Rudy’s out. Romney’s out. It looks like the Righties get to choose from McCain and Rev. Huckabee.
Oddly, one of my objections to Hillary was that she was unelectable. Now it seems like she is one of the more attractive candidates to the Righties.
This is gonna be a weird one.
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
I wrote and lost a long post about this. Thankfully I don’t have to rewrite it because someone else has written it for me. Nick Coleman has an oped piece that speaks exactly to my point. His is called Gussets, public servants both let Minnesota down.
There was nothing “routine” about the bridge, including its inspections. It had so many problems that it was the most-inspected bridge in Minnesota and engineers were openly worried (according to a story in this paper Aug. 19) about the dangers of a collapse.
Inspections did find that many of the gussets were corroded and thinning, plus a host of other significant problems ranging from cracks and missing bolts to a tilted bridge pier and frozen expansion rollers.
The question isn’t whether the original designers were distracted by thoughts of Marilyn Monroe as they were planning the bridge.
The question is why wasn’t the bridge closed, or fixed, by those in charge now?
But the gussets are a godsend to officials who want the public to believe they had no idea the bridge was in jeopardy and there was nothing that could have been done about it.
The gusset plate problem means that there was too much weight on the bridge. The notion that it was impossible to determine that the bridge was unsafe is false. It’s possible and perhaps likely that under a Democratic governor, the same thing would have happened. But maybe not. The Republican ideology of starving the government of resources creates a system where the cheapest solution always wins.
Whether it was Pawlenty’s fault or not is not my main concern. But somewhere along the line our processes failed us. Pawlenty’s administration seems to be saying that nothing could have prevented this. I don’t buy it.
My BFF and A-list blogger Chuck Olsen is involved with The Uptake, a citizen journalism project that is doing some great work and getting some nice attention. I’d encourage you to turn off CNN and turn on grass-roots journalism like this during the upcoming 11 months of election frenzy.
This is brilliant:
My picks for the biggest assholes of 2007 by Bill Maher
A few highlights:
Caught dead to rights as a customer of the D.C. Madam, and explained it away by saying, “Several years ago I received forgiveness from God in confession.” Oh, well, all righty then, it’s all good, then you’re obviously not a disgusting, horrible hypocrite who runs on family values and then fucks whores at home and in Washington.
At the Bush White House, a constitutional crisis is when somebody actually reads the Constitution. Gonzales…told Congress, I can’t recall who put together the list of which attorneys to fire. But I stand by the decision to fire everyone on the list. Which I never read. Also, nothing improper occurred. And I know, because I can’t recall.
A phenomenon I still don’t understand. Rudy says if a Democrat is elected in 2008, we’ll be at risk of another 9/11, because . . . he was mayor of New York when they attacked the World Trade Center the first time? His slogan should be “Not on my watch . . . again…
Benazir Bhutto killed in attack
There was a time when whales were the only major source of oil in the world. A huge, expensive and dangerous industry developed to chase whales around the world and slaughter them for the oil in their blubber. At that time, it seemed like there was a shortage of whales. There were concerns about how the economy could grow without finding more whales.
I heard a woman on MPR who called in about Mitt Romney and she said “I’m a Democrat and I’m a Mormon so I don’t know what I’m going to do — I’m torn!’
Torn between being a Democrat and a moron? By that I do not mean that non-Democrats are morons, I mean that people who make political decisions based on religious affiliations are morons.
Now hold on, moron is a strong word and many people feel that someone’s religious affiliations may indeed be evidence of their character and of shared values. My question to them is: how is that character demonstrated in real life in a political context? Answer: by their views on issues. What are political parties? People who have similar views on issues.
She is choosing between someone who represents her political views and someone who shares her religious views in a political race. That’s like choosing a piano player based on their hockey skills. We’re not electing clergy. The role of the President is not in any way religious. Foreign policy and domestic economics are not issues which rely on a particular religious view. They are hard and in many ways boring aspects of our government. The “moral” leadership of Bush has been a disaster and the last thing we need is people choosing elected officials based on completely irrelevant criteria.
Freedom requires religion — Mitt Romney, 12/06/07
And thus should Romney be excluded from consideration for the office of the President of the United States.
Not to mention Mormonism is completely batshit crazy and you have to divorce yourself from reality to believe in any of it.
lolife 
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