Month: October 2010

Christine O’Donnell Makes Sharron Angle And Sarah Palin Look Brilliant, Which They Certainly Are Not!

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We are in the age of Republican women politicians who come across as ill informed, ignorant, and unqualified for public office!

First, we had Sarah Palin, who has a great following, but has not yet demonstrated any knowledge or talents to be considering the Presidency, and yet flirts with it, the fault of Senator John McCain, who had the temerity to pick such an unqualified woman to run for Vice President! She is the gift that keeps on giving, and she is a nightmare to the future of the GOP, which she is now threatening will implode if they don’t follow the Tea Party Movement! 🙁

Then, we have Senate nominee Sharron Angle in Nevada, who has been absolutely outrageous in her statements and viewpoints, and manages to put her foot in her mouth every time she speaks!

But then we have Delaware Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell, who actually manages to make Palin and Angle look like comparative geniuses, with her constant evidence of pure stupidity and moronic statements!

Today, in a debate with her opponent, Democrat Chris Coons, before law professors and law students, O’Donnell seemed surprised to hear that separation of church and state was part of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights!

She also expressed the idea that we needed to close American borders completely to deal with the illegal immigration problem, an extremely radical solution that just about no one else has suggested, and would put us in a position similar to the old East Germany, which sealed its border in 1961, with the building of the Berlin Wall, an approach also suggested in the past day by Alaska Senate nominee Joe Miller–another truly disastrous nominee!

It will not be soon enough for Christine O’Donnell, a three time candidate for the Senate, who has proved to be the absolutely dumbest nominee this year, to leave the news front pages with a sound defeat of her candidacy on Election Day two weeks from now! 🙁

The Role Of Independents In Key Races!

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Three former Republicans, running as Independents, could tip the balance in a Senatorial race in Florida, and gubernatorial races in Rhode Island and Colorado!

In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist is running against Democrat Kendrick Meek and Republican Marco Rubio, and at the moment, is running well behind Rubio and only a point or two ahead of Meek in most polls!

In Rhode Island, former Senator Lincoln Chafee is running ahead in some polls past Democratic nominee Frank Caprio, with Republican John Robitaille in third place!

In Colorado, former Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo is running ahead of Republican Dan Maes, who is Tea Party supported, but clearly behind Democratic nominee and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper!

At this point, it seems as if Lincoln Chafee has the best chance to win, while Crist is faltering, and Tancredo’s only accomplishment is possibly to make the Republican Party a minor party in Colorado, if its nominee ends up with less than 20 percent of the vote, which now seems likely, a true electoral disaster for the GOP in Colorado!

Sarah Palin Throws Down The Gauntlet To The GOP! :(

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Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, in Nevada yesterday to campaign for GOP and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, did something unusual for her: she answered questions from CNN, while all along she has avoided any media other than Fox News Channel, who she works for!

She made it clear that she is a believer in the Tea Party Movement, and she warned the Republican Party leadership that if they did not listen to the people and incorporate the Tea Party Movement, they were “finished”!

That certainly sounds like a threat to the senior Republican leadership, and seems to many to be a hint that Palin is going to upset the party balance by challenging the establishment and running for President, although she did not specifically say that!

It is obvious, however, that if the Tea Party Movement has major successes in November, that Sarah Palin will exploit that success, and that the battle for the future of the Republican Party will begin in earnest, as to whether it will be a moderate centrist party with a future, or be an extreme right wing conservative party with limited appeal to the general electorate for the Presidential Election of 2012!

As predicted earlier, a civil war looks in the offing in the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower and Reagan for the soul of the party! It is not going to be a pretty picture! 🙁

Tea Party Outrages: More Evidence Of The Danger To The Reputation Of The US Senate! :(

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In the last week, and accelerating in the past weekend, we have seen outrageous statements and actions by several Tea Party Movement candidates for the Senate, proving that they are loons who should not be given the dignity of being United States Senators! 🙁

Ken Buck of Colorado declared that gay people can be compared to alcoholics, which can be partly genetic but can be overcome by strong efforts to change, according to him!

Sharron Angle of Nevada said that many Hispanics can be seen as Asians, because she sees them as looking very similar!

Christine O’Donnell of Delaware said that she had evidence that China was an imminent threat to the United States, based on having traveled with a group to China in recent years!

Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to shake hands at the end of a debate with opponent Jack Conway, because Conway brought up that Paul was a member of a strange Christian sect in college that promoted women being tied up as part of a ritual!

Joe Miller of Alaska has “goons”, a privately employed security group, which detained, roughed up, and handcuffed a journalist for trying to ask Miller a question after a public appearance by the candidate! This brings back memories of Governor and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana who had a group of “brown shirts” in the 1930s, that made some compare him to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler!

This is besides the reactionary, backward, anti democratic views that these men and women profess, which should, on its own, be enough to convince voters in their states that they would be undermining the image of their states if they were to award a six year stint in the Senate to these wing nuts! 🙁

And while the Senate certainly has its embarrassments in some of its members, the damage that could be done by the election of Tea Party candidates would be massive! 🙁

The Democrats’ “Secret Weapon” For The Midterm Election: First Lady Michelle Obama! :)

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With only a couple of weeks left until the midterm elections, the Democrats are bringing out their “big guns”–President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama!

The President is becoming effective as he finally becomes deeply involved in the campaign to help keep the Senate Democratic controlled, and to help gubernatorial candidates or office holders around the nation!

But First Lady Michelle Obama is much more the “secret weapon” than her husband, considering her public opinion ratings are 20 points higher–65 to 45! 🙂

If the Democrats keep control and win races that many thought were unlikely, it will be due to the Obamas, and particularly, Michelle, visiting key states!

Yesterday, in Columbus, Ohio, the husband and wife drew 35,000 people, including many young people, and minorities, which are crucial to the Democrats’ hopes!

If the Obama coalition of 2008 comes out, the Democrats will stop the Tea Party Movement and the GOP from taking the country backward in so many ways!

The CNN Top 100 House Races In Play!

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CNN has come up with a list of 100 House of Representatives seats that the network believes are in play in this fall’s election!

The list includes 90 Democratic held seats, with 15 of them being open seats, while 10 seats are held by Republicans, with 4 of them being open seats!

50 seats are thought to be most vulnerable, while 50 seats are races to watch! Four Republican seats are seen as most vulnerable, which if all went Democratic, would require the GOP to gain 43 Democratic seats instead of 39, in order to control the chamber. Of course, if all ten GOP seats were to switch, it would require 49 seats to be gained by the Republicans from the Democrats in order to gain control of the House.

More than normal interest in the House of Representatives exists because it could create a dramatic change in Congress if that chamber went Republican, while the Senate remained Democratic, which seems at this point more and more likely!

Never has the House of Representatives switched over without the Senate also switching, so this would be an historic election were it to happen!

Impending Split In GOP For 2012 Obvious: Who Did Not Attend California Rally Led By Michael Steele And Sarah Palin?

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Once the midterm elections of 2010 end in 16 days, the race for the Presidential nomination in 2012 will begin formally, and it is clear there will be a major split among Republicans!

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele and former Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin attended and hosted the event in Anaheim, but it was very obvious that there were three significant Republicans who did not want to associate themselves with the rally!

Specifically, Republican nominee for Governor Meg Whitman, and Republican nominee for Senator Carly Fiorina, both running very close races, and both very ambitious and accomplished corporate leaders (of Ebay and Hewlett Packard, respectively) avoided the rally, knowing fully and clearly that in the “blue” state of California, Sarah Palin and Michael Steele are seen as “poison”! And both women are believed to look down on Palin as a woman of few accomplishments, compared to themselves!

But also not present was Senator John McCain, who was campaigning just an hour away from the rally, for Carly Fiorina in her campaign against Senator Barbara Boxer, and going out of his way to make really nasty comments against a fellow Senator, a new tactic only used in the past few years against colleagues of the other party, as it was always felt it was unseemly to do so! One could campaign FOR a candidate without bad mouthing your colleague of the other party, but this is the new reality, which began when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist campaigned in South Dakota against Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004! The age of common decency with your colleagues is part of the “old rules” sadly no longer in effect!

But it also raised eyebrows that McCain avoided the rally headed by his own former running mate of 2008, and it is well known that Megan McCain, his daughter, has continued to make criticisms of Palin in her interviews and public appearances!

So the campaign of 2012 will be a very interesting one, with major blood letting to occur, as nearly a dozen ambitious Republicans will be organizing for President, and none of them want to be associated with either Michael Steele’s leadership of the party, or with Sarah Palin, who is seen by many, privately, as unqualified to be President, and as an annoying distraction in Republican party politics! 🙁

Fort Worth, Texas Councilman Joel Burns: A Hero And Role Model! :)

Ronald 4 Comments

Fort Worth, Texas Councilman Joel Burns has become a hero and role model by his speech promoting hope for gay teens who feel depressed and threatened because of their sexuality.

Burns gave a 13 minute emotional speech which went viral on You Tube, in which he described his own struggle to come to grips with his sexual orientation years ago.

He implored desperate teens not to lose faith and hope in a future, and wept over the spate of suicides of teens as young as 11 and as late teen as 18 in recent weeks, due to constant bullying on the internet, and rejection by churches and parents who claim to be “religious”, but are committing the greatest sin imaginable–the repudiation of children! 🙁

What churches, parents and classmates of these young men and women are doing is in reality the greatest abuse imaginable, and it is time for people of good will to demand that the hate and harassment and bullying and condemnation STOP in the name of human decency!

So Joel Burns, who could be risking his political career by being so open and emotional about this issue, should be seen as an inspiration, and the kind of politician that we need more of in the future, instead of the many phony, self serving office holders who will stop at nothing to promote hate and division in their quest for power! 🙁

And this includes talk show hosts who constantly spew hate and venom, in the mad quest for power and wealth, and have no conscience at all on this issue, as well as others they promote to divide America! 🙁 And it is not necessary to list who the author means, as anyone with any awareness of what is going on, knows who they are! 🙁

Religious Leaders And Bigotry: The Hypocrisy Of Some Clergymen Of All Faiths! :(

Ronald 5 Comments

Whatever religion one professes to believe in, one of the basic tenets of religion is not only to save humanity from its sins, but also promote tolerance and open mindedness toward those who do not share your beliefs!

On that test, many clergymen have failed miserably, and the problem is not only that these are their personal shortcomings, but that it has such a dramatic impact on their congregants, and often on the society at large! 🙁

Hate and prejudice is unacceptable rhetoric from a clergyman of any faith, and yet it prospers in American society!

For example, we have Franklin Graham, son of the the famous evangelist Billy Graham; and we have Terry Jones, pastor in Gainesville, Florida, both of whom spew forth anti Islamic rhetoric, which poisons the body politic, including the threat before September 11 that Jones would burn Korans at his church! 🙁

Then we also have Jones; the Reverend Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas; Pastor Eddie Long of Atlanta; and Rabbi Yehuda Levine of Brooklyn, New York as examples of religious leaders who promote hate and prejudice against people who are gay in their sexual orientation! 🙁

We also have the Catholic Church promoting anti gay sentiment, at the same time that many of its priests are shown to have been involved in such activity! And of course, the Pastor Eddie Long has been accused of similar activity with young men in his congregation, and yet rails against gays with poisonous rhetoric! 🙁

Whether evangelical Christians, Catholics, Jews, or mainline Protestants, we see too many examples of hate for people of a religion or those of a different sexual orientation, and these people are committing the ultimate sin: not following the concept of tolerance and open mindedness!

How can someone call himself or herself “religious” and then promote hate, prejudice, and discrimination in their sermons and public activities? And how can someone claiming to be “religious” be a parent and disown his or her own children over what is natural to them, as much as someone who naturally is heterosexual? 🙁

These leaders, and others like them, and ordinary citizens who are parents and reject their children because of being different, are not truly “religious”, but instead are hypocrites who are dividing families and society by their hate! 🙁

What is being truly “religious”? It is being a person who treats others who are different, with dignity and respect, and accepting diversity in this world with equanimity! It is how you deal with people every day of your life, not whether you attend church or synagogue on the Sabbath, as many such people sin all week and then think going to religious services somehow makes up for their horrible behavior on a daily basis!

It is essential that such religious leaders be called out for their reprehensible behavior, and be repudiated as hate mongers who do not deserve a collar! 🙁

And it is time for parents to act like parents, and be there for their children through thick and thin, not rejecting them under the guise of being “religious”!

Profile In Courage Needed By Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Richard Lugar, And Lindsey Graham Against Tea Party Movement Threat To Honored Traditions Of GOP!

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In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his anti Communist rampage, promoting fear and hysteria in millions of Americans; destroying the reputation of many public figures in government, media, Hollywood, and the professoriate; and silencing most members of the Senate who feared to speak up against him and his witch hunt! 🙁

But early on, a courageous woman Republican senator, Margaret Chase Smith, spoke up against McCarthy when no one else was willing to do so!

Smith was the first long serving woman in the US Senate, ultimately serving four terms from 1949-1973 for the state of Maine! She was truly a “profile in courage”, the title of a Pulitzer Prize winning book by Senator John F. Kennedy a few years later, although Kennedy was unwilling to speak out against McCarthy, particularly because his own father was supporting and financing the Wisconsin Senator!

The kind of courage Smith displayed, showing she had principles and was willing to risk her career to speak out against McCarthy’s tirades, needs desperately now to be copied by several Republican Senators, who are decent, mainstream Republicans, and who in their heart and mind, cannot be imagined to be supportive of the Tea Party Movement trying to usurp power and take over the Republican Party! 🙁

I am referring to Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham has, actually, been courageous to express doubts and criticism about the Tea Party Movement, but the others have remained silent. It could be because Snowe and Lugar face reelection contests in 2012, while Collins and Graham face it in 2014.

Graham has set the standard and needs to convince Collins, Snowe and Lugar to condemn what is going on, even if the result is a challenge to their seats when reelection time comes!

Sixty years later, we need some reputable GOP Senators to uphold the honored tradition of the party at a time when the party is in deep trouble and about to commit potential suicide!