Tag Archives: Election/Politicians

Gay Republican Group Takes To The NY Times To Oppose Hagel

open quoteAdding to the general confusion about exactly what they stand for, the Log Cabin Republicans took out a full-page ad in Thursday’s New York Times, urging President Obama to reconsider his possible selection of Republican Chuck Hagel for the position of Secretary of Defense.

The gay Republican group, which by association and voting behavior accepts the GOP’s default position that (openly) gay people are second-class citizens not deserving of the same civil rights as “normal” human beings, is apparently miffed that Hagel — in time-honored Republican tradition — made a homophobic remark in 1998 about James C. Hormel, President Bill Clinton’s choice for ambassador to Luxembourg, calling him “openly aggressively gay.”

Hagel has since apologized for what he termed the “insensitive” comment, adding that it does “not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to LGBT military families.”

His apology was accepted by the Human Rights Campaign, who referred to him as an “ally.”

But the selectively indignant group doesn’t stop there… it ups the ante by throwing in some foreign policy concerns — “Chuck Hagel: Wrong on gay rights, wrong on Iran, wrong on Israel,” reads the ad. “Tell President Obama that Chuck Hagel is wrong for Defense Secretary. Help us create a stronger and more inclusive Republican Party.”

Conservatives believe Hagel has not pledged sufficient allegiance to Israel, pointing to his assertion that there is a powerful “Jewish lobby” that intimidates legislators. (While few would contend that AIPAC is not a powerful lobby, the preferred term — says the suddenly-all-for-political-correctness crowd — is “pro-Israel” lobby.) “I’m a United States senator.” he reasoned. “I’m not an Israeli senator.” [emphasis added]close quote (Read more)

Men with honor have no place in politics.

Intrade.com more accurate that pundits!

open quoteJust recently in the presidential election, for example, I followed Intrade.com’s election markets. Here, the odds are formed by people betting their own property on the outcome. They have every incentive to extract every possible amount of truth out there so that they can make their money work for them.

I figured that the markets knew more than the blabberheads on television. This way I could ignore all election coverage. One guy would win, and it would probably be the one Intrade said would win, and then the whole thing would end. I would have used my time during the season doing actual productive things, rather than listening to the dopes on television who pretend to know what they do not.

It turns out, of course, that Intrade was right. Obama won. Romney never really had a serious chance, despite what every Republican operative claimed even up to the last minutes before the election was called. Intrade might have been wrong, of course, but it turned out to be more right than every expert.

My strategy of following the markets over the pundits worked. That’s generally true of markets: They are more correct than any individual. Not always, but most of the time.

It further turns out that I’m not alone. Even Washington Post energy reporter Brad Plumer wrote, “I’ll confess, I spent a good chunk of the 2012 campaign clicking on Intrade.com several times a day to see where the House, Senate, and presidential races stood. All those traders betting on the eventual outcome, I figured, could provide a more accurate synopsis of the race than reading endless blog posts and tweets.”

He points out that Intrade predicted 49 out of 50 state races as well.close quote (Read more)

Joe Klein’s sociopathic defense of drone killings of children

open quoteOn MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday’s night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama’s ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

. . . .

(1) Klein’s justification – we have to kill their children in order to protect our children – is the exact mentality of every person deemed in US discourse to be a “terrorist”. Almost every single person arrested and prosecuted over the last decade on terrorism charges, when asked why they were willing to kill innocent Americans including children, offered some version of Joe Klein’s mindset.

. . . .

Leaving aside the sociopathic, morally grotesque defense of killing 4-year-olds with a “joystick from California”, Klein’s claims are completely false on pragmatic grounds. Slaughtering Muslim children does not protect American children from terrorism. The opposite is true. That is precisely what causes the anti-American hatred that fuels and sustains terrorism aimed at Americans in the first place, as even a study commissioned by the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon recognized almost a decade ago.

. . . .

This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media’s most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it’s left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC – the progressive network – who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama’s ongoing killings.close quote (Read more)