Back to Main
| November 2008 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | ||||||
Go to MixMap.com to get your own MySpace Tracker
(0) Comments
This just in from the feverish-Barack-Obama-VP-watch department:
Obama is campaigning with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson in Albuquerque today.
Just FYI.
(0) Comments
From our Gene Pool Monitor file, today I bring you the curious case of John Moloney.
Moloney is mayor of Mount Isa, Queensland, down under in Australia. It seems the town of 25,000 has a bit of a gender imbalance, what with its remote location and rural-outpost character.
Mayor Moloney decided he needed to use his influence to encourage women to come to Mount Isa to even things out a bit.
Well, this is one politician who doesn’t have a way with words – or, apparently, women.
Basically, Moloney invited “beauty disadvantaged” women to move to Mount Isa.
“Beauty disadvantaged” – that’s ugly, in non-PC speak.
Mount Isa is a place for “ugly ducklings to flourish into beautiful swans,” the mayor told a newspaper.
Again, in other words, come on down, ugly gals; the men here are so desperate for female companionship, you’re bound to land a guy.
Moloney seemed genuinely surprised when his comments touched off a fury – among men as well as women:
Mount Isa city councillor Gary Asmus said that while there was a shortage of women, Moloney’s comments were an insult to the town’s menfolk.
The mayor was “returning us to the Dark Ages and making the guys that live in this town seem like sex-hungry starved men that will pounce upon the first girl that they see walking down the street,” he said.
One Mount Isa resident, who has lived in the town for 50 years, told the radio “she had not come across anyone who she would call ugly.”
(Oh, there are so many good quotes in this story, it’s impossible to pick a favorite!)
Mayor Moloney went into damage-control mode and went on Australian national radio to clarify his comments. He didn’t mean any offense, he said:
“Well I said beauty disadvantaged … Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty can be a good set of teeth, beauty is nice wavy hair. Beauty can be blue eyes or green eyes.
“There is such a thing as disposition, temperament, manners, general attractiveness, attitude and demeanour, all those things tend to make a person attractive.”
Yes, yes … and there is such a thing as knowing when to keep your mouth shut – i.e., cutting your losses. Politicians are notorious for not knowing when to lock it up, but this guy takes the cake: Not only do his comments actually discourage women from coming to Mount Isa, thus defeating his original purpose that led to him put his foot in his mouth, but in one fell swoop, he also managed to insult and alienate the entire town.
… And by “the entire town,” I mean all the people who actually vote for mayor.
But take heart, Mount Isians! There is yet hope for your fair city:
The operations manager of the city’s popular Irish club, Bernard Gillick, said he sees the gender imbalance daily but suggests the mayor’s solution might not be the right one.
“Anyone who moves to Mount Isa, beautiful or not so beautiful, they have a great chance to make a great life here. It is a fantastic town.” he said.
“If guys have the right attitude then, you know, any type of girl will be happy to be with them so maybe the guys need to fix their attitudes a little bit.”
Gillick for Mayor!!
And …
Mayor John Moloney: You!! Out of the gene pool!!
(0) Comments
And speaking of that Obama VP selection, today’s favorite seems to be Delaware Sen. Joe Biden.
CNN’s Political Ticker Source why Biden is going to be a busy guy when we returns to Capitol Hill from Georgia and the ongoing showdown with Russia there.
That trip—and the haste with which it was arranged—is what’s got the insiders buzzing. CNN says that it was “at the behest of that country’s president” that Biden went to Georgia, and:
If Biden does aspire to be on the Democratic presidential ticket, the trip couldn’t have come at a better time — reinforcing his lengthy resume on matters of foreign policy and reminding voters, and Obama, he is well respected by foreign leaders half a world away.
The trip also comes days before Obama is expected to reveal his VP choice — with only days remaining until the Democratic convention, the choice is expected to come this week.
So, I’m confused ... Did Biden make the trip at Georgia’s president’s request, or did Biden go because he needed to be fresh off a foreign trip when he’s announced as Obama’s VP?
What if Mikhail Saakashvili had summoned Bill Richardson? Or Hillary Clinton? Would their stocks be up similarly up this morning?
“The Illinois senator, so the Beltway chatter goes, needs a running-mate with foreign policy experience now more than ever,” CNN says.
I agree. I just think he’s barking up the wrong tree with Biden.
(0) Comments
Remember when I told you last week about Barack Obama’s plan to announce his vice presidential selection via text message, and how the database he’s creating with that buzz will inevitably lend itself to other uses?
Well, well, well ... guess what I received on my phone Thursday night?
Please REPLY to this message with your 5 digit ZIP code for periodic local Obama news and updates. Be the first to know when Barack is coming to your area!
I’m guessing that everyone else who signed up to receive the VP news got this one, too.
So, not only does the Obama campaign have a growing database for the much-anticipated VP announcement, but they have ready-made outreach capability for their events across the country—in addition to the quick-response potential we talked about the other day.
Pretty good campaign planning, if you ask me.
(1) Comments
As a follow up to John McCain’s comments during the Saddleback event Saturday night that he would not have appointed any of the so-called liberal justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, regular reader Don sent me an e-mail inquiring whether I knew how McCain had voted on the four—John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
I didn’t know. So I looked it up!
As it turns out, he wasn’t in the Senate when the first one came through, but McCain voted to confirm the other three:
So McCain supported all three of nominees for whom he had a chance to vote.
While we’re trying to extrapolate McCain’s philosophy on judges from his record, I figured I’d look at the other nominations on which McCain has voted. They include:
So what does this tell us? It’s hard to say. McCain would undoubtedly argue that senators saddled with the responsibility to “advise and consent” have to view potential Court justices from a different perspective than they would if they were making the selections themselves. Each senator has his own criteria, of course, but suitability to serve, experience and judicial temperament are baseline standards from which senators begin to consider nominees.
In recent years, senators have begun to consider nominees’ judicial philosophies. Whether you view this as a positive development depends on your perception of the Senate’s “advise and consent” role. But again, here was an example of a time Saturday when a follow-up question would have provided voters with critical information (the other was when Rick Warren missed an opportunity to ask Barack Obama if he would support Democrats for Life and its 95-10 Initiative to reduce the number of abortions in America): How would President McCain’s standards in choosing Court nominees different from the standards Sen. McCain has used to consider other Court nominees over the past 20 years? Ginsburg would have been a prime example to illustrate the point: McCain would probably be hard pressed to cite one decision where he has agreed with Ginsburg’s judicial philosophy. If he wouldn’t have nominated her as president, what compelled him to support her as a senator?
Another angle would be to look at McCain’s voting record as a whole: McCain has considered eight Supreme Court nominations; he has never opposed one, even though three of the Court’s four “liberal” members came through the Senate after he got there. So the follow-up question would be to ask McCain to detail the factors he considers to be disqualifiers in a potential justice’s nomination. Or, you could combine the questions: As president, what would he consider to be disqualifying factors in Court nominees, and how would those factors differ from whatever standards he’s applied in confirmation deliberations during his Senate tenure?
Maybe we’ll get those questions answered in a regular news-type debate later this fall.
... But I won’t hold my breath.
Anyway, this has been an interesting topic to consider. Thanks, Don, for the question!
(0) Comments
If you didn’t get a chance to see it, I know you had to have heard about Michael Phelps’s razor-thin victory in the 100-meter butterfly on Saturday morning (Friday night, U.S. time).
Actually, it was closer than razor-thin. Phelps kept his drive for eight gold medals—which was completed Sunday morning (Saturday night, U.S. time)—alive by 0.01 ... that’s one one-hundredth of a second.
I was watching it when it happened, and, I have to say: I wasn’t sure Phelps pulled it off. They showed the replay, and I just couldn’t tell. It seemed impossible that he could have beaten Serbia’s Milorad Cavic to the wall; he was behind, even with less than a meter to go.
But he did. And this incredible sequence of pictures from an underwater camera at the wall convinced even the Serbian delegation, which withdrew its protest of Phelps’s win after seeing the tape.
Go ahead. Click the link. You have to see these pictures to believe it.
Athletes and their teams have to have a bit of fortune to go along with their skill if they are going to become dynasties. It’s an old saying in sport that you’d rather be lucky than good.
Michael Phelps, a dynasty in himself, is both.
Phelps now has 14 medals and can unquestionably be called the best swimmer in history. But now that the swimming competition is over, the debate has become whether Phelps—who won every event he entered and set or was a part of setting world records in seven of the those eight events—is the greatest Olympian ever. Click here to read a great article about this debate, which won’t likely be settled ...
... At least until 2012.
Page 81 of 171 pages « First < 79 80 81 82 83 > Last »
