The next time you're in a public place and some politician peers into your eyes, broadens his stance, taps for your attention, and begins spouting "family values" rhetoric, run for the nearest exit.Read More......
Two men sealed the state's first legal same-sex marriage with a kiss Friday morning, less than 24 hours after a judge threw out Iowa's ban on gay marriage and about two hours before he put that ruling on hold.Read More......
It was a narrow window of opportunity.
Polk County Judge Robert Hanson temporarily cleared the way for same-sex couples across the state to apply for marriage licenses in the county when he ruled Thursday that Iowa's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed marriage only between a man and a woman, violated the constitutional rights of due process and equal protection of six gay couples who had sued.
County attorney John Sarcone promised a quick appeal and asked Hanson to stay his ruling until that appeal was resolved.
Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig will announce Saturday he will resign from the Senate amid a furor over his arrest and guilty plea in a police sex sting in an airport men’s room, Republican officials said Friday.6:57 PM The article above has been UPDATED with these lines:
Craig's communications director Dan Whiting told the Idaho Statesman, "I won't say either way."
The Idaho Statesman independently confirmed the report.
Craig's office declined to confirm or deny a resignation.
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Sen. Larry Craig plans to make an announcement Saturday about his future.Read More......
"We haven't quite scheduled anything, but we're looking at doing something tomorrow," said Craig's spokesman Sid Smith. "We haven't set a time or place yet."
The only kind of "morality" that this movement knows or embraces is politically exploitative, cost-free morality. That is why the national Republican Party rails endlessly against homosexuality and is virtually mute about divorce and adultery: because anti-gay moralism costs virtually all of its supporters nothing (since that is a moral prohibition that does not constrain them), while heterosexual moral deviations -- from divorce to adultery to sex outside of marriage -- are rampant among the Values Voters faithful and thus removed from the realm of condemnation. Hence we have scads of people sitting around opposing same-sex marriage because of their professed belief in "Traditional Marriage" while their "third husbands" and multiple step-children and live-in girlfriends sit next to them on the couch.And don't forget, there was much said in the bible about adultery and divorce, a tome the Right frequently drags out to beat gays with. And what about the whole shebang about wearing mixed fibers and eating shellfish? Oh, yeah, that doesn't matter either with that crowd. Read More......
... It goes without saying that no gay candidate would stand a chance of receiving the presidential nomination from the party that stands for Traditional Marriage. And indeed, the Idaho Family Values Association (entitled to great respect), in the wake of the Craig scandal, just called -- explicitly -- for the Republican Party to purge all gay politicians from the party:The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig's situation aside, the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP.But they would never call for the exclusion from the Party of political figures who dumped their wives and are on their "second marriage" or "third marriage" -- actions at least equally deviant from principles of "traditional marriage" as anything Sen. Craig did and which wreck the lives of Our Children far more -- because so many of their pious supporters engage in the same behavior, as Idaho's traditionally high divorce rates (.pdf) demonstrate.
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter already appears to have settled on a successor — Lt. Gov. Jim Risch — Republican officials in Idaho said today.Mitch McConnell also reports several of Craig's colleagues want him to resign:
Risch served for seven months as governor last year after former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne was named Interior Secretary. Risch had said earlier he was interested in Craig’s Senate seat if Craig did not seek re-election in 2008.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell today called Craig’s conduct “unforgivable” and acknowledged that many in his caucus believe Craig should resign.The Republicans are getting might sanctimonious about Craig. Just wondering what David Vitter and Ted Stavens have to say? What about Lindsey Graham?
“We have acted promptly to begin the process of dealing with this conduct,” McConnell said. “We will see what happens in the coming days.”
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On a Sunday morning in early August, just hours after Congress had recessed for the summer, Representative Jan Schakowsky and five of her colleagues boarded a military jet at Andrews Air Force Base. Three flights and a Black Hawk helicopter ride later, they were lunching on asparagus soup and lobster tortellini at the home of Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in Baghdad.Somehow, lobster tortellini isn't the first thing I would expect in Baghdad. But, it's all part of the show.
Brief, choreographed and carefully controlled, the codels (short for congressional delegations) often have showed only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have wanted the lawmakers to see. At one point, as Moran, Tauscher and Rep. Jon Porter (R-Nev.) were heading to lunch in the fortified Green Zone, an American urgently tried to get their attention, apparently to voice concerns about the war effort, the participants said. Security whisked the man away before he could make his point.You can't make this stuff up, although the Bush administration makes stuff up about Iraq all the time. Read More......
Tauscher called it "the Green Zone fog."
"Spin City," Moran grumbled. "The Iraqis and the Americans were all singing from the same song sheet, and it was deliberately manipulated."
But even such tight control could not always filter out the bizarre world inside the barricades. At one point, the three were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. Rubaie was watching children's cartoons.
When Moran asked him to turn it off, Rubaie protested with a laugh and said, "But this is my favorite television show," Moran recalled.
Porter confirmed the incident, although he tried to paint the scene in the best light, noting that at least they had electricity.
During their summer vacation, Americans discovered that Gen. David Petraeus doesn't take one. And his energy and urgency have shifted the Iraq debate in some fundamental ways.You see, everything in Iraq is hunky-dory. We are on our way to winning. How could anybody doubt these optimistic asessments? Oh yeah, this report from yesterday:
A few months ago, it was the received wisdom that Iraq was in the midst of a rapidly escalating civil war. That claim is no longer plausible.
While the level of violence is still unacceptably high, the surge has disrupted the cycle of escalation and proved that progress is possible. Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno's briefing this month was an antidote to pessimism. "Total attacks," he said, "are at their lowest levels since August of 2006." Some of the most violent and lawless regions of Iraq, such as Anbar and Diyala, have been stabilized with the cooperation of local Sunni leaders who have turned against al-Qaeda thuggery. Insurgents are being pushed out of population centers and then targeted in further operations. Sectarian murders in Baghdad have gone down by more than 50 percent in a few months, reaching their lowest levels since the Samarra mosque bombing. And new sectarian provocations -- such as the al-Qaeda bombings in Nineveh -- have not resulted in the usual spiral of revenge murders
Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.These bozos have no credibility left. How can we possibly believe anything they say? Read More......
The strikingly negative GAO draft, which will be delivered to Congress in final form on Tuesday, comes as the White House prepares to deliver its own new benchmark report in the second week of September, along with congressional testimony from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. They are expected to describe significant security improvements and offer at least some promise for political reconciliation in Iraq.
"I believe that there are millions of Americans who know that our security and prosperity are at risk if we don't address the challenges of our time," Thompson said in a statement.Read More......
The formal announcement will come in a webcast on September 6, followed by a tour of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. A second leg will hit Florida and wind up at home in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, on September 15.
"We enter this campaign in a strong position," said campaign manager Bill Lacy. "Fred is consistently near the top in the polls, and conservatives across the country have put together the closest thing to a draft in recent presidential campaign history in an effort to bring about this day."
But Thompson's long-delayed formal entry had made some supporters anxious and sparked complaints he was violating Federal Election Commission laws by running a shadow campaign.
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