Sarah Palin recalls her first meeting with Michele Bachmann:
I knew that we’d be buddies when I met her when she said, Drill here, drill now. And then I replied, Drill, baby, drill and then we both said, You betcha!
Bachmann was equally taken with Palin’s charms:
[A]s absolutely drop dead gorgeous this woman is (sic) on the outside, I’m here to testify that she is 20 times more beautiful on the inside.
Palin/Bachmann 2012: Don’t ask, baby, don’t tell
Posted in campaign, Palin Bachmann 2012, Republican Party, Tea Party
Tagged Michelle Bachmann, sapphic, Sarah Palin, wingnut
Upon hearing porn star Stormy Daniels announce that she’d consider running for David Vitter’s Senate seat as a Republican, the NRSC responded, calling Daniels a “Republican sideshow.”
Stormy was quick with the comeback:
We are disappointed that Senator Vitter has shamelessly allowed the Washington and Baton Rouge Republican elite to violate Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment and attack a fellow Republican who is not as of now even a declared candidate in this race.
…
[F]ellow Louisiana tea partiers and true conservatives will reject the Republican elite’s attempt to ram down our throats closet liberals like David Vitter.
Ouch!
But the Louisiana Democratic party gets the last word:
If the Louisiana Republican Party is uncomfortable with a Republican challenger who has a history of selling sex, I would suggest they reconsider standing by an incumbent with a history of paying for it.
Booyah!
Posted in Republican Party
Tagged bondage, David Vitter, lesbian, libertarian, Louisiana, porn, Stormy Daniels, Voyeur
It’s like a bad dream that the RNC just can’t wake up from.
The Republican National Committee at the end of last year struck a deal with the Michigan Republican Party that if the state party could raise what turned out to be a half a million dollars for the RNC from its donors, the committee would immediately give the money back, in a scheme apparently devised to increase the RNC’s 2009 fundraising numbers.
“It was a known secret that a deal had been struck on the topic,” a former RNC official confirmed to The Daily Caller.
RNC spokesman Doug Heye, contacted by a reporter Tuesday afternoon, did not comment.
The allegations appear to be backed up by FEC reports: Fifteen donors from Michigan maxed out their donations to the committee on a single day —Dec. 31 — the last day of 2009 — giving $456,000 to the committee. Over the next two months, $500,000 was disbursed back from the RNC’s coffers to those of the Michigan Republican Party, with $250,000 given in January and another $250,000 disbursed in February.
For the record: that’s illegal. In fact, it’s almost exactly why Tom DeLay was indicted in 2005.
Posted in Republican Party
Tagged Michael Steele, Michigan, money laundering, RNC, Tom DeLay
In case you missed it during the coverage of the Baghdad helicopter slaughter this week, another gruesome example of civilian deaths was reported on Sunday. This time, it was in Gardez, Afghanistan. Two men – both local officials – and three women – two of whom were pregnant – were shot and killed by U.S. troops.
More horrifying: it looks likely that the troops, after realizing their mistake, anesthetized the crime scene to make it look like they stumbled upon an honor killing.
By digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies with knives.
Afghan officials investigating the deaths of five Afghan civilians gunned down in February during a bungled raid by American Special Operations forces believe that troops tampered with evidence at the scene, the lead investigator said Monday.
The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans — all family members — from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said.
As in the case of the Baghdad helicopter killings, the circumstances surrounding the shooting were at first grossly misrepresented by the military to make the deaths seem justified:
At first, the American-led military command in Kabul said that the two men who died were “insurgents” who had “engaged” — in other words, shot at — the forces at the scene. The initial account also said that the troops then stumbled onto the bodies of three women “tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room.
Military officials later suggested that the women — who among them had 16 children — had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid, implying that their own relatives may have killed them.
The implication behind the lie is insidious – that the two men killed their own wives before the troops arrived on the scene.
Evidently, the troops cut their own bullets out of the women’s bodies with knives, to make it look as if they’d been killed by their husbands in some sort of honor killing:
Mohammed Tahir, whose 18-year-old daughter was killed, said he had watched from the compound through an open door as an American knelt over one corpse with a knife and tried to extract bullets. “I saw them working on the bodies,” Mr. Tahir said. “I saw a knife in one of the American’s hands.”
Another family member, Abdul Ghafar, said the bullet entry wounds on the bodies had been widened or scraped out in an effort to remove bullets. “The holes were bigger than they were supposed to be,” he said.
The military has thus far denied tampering with the bodies.
Posted in Afghanistan
Tagged coverup, Gardez, NATO, Special Operations, Taliban, war
Porn star and would-be Senate candidate from Louisiana Stormy Daniels FTW:
I am ready today to declare that should I seek the office of US Senator from the great state of Louisiana that I will do so as a Republican.
While this decision has not been an easy one, recent events regarding Republican National Committee fundraising at Voyeur, an LA based lesbian bondage themed nightclub finally tipped the scales.
…
As someone who has worked extensively in both the club and film side of the Adult Entertainment Industry, I know from experience that a mere $1900 outlay at a club with the reputation of Voyeur is a clear indication of a frugal investment with a keen eye toward maximum return.
…
As is the case with so many of my fellow Louisianans, I have been a registered Democrat throughout my life. But now I cannot help but recognize that over time my libertarian values regarding both money and sex and the legal use of one for the other is now best espoused by the Republican Party.
I am so proud of my home state right now.
Posted in Republican Party
Tagged bondage, David Vitter, lesbian, libertarian, Louisiana, porn, Stormy Daniels, Voyeur
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will be welcoming a very special guest to Minnesota today: Sarah Palin, for a rally together in Minneapolis.
The much-anticipated rally will begin at 3 p.m. ET, and will be streamed online by Bachmann’s campaign. Other guests will include Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a potential presidential candidate, as well as right-wing talk show host and Bachmann ally Sean Hannity.
And poor Tim Pawlenty. Talk about holding your manhood cheap.
Ouch:
Back in February, a CNN survey found that on the first party question, 44% of Tea Party activists identified as Republicans, 4% as Democrats and 52% as independents. However, as I reported in a column last month, when CNN asked the traditional follow-up, nearly all the independents leaned Republican. Thus, with leaners included, 88% of CNN’s Tea Party activists were Republican, 6% were Democrats and only 5% fell into the pure independent category.
As GWU Political Scientists John Sides often reminds us, independent leaners typically “act like partisans.” Leaners vote for their party’s candidate about as often as those who initially identify with the party (see my column and Sides’ post for more).
So those reports you’ve been seeing saying that the Winston Group poll shows that Tea People are largely made up of independents?
Yeah, that’s pretty much bullshit.
There are two takeaways here:
1. Despite their protestations to the contrary, Tea People are almost uniformly Republican
2. You should never take news networks’ word when they interpret polls. They’re terrible at it. Instead turn to people who know what they’re talking about, like Nate Silver and Mark Blumenthal.
Posted in poll, Republican Party, Tea Party
Tagged 538.com, CNN, John Sides, Nate Silver, Pollster.com
NH RNC member Sean Mahoney resigned his post today, taking aim at chairman Michael Steele in a strongly-worded protest letter over the committee’s profligate spending.
“Not only has the out-of-touch, free-spending culture of Washington come to completely dominate the United States Congress, but I have watched with growing unease as the same mentality has seeped into our own national party,” Mahoney said in a letter to Steele.
Sean Mahoney: not a lesbian bondage fan.
And then there’s this:
Alex Castellanos, who was hired late last year by the RNC to help reform Chairman Michael Steele’s image, said on CNN moments ago that he thinks “a change in leadership” would be good for the RNC.
Posted in Republican Party
Tagged bondage, lesbian, Michael Steele, New Hampshire, RNC, Sean Mahoney
Glenn Greenwald has a great piece of perspective up at Salon today regarding the Apache helicopter massacre video released by Wikileaks. It dovetails nicely with the heated discussion I’ve been having with friends (and that I imagine many people are having with friends today) over the significance of the video.
The main focus of our own discussion has been on the question “Were the actions of the helicopter gunner justified under the military’s Rules of Engagement?” Tributary questions to this include “What was happening before the video begins?” and “Was the gunner’s misidentification of civilians reasonable?” and “Does the heat of battle justify any mistakes made?”
Greenwald has pulled back to see the forest for the trees. These questions are important, he says. But they miss the most important question: How common is this kind of event?
[T]here’s a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn’t. It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we’re seeing it on video not because it’s rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety — as though there’s something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.
A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That’s why it’s repulsive to watch people — including some “liberals” — attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because “our guys are the good guys” and they act differently “99.99999999% of the time.” That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue “bad apples” once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.
As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step — including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded — without first receiving formal permission from their superiors. Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday — once the video was released — suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called “investigations” it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified — including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers — but also found that there’s no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence. What we see on that video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, and it’s what we’ve been doing for years. It’s obviously consistent with our policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly what those investigative reports concluded.
The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved — at least not primarily. Of course those who aren’t accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they’re taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.
Posted in Iraq war, Uncategorized
Tagged Apache helicopter, collateral damage, coverup, Glenn Greenwald, Reuters, Salon
We’ve seen quite a list of flip-flops from John McCain ever since he found himself saddled with a Tea Party challenger in his primary this year. Always tacking to the right, he has been quick to chuck any number of his previous cornerstone beliefs overboard to appeal to the slavering Tea People.
But this takes the cake.
“Maverick” is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. “I never considered myself a maverick,” he told me. “I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.”
Um…
From the Courthouse News Service:
JPMorgan Chase instructed homeowners to stop making mortgage payments, as that was the only way to be considered for a loan modification, then repossessed their house when they followed the bank’s advice, a couple claims in Federal Court.
Faiz and Khadua Jahani have sued JPMorgan Chase in Federal Court, claiming that the bank told them the only way they could qualify for loan modification is to intentionally become delinquent on their mortgage – i.e., to miss multiple payments.
In their federal complaint, the Jahanis say they contacted the bank in December 2008 “to indicate that they were having trouble paying their mortgage and would like to discuss a possible loan modification.”
The Jahanis say the bank representative told them “that they would not work with plaintiffs at all because they were currently not in breach of their loan terms.“
In other words, the bank couldn’t help them adjust their mortgage because they had been too good about making their payments. They needed to be a little less trustworthy:
Plaintiffs were specifically advised at that time to stop making payments for a period of three months, at which time [JPMorgan Chase] would consider a loan modification. Plaintiffs were specifically informed that as long as they were current on their mortgage payments, that defendants would not consider a loan modification.
Being good customers, the Jahanis did as they were told.
Whoops.
“Reasonably relying on the direction of [JPMorgan Chase], plaintiffs stopped making their loan payments. Plaintiffs are informed and believe and thereon allege that [JPMorgan Chase] immediately reported to the various credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) that plaintiffs were late on their mortgage payments.
“On or about June 23, 2009, [JPMorgan Chase] sent a letter to plaintiff entitled ‘Notice of Intent to Foreclose,’ indicating that plaintiffs were past due in their mortgage in the amount of $100.65 and that plaintiffs need to bring the account current within 30 days to avoid foreclosure proceedings. No Notice of Default accompanied the letter, nor was any Notice of Default ever served on plaintiffs.”
Months of correspondence between the Jahanis and Chase followed, with the Jahanis repeatedly sending Chase documents it had requested, and Chase repeatedly sending them letters claiming it had not received proper documentation and that their loan modification was “in jeopardy.”
The Jahanis say they called the bank to check on the status of their loan modification, and were told to disregard Chase’s letters, that the bank “had in fact received all necessary documentation.”
Then in October 2009, [JPMorgan Chase] sold their house at a trustee sale. The Jahanis say strangers came to their house and told them that “the property had sold at auction, that plaintiffs no longer owned the property and that they (meaning the unnamed persons) were interested in buying the house from the bank.”
This is what it’s come to.
After a decade of trashing homeowners and the wider economy with reckless subprime speculation, the too-big-to-fails are still at it. How can one reasonably expect to be a reputable credit consumer when the deck is stacked against you in this way? When an attempt to do the right thing is met with overwhelming punitive action?
Financial reform is worth the fight.
Don’t back down.
Posted in financial reform
Tagged JPMorgan Chase, mortgage, subprime, Too Big to Fail
Wikileaks has a video up today showing the murder of about a dozen innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters photographers, and the wounding of two Iraqi children, in Baghdad in 2007. The video, provided to them by a whistleblower in the military, is disturbing. Nonetheless, it is important that people see it.
The crew of an Apache helicopter gunship can be heard trying to identify as friend or foe a group of about a dozen Iraqis in an open courtyard. They see the two Reuters photographers with cameras, and mistake them for guns. They are given permission to fire, and kill the entire group of civilians.
What happens next is even more disturbing. A civilian van, with two children in the front seat, pulls up to help evacuate the wounded to a hospital – the act of a good samaritan. The Apache crew once again calls for permission to fire on the van, saying it is “picking up bodies and weapons.” They are given permission to fire, and proceed to decimate the van.
When ground troops arrive and see the two wounded children, they rush them to humvees for evacuation to local hospitals. The Apache gunner can then be heard saying:
“Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
Reuters has been trying since the event happened to access this video through the Freedom of Information Act. They have repeatedly been denied. The video has only come to light thanks to the ongoing work of the people at Wikileaks. They provide a safe online forum for whistleblowers, and have a 100% record of protecting their sources. They are doing the kind of work that the mainstream media should be doing – but isn’t.
They have been so successful, in fact, that Army counterintelligence created a plan to discredit and marginalize them.
Fittingly, the plan was outed to Wikileaks by an Army whistleblower (pdf).
To find out more about Wikileaks, click here. To donate money, time or legal expertise, see their links at the bottom of their home page.
Tagged civilian, collateral damage, coverup, FOIA, murder, Reuters, whistleblower
Maddow is on fire today:
The anti-ACORN crusade was bull. Climategate was bull. Repealing health reform is bull. The lawsuits against health reform are bull. The death panels? Bull. The President’s secretly foreign and doesn’t have a birth certificate? Bull. Fear of the census is bull. Supposed threats to end the Second Amendment? Bull. The claims that thousands of armed IRS agents are going to be stormtroopers to enforce health reform? It’s bull. The administration taking away the right to go fishing? It’s bull. Scott Brown saying I’m even running against him is bull. It’s made up. It’s bull.
It’s bull. It’s not real politics. Let them eat fake. They’re not real problems to work on and worry about as a country, right? But there’s more bang for the political buck to make stuff up like this than to try to debate real problems in the real world. So just go with the bull.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports today that billboards against Obama are popping up in the Atlanta area right now. They say things like, “Stop Obama’s socialism!” and “Now it’s personal!” CNN has hired a contributor [Eric Erickson] who said on his radio show yesterday that he’s “pull a shotgun” on any census worker who came to his home. A group calling itself the “Guardians of Free Republics” has sent threatening letters to dozens of governors telling them to resign from office “or else.”
Dissent is not the aberration in a democracy. Dissent is the norm. Our political vitality depends on dissent. No one expects that a president is going to have the whole country agree with his actions and his priorities. Nobody expects Americans to share the same political opinions. But has there ever been a time when we’ve shared so few political facts?
Let’s argue. Let’s have the great American debate about the role of government and the best policies for the country. It’s fun. It’s citizenship. It’s activism. It makes the country better when we have those debates. And your country needs you. It needs all of us. But two things disqualify you from this process:
You can’t threaten to shoot people.
And you have to stop making stuff up.
Krugman warms up the topic with a quick summary of the two main approaches: breaking up “too-big-to-fail” banks into smaller banks, and limiting the risks that those banks take by imposing stricter regulations.
Here’s how I see it. Breaking up big banks wouldn’t really solve our problems, because it’s perfectly possible to have a financial crisis that mainly takes the form of a run on smaller institutions. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in the 1930s, when most of the banks that collapsed were relatively small — small enough that the Federal Reserve believed that it was O.K. to let them fail. As it turned out, the Fed was dead wrong: the wave of small-bank failures was a catastrophe for the wider economy.
…
So what’s the alternative to breaking up big financial institutions? The answer, I’d argue, is to update and extend old-fashioned bank regulation.After all, the U.S. banking system had a long period of stability after World War II, based on a combination of deposit insurance, which eliminated the threat of bank runs, and strict regulation of bank balance sheets, including both limits on risky lending and limits on leverage, the extent to which banks were allowed to finance investments with borrowed funds. And Canada — whose financial system is dominated by a handful of big banks, but which maintained effective regulation — has weathered the current crisis notably well.
What ended the era of U.S. stability was the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions that carried out banking functions but operated without a safety net and with minimal regulation. In particular, many businesses began parking their cash, not in bank deposits, but in “repo” — overnight loans to the likes of Lehman Brothers. Unfortunately, repo wasn’t protected and regulated like old-fashioned banking, so it was vulnerable to a pre-1930s-type crisis of confidence. And that, in a nutshell, is what went wrong in 2007-2008.
So why not update traditional regulation to encompass the shadow banks? We already have an implicit form of deposit insurance: It’s clear that creditors of shadow banks will be bailed out in time of crisis. What we need now are two things: (a) regulators need the authority to seize failing shadow banks, the way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation already has the authority to seize failing conventional banks, and (b) there have to be prudential limits on shadow banks, above all limits on their leverage.
On the other hand, why not both? True, breaking up too-big-to-fails wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of a run on smaller banks. But it does curb the risk behavior of those too-big-to-fails, which at the moment is predicated on their belief that they will always be bailed out when that risk behavior doesn’t pay off.
Krugman finishes by noting that while the legislation being considered is a step in the right direction, it’s not big enough, and he’ll “explain why in a future column.”
As always, I’m looking forward to it.
Posted in financial reform
Tagged bail out, bank, FDIC, Paul Krugman, regulation, shadow banking, Too Big to Fail
U.S. job loss / growth per month, updated for March.
Posted in Bush administration, Employment, Obama administration
Tagged ARRA, stimulus, unemployment
The ever-forthright Matt Taibbi weighs in on the critical-mass collapse going on in the Catholic church right now.
He makes two very good points: celibacy is a profoundly cruel practice which leads directly to sexual abuse, and any group that condones the latter to protect the former is a criminal organization, and should be prosecuted as such.
But I think it’s time we started considering that what the church is is even worse than that. It’s possible we should start wondering if the church is also a criminal organization that in this country, anyway, should be broken up using RICO statutes.
One of the few areas where I agreed with George Bush was in the notion that a country providing safe haven to terrorists should itself be treated as a terrorist organization. Morally this isn’t a difficult one to figure out; a country that keeps house for a bin Laden and doesn’t assist other countries in trying to catch him is a rogue state, one that should be booted out of the community of nations.
We don’t permit countries that harbor terrorists to participate in international society, but the Catholic Church — an organization that has been proven over and over again to systematically enable child molesters, right up now to the level of the Pope — is given a free pass. In fact the Church is not only not sanctioned in any serious way, it gets to retain its outrageous tax-exempt status, which makes its systematic child abuse, in this country at least, a government-subsidized activity.
Somewhere underneath all of this there is a root story that has to do with celibacy. The celibate status of its priests is basically the Catholic church’s last market advantage in the Christian religion racket, but human beings are not designed to be celibate and so problems naturally arise among the population of priests forced to live that terrible lifestyle. Just as it refuses to change its insane and criminal stance on birth control and condoms, the church refuses to change its horrifically cruel policy about priestly celibacy. That’s because it quite correctly perceives that should it begin to dispense with the irrational precepts of its belief system, it would lose its appeal as an ancient purveyor of magical-mystery bullshit and become just a bigger, better-financed, and infinitely more depressing version of a Tony Robbins self-help program.
Therefore it must cling to its miserable celibacy in order to keep its sordid business scheme going; and if clinging to its miserable celibacy means having to look the other way while children are serially molested by its sexually stunted and tortured employees, well, so be it.
Posted in Catholic church
Tagged Benedict, celibacy, Joseph Ratzinger, Matt Taibbi, rape, RICO, terrorism
My new crush, Elizabeth Warren, has put up at Politico a bare-bones summary of what the Banks and their lobbyists want out of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency she has proposed. If one is going to be instituted by Congress, they want to make sure it is folded into the existing regulatory system, rather than operate on its own. In other words, they want to make sure it doesn’t do its job.
The lobbyists’ consistent theme is unmistakable: They oppose meaningful rules in the consumer credit market.
In 2006, they opposed any structure that might have produced rules to rein in subprime mortgage lending. In 2010, they oppose any structure that might rein in a broader array of tricks and traps.
They are now lobbying hard to water down the consumer agency’s independence with oversight vetoes and other administrative roadblocks that have no precedent in the federal regulatory apparatus — not out of principle, but because they don’t want meaningful rules.
…The ABA’s premise that the country can’t have both meaningful consumer protection and safety and soundness is wrong. In fact, its defense against an independent consumer agency boils down to this: If banks can’t trick and trap people with fine print and legalese, they won’t be able to turn a profit.
When other industries have argued that tricking their customers is an essential part of their profit model, they haven’t gotten far. For example, it might be profitable in the short run to substitute baking soda for antibiotics, but basic safety regulations prevent such moves — and the pharmaceutical industry still manages to do just fine. In fact, the industry flourishes, bringing better, cheaper products to customers.
Similarly, the consumer agency now before the Senate is designed to cut out tricks and traps pricing, fine print that no one can read and sharp practices that strip billions of dollars from consumers.
The ABA’s position is particularly galling because it was the lack of meaningful, independent consumer protection that helped bring down the entire banking system and cause the current crisis. Without billions pumped into subprime mortgage lending, the housing bubble could not have inflated; Lehman and other MBS traders would have lacked the raw material that fueled their excessive risk taking, and the destabilization of millions of families and neighborhoods would not have occurred.
In the weeks ahead, the Senate does not need to decide between safety and soundness and consumer protection.
But the ABA is right about one thing: The Senate does need to decide between banks and families.
Poor Charlie Crist.
His matchup in the Florida Republican senatorial primary against wingnut Tea Party upstart Marco Rubio has been the most one-sided smackdown since Godzilla first made his way through Tokyo.
But things are looking up.
Just this morning, Colonel Bud Day, one of John McCain’s Hanoi Hilton cell-mates, endorsed Crist in the primary.
“You know, we just got through (electing) a politician who can run his mouth at Mach 1, a black one, and now we have a Hispanic who can run his mouth at Mach 1,” Day said. “You look at their track records and they’re both pretty gritty. Charlie has not got a gritty track record.”
Day confirmed he was speaking of Obama and Rubio.
“You’ve got the black one with the reading thing. He can go as fast as the speed of light and has no idea what he’s saying,” Day said. “I put Rubio in that same category, except I don’t know if he’s using one of those readers.”
Crist’s response? Any port in a storm:
“I am more than honored to have the endorsement of Colonel Bud Day,” Crist said in the release. “Colonel Day is a true American hero who has served our country well, and I could not be more grateful for his support.”
Godzilla: 1
Tokyo: 0
Posted in campaign, Republican Party
Tagged Bud Day, Charlie Crist, Godzilla, Marco Rubio, Senate
