Huckabee on Iran and Iraq

Republican Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee’s sudden surge in the Iowa and national polls has fittingly led to heightened scrutiny of his views and policy positions. But as the veneer begins to peel off voters may see some neocon leanings hiding behind that campionate conservative guise.

Take for instance his recent interview with Wolf Blitzer on Late Edition this past Sunday where he fielded questions on Iran and Iraq. When Blitzer asked Huckabee to describe his strategic approach toward preventing Iran from attaining nuclear weapons, Huckabee’s response was flip, ill-considered and uninformed.

Whatever it takes. We cannot allow Iran to have nuclear capacity. It’s as simple as that. We can’t allow it for a couple of reasons. One, they’ve already made clear their intentions to destroy Israel. (Secondly,) they have not shown a level of responsibility or restraint.

This response sounds as if Huckabee’s briefing book on Iran was simply filled with doomsday scenarios that some campaign consultant on the Weekly Standard payroll told him to spout at will. Interestingly enough, few people especially in the Republican or Democratic camp, have mentioned anything about the slow hard slog of diplomacy taking place currently taking place between the Pyongyang and Washington, who are presently much further along in their weapons program than the Iranians. As evidenced by the North Korean example, diplomatic negotiations are a far better option in dealing with Iran.

In recent weeks, Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohammed ElBaradei has made this point much more forcefully as the administration’s rhetoric on Iran has become increasingly hawkish. During separate interview with Wolf Blizter on CNN, ElBaradie had this to say about the administration posture toward Iran.

Well, this is the U.S. policy. I can’t really pass judgment on it. All I can say, Wolf, the earlier we go into negotiation, the earlier we follow the North Korean model, the better for everybody. Negotiation stopped with North Korea from five years. They ended up with nuclear weapons. They ended up with a nuclear test.

You resume negotiation, now we see a positive result. I always compare between the Korean model and the Iraq model. And I believe that these security or insecurity issues can best — can only be resolved through negotiation.

ElBaradie was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. After conducting inspections of Iraq in 2003, he also warned reported it had no weapons of mass destruction. But at the time ElBaradie was summarily dismissed by the Bushies.

John Tanner Gets the Grilling of His Life

John Tanner got the grilling of his life by a House Judiciary Subcommittee yesterday on his record as chief of the voting rights section at the Justice Department and his remarks about minority elderly voters.

Under Tanner’s leadership the Justice Department has approved the most stringent voter ID laws in places such as Arizona, Georgia, and Indiana that make it harder not easier for the poor, people of color, and the elderly to vote. Many civil rights advocates consider current voter ID laws a tool of voter suppression because of their onerous provisions.

As Bradblog reported weeks ago, Tanner stated his rationale for not believing elderly voters of color are discriminated against in the implementation of these laws because “they die first.”

Since then, Tanner offered a meager apology that sounded more like as if he regretted how others misinterpreted his statement than an attempt to be genuinely contrite.

I want to apologize for the comments I made at the recent meeting of the National Latino Congreso about the impact of voter identification laws on elderly and minority voters. I understand that my explanation of the data came across in a hurtful way which I deeply regret.

Alabaman Congressman Artur Davis, however, wasn’t buying it. He began his questioning by leaning into Tanner regarding his rationale for his offensive remarks. Tanner began to explain away his statements by referring to certain inequities in the healthcare system and other “sad facts.” But curiously cited very few facts and statistics to support his views.

As he probed John Tanner reasoning, Congressman Davis asked him the most salient question all morning: Was Tanner familiar with the numbers regarding voter turnout among minority voters in Georgia? After a few failed attempts at dodging the question, John Tanner, chief of the DOJ voting section, said no.

Mr. Davis did not stop until he hammered this critical point home.

You’re a policy maker, sir. You’re in charge of enforcing the voting rights laws in this country and if you are not fully informed about you are talking about and pontificating about…. If you are basing your conclusions on stereotypes rather than facts, then it suggests to some of us that someone else can do this job better than you can.

Watch it.

Pressure Mounts on Mukasey to Denouce Torture

A growing number of Senators are starting to mount pressure on attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey to denounce water boarding as a form of torture.  Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) told Face the Nation yesterday that Mukasey “should not be confirmed unless he is very, very clear about these aggressive techniques, which violate our laws and violate (the international) Geneva (convention on treatment of prisoners of war), as being totally unacceptable.”

And even Republican conservatives such as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham voiced concerns about Mukasey’s legalistic and dispiriting response stance on waterboarding. “I am urging him that he needs to come forward. If he does not believe that waterboarding is illegal, then that would really put doubts in my own mind because I don’t think you have to have a lot of knowledge about the law to understand this technique violates” international and domestic laws.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Chris Dodd of Conneticut also announced his opposition to Mukasey recently in this statement:

Mr. Mukasey’s position that the President does not have to heed the law disqualifies him from being the chief attorney for the United States. We have seen for too long, and at great expense to our national security, an Administration that has systematically attacked the rule of law and turned our Justice Department into a political wing of the White House. I’m afraid that Mr. Mukasey as Attorney General would be more of the same.

Not only does statements like these makes you doubt if Mukasey has the votes to get confirmed right now, but, more importantly, whether or not the Bush administration will take a nominee who has gone on record denouncing torture, if Mukasey reverses himself. 

Seeing mere skeptics and lukewarm supporters of  Mukasey’s nomination turn into outright opposers also makes you wonder if the administration is going to allow this nominee sink, and start over with say a Ted Olson, or if it just inept at tackling this meltdown.

McCain Hedging on Waterboarding

Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain (R-AZ), has championed anti-torture legislation and has remained a steadfast critic of the Bush Administration’s torture policies. In 2005, he took on the White House in battling for the passage of a “law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror,” which, among many other torture techniques, outlaws waterboarding.

And as recently as this past summer at a GOP Presidential Debate in New Hampshire, he castigated his fellow Republicans for implying that pro-torture policies helped U.S. in its so-called “war on terror.” At that forum he said, “And it was interesting, during the debate on torture, the retired military, from Colin Powell on down and others, sided with me. Those who had no military experience took the other side.” As it is often noted, Sen. McCain’s position on the issue is rooted in his experience of being tortured while held captive by the Vietnamese after his plane was shot down 40 years ago this week.

So given McCain’s history of being a fierce anti-torture advocate, one would think he would be much more forceful in his criticism of Attorney General nominee Michael Muskasey’s refusal to call waterboarding torture. During his confirmation hearings, Mukasey said if waterboarding was unconstitutional it was indeed torture, a statement that completely ignoring the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, or at best suggesting the law itself was inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution. Either way Mukasey’s response implied he might at worst permit, if not encourage, certain techniques already banned by Congress to continue.

But Mr. Straight Talk Express actually did nothing of the sort while on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos earlier today. In fact, when asked point blank “Will Mr. Mukasey have to say clearly that waterboarding is torture to get your vote for attorney general?” McCain sounded coy and cautious. He simply retorted:

I can’t be that absolute. But I want to know his answer. I want to know his answer. Obviously, you judge a candidate for office or nominee for office on the entire record. But this is a very important issue to me.

Watch it!

In recent days, a number of other Senators have voiced their criticism of Mukasey’s refusal to unambiguously condemn the use of torture, including Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has already stated he will vote against Muskasey’s confirmation.

In the coming days, we will see if Mukasey credibly repositions himself on the torture issue to merit Senate support. If Muskasey wins Senate approval despite an unequivocal rebuke of all torture methods, the rest of the Senate will be using the same double-talk play book the administration has been using on the American public since the Abu Garaib.

(H/T: Think Progress)

School to Prison Pipeline

In its preliminary shadow report of the United States compliance with an international treaty on ending racial discrimination, the American Civil Liberties Union summarized the “school to prison pipeline” in very succinct and sobering terms.

The “school to prison pipeline,” a disturbing national trend, refers to the increasingly widespread practice of funneling primarily children of color out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. These are often children with learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect. Rather than addressing their needs through additional educational services, they are isolated and punished.

Policy trends responsible for this problem include “zero-tolerance” policies criminalizing minor instances of school misconduct; schools increasingly ignoring due process protections for these children, expelling them from public schools and placing them in alternative schools and detention facilities; and policy initiatives including the federal No Child Left Behind Act that place an undue emphasis on ‘high stakes testing,’ providing schools the incentive to push out low performing students.

For example, in the Winner school district in South Dakota, middle and high schools disproportionately punish Native American students for alleged misconduct. Native American students, many with learning disabilities, are 3 times more likely than Caucasian students to be suspended and more than 10 times more likely to be arrested for school misconduct.

Over one-third of the Native American students will be suspended, and roughly 1 in every 7 Native children will be arrested for violating a school disciplinary rule, in any year. Native children who defend themselves against racial harassment by Caucasian children are routinely arrested.

The U.S. report, by contrast, barely mentioned the school to prison phenomenon.

To read the U.S. report on its compliance with the CERD click here.

To read the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) click here.

Click here to read the rest of the ACLU report.

Update: Learn more about the school to prison pipeline Legal Defense Fund’s site by clicking here. Learn about the ACLU’s campaign against the school to prison pipeline by clicking here.

Base Politics

When asked about the different approaches Congresswoman Pelosi and Senator Clinton have toward policy making, foreign policy maven Walter Russell Read told the Politico:

Pelosi is a grass-roots politician who is interested in making policy out of the views of the base. Hillary Clinton is a national politician who is interested in formulating good policy and then selling that to the base.

That kind of assesment makes you wonder what the fate of great social change is when people continue to think along the lines of these false dichotomies.  Or worse, when people begin to personify these false dichotomies themselves.

Flag Pin Patriotism

After hearing that Obama was criticized a few weeks ago for not wearing the flag pin anymore and seeing that bit of information being treated as newsworthy fodder for pudits and reporters alike, I thought the mainstream media must be really bored to spend time on this.  But then I began to pay attention to this dishonest discussion about patriotism take place and watched people act as if they were really taking the whole charade seriously.

Perhaps, I am alone on this, but I thought Obama response was a good one because it shifted the focus away from the mini-smear campaign right wingers such as Sean Hannity were waging against Obama to criticizing those who wrap themselves in the flag only to violate the U.S. Constitution in how they govern or craft policy. 

You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest; instead I’m gonna try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.

But apparently that answer did not satisfy critics such as Stanley Renshon who said in the Politico yestersday,

Certainly dissent is important, and it’s both the right and the privilege of all Americans. However, equating it with true patriotism is like comparing dating with a good marriage.

That’s assesment is unfair and fails to acknowledge how the post-9/11 America became infused with extremist rhetoric that led to disatrous polices. 

Consider the following. Immediately after 9/11 right-wingers such as the late Jerry Falwell said,  

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU….I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen’.

And as late as fall of 2006 Rep. Dennis Hastert and others, attributed Democratic opposition to legalizing the President’s unlawful wiretapping to wanting to “coddle terrorists.” And since 9/11, the Bush administration has held suspects indefinitely without charge, tortured people, and of course unsuccessfully prosecuted an unnecessary war.

Now to be fair to Renshon larger criticism was that Obama was conflating the demonstration of solidarity in wearing the pin after 9/11 with the hyper-patriotism of the right wing or even initial support for foreign adventures.  Patriotism, Renshon argued, can be the glue that binds people together for the sake of community service or overcome “identity politics.” And perhaps that true. 

But thats not how it has been recasted in this current environment, and to forget that is to be either blind or purposefully forgetful.  Patriotism and loyalty whether Renshon admits it or not were defined by the right in very stark terms.  It was either you are with us or you are against us. Or as Ashcroft warned the American public, criticism of administration policies would only provide aid and comfort to the enemy.

So while some might want to dismiss Obama’s justification for not wearing the flag pin the way he did as just some ill-considered platitude, he still has a point. Somehow that got lost in the translation.

Bill Maher of course had a much more witter take on the faux controversy.

Good Vibrations?

Looking for washboard abs?  Then you may want to consider standing on a vibrating plantform for 15 minutes a day for about 15 weeks. Perhaps, that sounds a little looney, but that’s what a medical researcher in Maine discovered in his testing on mice. According to the Associated Press:

mice developed 27 percent fewer abdominal fat cells and saw other benefits, including reduced triglycerides in the liver. The mice didn’t lose weight but Rosen says it appears that the vibrations changed fat distribution in a beneficial way.

Sounds like vibrating platforms might make good Christmas gifts for all those holiday compulsive eaters yet reluctant dieters out there. Or perhaps it might be a better gift to some other people looking to shift some weight to all the right places.

Obama Going Nose to Nose with Hillary

In Iowa, the Obama campaign is ratcheting up its nose to nose strategy against the Hillary Clinton campaing by aligning her with Bush administration and other hawkish Democrats in Congress.  A recent mailing attacks Hillary for not only voting for the war in Iraq, but also for the recent Kyl-Lieberman Amendment to a recent Iraq War bill. Here is some text from the Iowa mailing:

“Why is this amendment so dangerous?… Because George Bush and Dick Cheney could use this language to justify keeping our troops in Iraq as long as they can point to a threat from Iran. And because they could use this language to justify an attack on Iran as a part of the ongoing war in Iraq.”

I am not so sure how much traction this criticism will get. Implying Hillary is just as much of a war warmonger as Bush is in an effort to draw a distinction between the two campaigns may not be sustainable for very long.  All she has to do is point to a number of instances in which she has been attacked by the administration and other Republicans for her criticisms of the war and its foreign policy generally to sap the charge of its sting. 

Plus, since Obama did not actually vote on the amendment himself he might be vulnerable to the claim that he is criticising her from the sidelines.

It will be interesting to see how long the Obama campaign will take to move onto the next attack or if this one is followed up on during the next two weeks with another foriegn policy or vision speech.

See the mailer here.

How is Waterboarding Not Torture?

On his second day of his confirmation hearings, retired Judge Michael Mukasey was asked by Senator Whitehouse whether or not he considered waterboarding torture. Most reasonable people would think this is a no-brainer, especially since Mukasey said on the first day of his testimony that torture was antithetical to American values and that “the president can’t authorize torture because torture is barred both by statute and the constitution.” But just as he skirted around the question of closing down Gitmo, Mukasey did the same on waterboarding by spouting legalism.

Watch it.

It’s also a rather odd that Mukasey claimed he could not say whether or not it was torture because he did not know what was involved in the technique and yet is touted as a judge experience in national security issues and terrorism cases.

He could not have expected the committee to sincerely believe that he was unfamiliar with what was actually involved in waterboarding. So Sen. Whitehouse gave him the quick and dirty and told him that it consisted of “putting someone in a reclining position, strapping him down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning.” That kind of explanation should be clear to anyone. Yet all Mukasey said was “if it amounts to torture it is not Constitutional.”

Perhaps, this might be an indication that though he may be willing to tell the President no on certain occassions it does not mean he is not oppose to executive power operating outside of the bounds of law for national security reasons. This view of executive power might also explain why he was also reluctant to go along with shutting down Gitmo on day one of the hearings.

But more importantly, it seems to suggest that Mukasey may be unwilling to put a end to torture and other abuses once he becomes attorney general, despite saying such interrogation techniques are against everything this country stands for.

Mukasey Skirts on the Gitmo Question

In politics what is said is often just as important as what is left unsaid. Hence the Kabuki theatre quality of many high profile Senate confirmation hearings.  Yesterday’s hearings of President Bush’s nominee for attorney general Michael Mukasey was no exception to this rule. 

In a somewhat telling exchange the clip below Mukasey did not merely demure on whether or not Guantanamo prison should be closed immediately, but also asserted that the detainees there were treated humanely.

First of all, considering how well documented the allegations of torture are at Gitmo by the press and the advocacy world, it is more than disappointing that none of the Senators followed up on Mukasey’s statement on the treatement of detainees. Secondly, Mukasey reluctance to closing down Guantanamo because the “National Intelligence Director has an interest in what happens to the people there because they may very well have or have had information that we may need in order to combat terrorism,” is also troubling. 

It signals a willingness to detain people indefinitely and without charge because they allegedly might have sensitive information including American citizens as we have seen in the Jose Padilla case, which Mukasey presided over as a federal judge.  His murky position on this issue was also illustrated in another exchange with Sen. Dianne Fienstein where Mukasey said that 2004 holding of the Hamdi case made the notion of the battlefield vague enough that even U.S. citizens captured on American soil can be designated so-called enemy combatants.

It was also odd that there was virtually no mention of the fact that the vast majority of the detainees at Gitmo are not real terrorists or have any real intelligence value.  A former Arabic translator for the U.S. Army at Guantanamo Bay told 60 Minutes in 2005, “At best, I would say there were a few dozen (terrorists),” says Saar. “A few dozen [out of 600].” Nor was there any mention of how he would go about dismantling the systematic and widespread use of torture and other abuses that not only go on at Gitmo, but presumably elsewhere too such as the CIA’s black sites.

Interestingly enough, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said earlier this year that with regard to Gitmo detainees ”I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our more federal legal system.”

To be fair, there are problems with transferring detainees out of Gitmo, since some of the detainees there could tortured by governments of their home countries, but Mukasey never mentioned he was concerned about that possibility or offered any ideas of his own about what to do about them.

Additionally, asserting that President Bush “understands” that Gitmo is hurting America’s reputation in the world and that the goal should be closing down the Gitmo prison, may strike many people as a rather specious claim. Though President Bush has professed a desire to close Gitmo down, he also called international criticism of human rights abuses there absurd. And even though the prison has been open since 2001, he and others in the administration have been terribly slow to come around to even considering shutting it down.

That said, however, it is encouraging to hear Mukasey unequivocally repudiate torture as antithetical to American values. But by the end of the hearing, its was difficult to say whether or not Mukasey’s unwillingness to unequivocally recommend Gitmo be shut down can be attributed to what he sees as certain impracticalities or if he simply thinks its a losing battle altogether.

Overall, after what was said and unsaid during several hours of hearing testimony yesterday, I remain just as cautiously pessimistic about Mukasey’s future as attorney general as I was before the Kabuki theatre began.

(Hat Tip: TPM)

The Long Campaign of Inevitability

Michael Tomasky, editor of Guardian America, sounded off this week against the mainstream media for over hyping the influence of the new primary schedule and perceived front-runner status of certain candidates.

In a response a to a reader’s question about whether or not some other candidate that’s not Obama or Clinton can still muster enough momentum to perform well in the early primaries, Tomasky said the following in the New York Review of Books:

The new primary schedule, or more to the point the media’s treatment of the new schedule, is one of the most maddening things to me about this political season so far. Originally, the (laudable) aim of adding South Carolina and Nevada as early primaries, and of other larger states jumping forward to February 5, was to diminish the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. But the media—the experts on cable TV and so on—have decided that the new calendar only augments the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire. I haven’t been able to figure out from any of them exactly why this is so, except that for whatever reason they’ve decided it’s so. It’s a classic case of the media pretending to be describing a reality but actually creating it by constantly yakking about it.

Thus, the experts have already agreed: if Edwards loses Iowa, he’s finished. This seems preposterous to me. What if the Iowa result is a very close three-way result among Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, and Edwards finishes third by just a few percentage points? The media will be shooing him out of the race from the moment the polls close.

One does not have to look far and wide for examples that illustrate Tomasky’s point. Pundits and reporters at various media outlets itching to prematurely dubb Sen. Hillary Clinton Madame Inevitable. Back in August, Stanley Fish said, “It’s time to start thinking seriously about Hillary Clinton’s running mate.” CNN’s senior political analyst Bill Schneider, for example, recently said Hillary was “looking more inevitable, and the more inevitable she looks, the easier it is to raise money. People want to be with a winner.” Additionally, reports about her commanding lead in the polls and in recent fund raising totals are certainly meant to underscore the notion that she is the presumptive nominee.

While it is important to remember that at this point in 2004 Howard Dean was leading in the national polls and then manage to decompose on the campaign trail, Clinton is a far more discipline candidate with a solid organization behind her. More importantly, she has him to play backup.

Whites and Blacks Differ on Jena and Justice System

Unsurprisingly, recent polling data of the opinions of whites and African-Americans regarding the Jena Six situation in Louisianna, and discrimination within the criminal justice system generally, reveal a huge gulf in their attitudes.

According to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday, 79 percent of blacks said the black teenagers in Jena were treated unfairly. Whites were more evenly divided, with 33 percent saying they were treated unfairly, 29 percent fairly and 38 percent saying they were unsure.

In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll taken late last month, nearly nine in 10 blacks said that blacks and other minorities cannot receive equal justice to whites under the nation’s justice system. Whites agreed, but by a much narrower 50 percent to 44 percent.

Can You Wiretap Me Now?

The Washington Post reported yesterday that telecom giant Verizon handed over phone records to federal authorities without a warrant tens of thousands of times.

From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities on an emergency basis 720 times, it said in the letter. The records included Internet protocol addresses as well as phone data. In that period, Verizon turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order, the letter said. The information was used for a range of criminal investigations, including kidnapping and child-predator cases and counter-terrorism investigations.

Verizon and AT&T said it was not their role to second-guess the legitimacy of emergency government requests.

The letters were released yesterday by the lawmakers as Congress debates whether to grant telecom carriers immunity in cases in which they are sued for disclosing customers’ phone records and other data as part of the government’s post-September 11 surveillance program, even if they did not have court authorization. House Democrats have said that they cannot contemplate such immunity without first understanding the nature of the carriers’ cooperation with the government.

On Saturday, the Washington Post also reported that Joseph P. Naccio, former CEO of Qwest Communications, said his former company was approached by the National Security Agency to participate in its warrantless surveillance program 6 months before 9/11. This entirely totally undermines the administration claims that they the program was launched in response to September 11th. When Qwest refused because of the questionable legal grounds, the government withdrew from contracts worth hundred of millions of dollars.

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

Andrew Cohen at the Washington Post blog, Bench Memo succinctly captured the inanity of it all.

It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing– the fact that Verizon Communications turns over private phone records to the feds without a court order, or the fact that company officials take the position that it’s not their job to question the legality of “emergency” requests for such information.

Funny Bits from the Dowd and Colbert Column

In today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd apparently coaxed Steven Colbert to guest write her column for her. Someday, I’d like to have a job cushy enough to allow people to do my work for me and get praised for doing so. Sigh.

At any rate, I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the funny bits in the piece. Here is Colbert on Frank Rich.

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Its so funny because its so true!

Here is another observation about the candidates that I think almost anyone can relate to.

And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

First of all, I think that’s so revealing of how voting is such an irrational act for so many people. Its not just who do I like the least, but also who can knock off that one candidate who I dread the most. Then again, by the same token, it also reminds us of how the candidates and their respective campaigns exploit that very fact by creating such emotionally charged depictions of their rivals.

Seconly, its glad to know I am not alone on Thompson. As a born and breed New Yorker, I thought it was kind of insult to have this dude from Tennessee playing a lawyer in the District Attorney’s office. The guy probably could not tell a good bagels & lox sandwich from pastrami on rye. And he probably couldn’t care less either.

I hope there is more humor to come before and after January 20, 2009.