a tight-jeans contest — and won.

Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, was lieutenant governor when he won the “Mr. Tight Jeans” contest at the Rockin’ Rodeo bar here in the state capital in July 1992. A few days later he was arrested, and eventually convicted, for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Now, after having gone on to serve three terms in the House of Representatives before being elected governor last year, Mr. Otter knows better than most what voters in this deeply conservative state will tolerate when it comes to the private behavior of public officials. “As a public servant who has made mistakes in my private life, I am mindful that you don’t really know who your friends are, until you stumble,” he told reporters here this week.

Where do they come up with these people?

Tom Tancredo's final solution

Slate Magazine: By Timothy Noah

Addressing 30 people at the Family Table restaurant in Osceola, Iowa, the presidential candidate and Republican House member from Colorado [Tom Tancredo] outlined his highly original position on homeland defense:

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Because that is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. But as I say, if I am wrong, fine. … I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent or you will find an attack. There is no other way around it. There have got to be negative consequences for the actions they take. That's the most negative I can think of." ...

The problem with this hypothesis is that it wasn't the first time this imbecilic bigot displayed an inability to distinguish the relatively small group of active Islamist terrorists (numbering at best in the thousands) from the significantly larger group of people who are Muslims but do not intend to attack the United States (approximately 1 billion, representing about one-sixth of the world population, a few million of whom live here in the United States).

Where does the Republican Party find these people, who votes them into office, and why? Tancredo's is, of course, one of the loudest and most offensive voices in the immigration debate as well.

Giuliani's Health Care Plan: Making Him A Stronger Candidate?

The Huffington Post: By John Harwood:
Harwood's suck-up column on Giuliani's non-plan for health care contains nothing of interest (much like the plan itself). I did like this comment by a reader, identified as DMuhl:

The day after his Rochester speech, I walked into my cigar store hangout in New York, and there was Rudy Giuliani enjoying a cigar and strategizing with an aide. He's a regular, so it's no surprise to see him there, but it was the first time I'd seen him since he announced he's running for president. I couldn't let the moment pass.

After his meeting he did some glad-handing with the rest of us, joked about how he has to hang out his apartment window when he smokes a cigar, then headed to the back of the store. I followed him. I told him I'd heard what he said about single payer health insurance, and I totally disagreed. He said, 'That's okay, you can disagree.' Before he could walk past me, I told him that my brother was a doctor with the VA, and he supported a single payer system. I added that the VA provided preventitive [sic] care that was comparable to the private sector, but at a cost of 30% less than private insurance. He mumbled something about how it would be nice if there was a demand for that (I had no idea what he meant). As he headed for the door, I told him I pay $664 a month for health insurance just for myself. Before I could finish the sentence, he was on the street. The thing is, he left in such a hurry, he forgot to pay for his cigars. A salesman had to chase him down and bring him back to the store to settle up. I told the salesman he should've let him go, and called the New York Post.

And Giuliani is supposedly one of the more "moderate" Republican candidates. What a horror.

Giuliani Calls for Tax Breaks to Buy Health Insurance

New York Times Blog:

The decision by the Giuliani campaign to address health care so early in the primary is a clear recognition of the broad dissatisfaction among voters with the current system, both for those who do have coverage and for the millions who are uninsured.

Using explicitly partisan language, obviously intended to stir memories of Senator Hillary Clinton’s failed bid to reform health care more than a decade ago, Mr. Giuliani cited a series of horror stories and selective statistics about health care in foreign countries that cover all their citizens. Mr. Giuliani said that “socialist” model would bankrupt the government.

“That is where Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are taking you,” he said. “You have got to see the trap. Otherwise we are in for a disaster. We are in for Canadian health care, French health care, British health care.”

If only...And from the NYTimes Blog:

Yes, the horror of the “socialist” solution, like in France or Italy, ranked #1 and #2 by the WHO organization for overall quality of health care.

Instead, we have to make sure large corporations make enormous profits in the most innefficient system in the western world.

I’m truly amazed that intelligent people can continue to fall for this fear-mongering nonsense.

I’m embarrassed to be an American citizen when I read garbage like this.

— Posted by Thomas NYC

An Immoral Philosophy

New York Times: By Paul Krugman

So what kind of philosophy says that it’s O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?

Well, here’s what Mr. Bush said after explaining that emergency rooms provide all the health care you need: “They’re going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a — I wouldn’t call it a plot, just a strategy — to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care.”

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.” ...

There is, it seems, more basic decency in the hearts of Americans than is dreamt of in Mr. Bush’s philosophy.

Is that even possible?

Truthout: Senate Work Held Up by Republican Filibusters:

Washington - This year Senate Republicans are threatening filibusters to block more legislation than ever before, a pattern that's rooted in - and could increase - the pettiness and dysfunction in Congress.

A handy reference guide to GOP scandals

By Holly Allen, Christopher Beam, and Torie Bosch - From Slate Magazine:
Bushies Behaving Badly: A guide to GOP scandals.

I love the smell of sliming blogs in the morning

The Opinionator - New York Times Blog:

Maybe Giuliani has an outside chance at the G.O.P. nomination, but could a pro-choice Republican win the general election? The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat doesn’t think so: “Frankly, if Giuliani being the Republican nominee doesn’t prompt a third-party run by a pro-life candidate that cuts into his general-election support, then social conservatives ought to retire from politics out of sheer embarrassment.”

Giuliani isn’t the only Republican candidate whose candidacy is suffering because of an abortion-related controversy. One prominent conservative blogger ruled out supporting Mitt Romney after learning that Romney’s wife, Ann, gave $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. “It is not because Ann Romney gave money to Planned Parenthood,” writes Erick Erickson at RedState. “It is because this is the straw that broke the camel’s back — one light piece of straw piled on a mountain of political opportunism and reckless vacillation.”

Giuliani to Support Abortion Rights

From The New York Times:

After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday....
Mr. Giuliani’s aides were concerned both because the responses [to his performance in the recent Republican "debate"] opened him up to a new round of criticism from abortion critics, who have never been happy with the prospect of a Republican presidential candidate who supports abortion rights, while threatening to undercut his image as a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate on tough issues.

Indeed, "a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate" on following his political strategists and their positioning advice.

It's the Constitution, Stupid

Marty Kaplan, The Huffington Post:

"Okay, this is a lightning round. How many of you believe in evolution? Raise your hands. Thank you. Now how many of you believe in the Rapture? Is that hand up or down, Senator McCain? Okay, thanks. Now this is multiple choice, so please listen to the whole question first. How many pairs of chromosomes do you think people should have: 23, less than 23, or more than 23?
Ready? Okay, who says 23? One, two, three, four, five, six hands. Less than 23? I'm sorry Mayor Giuliani, you can only pick one. All right, who says more than 23?'

Can you think of a stupider way for a great nation to choose its leader than the one we have?"...

Here's the most important thing we can learn from any of these candidates: Do they believe in the rule of law? I don't care whether it means we have to hear again, and probably over and over, about Bill Clinton's lying under oath about sex. That's worth the price of finding out what every candidate believes about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers and every other element of American democracy that we used to count on to safeguard us from tyranny. And since it's a Republican president and his Congressional enablers who have treated their oath-taking -- their swearing to defend the Constitution, to take care to enforce the laws -- like a horny teenager at an abstinence-only ring ceremony -- it's Republicans in particular who should be forced by these debates, by the media, and by the public to answer the only real questions that turn out to count.

Republican Hopefuls Demonstrate Doublespeak on stem cells

blog.bioethics.net: Republican Hopefuls Demonstrate Doublespeak: Art Caplan on Blog.Bioethics.net

W

hat exactly, students sometimes ask me, is 'doublespeak'. Now I have a paradigmatic example to show them.

Herewith the wafflings, twistings, turnings and outright mumbo-jumboing of ten wannabe Presidents.The ten GOP presidential candidates held a debate on Thursday evening. Moderator Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked the candidates about stem cell research. Here is that section of the debate transcript.

On The (Republican) Debate

From Eunomia : With thanks to The Opinionator@NYT

That brings me to Mitt Romney. Yes, Romney is smooth and, to the untrained eye, almost human. In the superficial world of television debates, he will always “do well” in some sense, because he is a master of appearance over substance. I will be willing to grant that Romney gained the most from last night’s debate, even though he did not necessarily perform as well as some of the others, because he made no obvious mistakes (except for being a treacly and obnoxious politician who reinvents his views when it is convenient) while his two major rivals came away looking unimpressive (Giuliani) or like a crotchety old man who hasn’t had his dinner yet (McCain).

Nice invective. Sounds right.
If you agree, raise your hand. Very evolved of you.
I didn't watch. No regrets.

McCloskey leaves Republican Party

ContraCostaTimes Politics Weblog::

Lifelong Republican, Marine veteran and former congressman Pete McCloskey has left the GOP and registered with the Democratic Party.

McCloskey says he is disgusted with the 'succession of ethical scandals, congressmen taking bribes and abuse of power by both the Republican House leadership and the highest appointees of the White House.'

'A pox on (Republicans) and their values,' he wrote.

And who said the only good Republican was a dead Republican? For shame.